"Your Environmentalism Sucks!" Says WIRED

Hey fungus amungus:
You may be very right in what you say here, and I hate to say it, but, this is not the fourm for a political view.  This is where you show how to use recycled items for something new.

I wish people like the ones likely to be influenced by this article could get out of the habit of treating complex issues as one-dimensional, or worse as black and white good/bad. You can't just give something a "this is 73% environmentally good" label, and trying to do so reminds me of the "Love/Fear" thing (if any of you have seen D.D.). Most often there are at least two factors involved, so there are plain good and plain bad alternatives but more often there is a trade-off involved. "Newsflash- cutting down trees is now A-OK because old growth forest releases methane" or "Biofuels are a ridiculous idea that will never work because we need more land for growing crops" are prime examples of what I'm talking about. Thinking about issues like this, I think in diagrams so my head is full of images like this one, put together (in Paint, sorry for the crappy rotated text) to illustrate the factors affecting whether organic food is "good", influenced by Doctor What's point below. The key to properly understanding an issue like how "environmentally sound" something is is to find the factor influencing it and the tradeoffs that may be implicit. It could be particle emissions and CO2 (bicycle vs. petrol engine vs diesel engine vs coal powered steam engine, for instance), or raw material use and energy use (think recycling)- if there was a one-dimensional good/bad spectrum there would be no "debate" as we would all be using the good option.

Honestly, I think of organics as gimmicky. And it's a ton of hassle to process them. More man hours, more costly shipping, and a crapload of ladybugs. All it does is make for a more expensive product.

Lots of people believe the (Smoke) coming from the Cooling towers of nuclear power plants is dangerous. Lol, its steam!

Yeah, I just read that piece in Wired last night. They were obviously trying to be controversial and push buttons. But they did have a bunch of good points to make!

The fact that Air Conditioning is much cheaper than heating a house in the winter was one that I hadn't thought off before. Makes sense, though. Of course, the correct take-home message from this fact is not "Go ahead, crank up that AC"!

"Used cars, not hybrids" is another good one. But it's really just one small instance of re-evaluating your consumption needs, rather than trying to maintain the same lifestyle through high-tech solutions. A more complete picture would be:

bike > public transport > used car > new hybrid > new non-hybrid

I've noticed that every environmental argument eventually gets sidetracked into the global warming debate. Personally, regardless of my stance on GW, I believe the whole debate on GW has been the greatest triumph for industry against envronmentalist since it can be used to dismiss or twist any environmental concern, or perverted into feel good, and extremely profitable enterprises like biofuels. Jut to grab the three that stick out wired says we should Urbanize, deforest and factory farm to save the environment. Sounds Orwellian, we must destroy it to save it.

I suppose it really comes down to people having different opinions about the world in which they'd like to live. I for one enjoy old growth forests and a little room to breath.