If you’ve seen the cover of the new Newsweek, you’ve already braced yourself for a focus on environmental issues. (The cover headline “Who’s The Greenest Of Them All?” refers to presidential candidates.)
I found particularly interesting a sidebar story from Sharon Begley that focuses on the fallacies of popular efforts to “save the planet.” Ms. Begley tells us that eating locally grown food is not necessarily better for the environment than eating food shipped from the far corners of the globe. She explains that hybrid cars are not necessarily better than non-hybrids for efforts to save fuel. She contends that carbon offsets don’t necessarily have much value.
She does a good job poking holes in some bad ideas. I wish I could end this blog entry with that praise. Unfortunately, Begley offers her criticism because she wants people to take even more drastic steps than those she has criticized.
Consider this example:
Instead of recycling two-quart juice bottles, we should have been
telling people to buy 12-ounce concentrates and refill that bottle 100
times before putting it in the blue bin.
Will that annoying step have even a remote impact on efforts to stop global warming? Uh, no.
The greatest folly is the “what you can do” fairy tale. Yes, every bit
of saved energy?by insulating homes, driving less?helps. But we
shouldn’t fool ourselves that individual eco-conscious behavior can
prevent dangerous global warming. That will require “serious
interventions from governments to change how we produce and use
energy,” says Gabrielle Walker, coauthor of the new book “The Hot
Topic” with Sir David King, Britain’s former science adviser. “Everyone
can try to do our bit, but it’s not the sort of thing that individuals
can greatly influence by themselves.”
Substitute for “serious intervention” the words “wrenching transformation” and you get an idea of what Begley supports.
It’s sad that a writer who admits “errors have plagued efforts to green the planet” doesn’t see that errors might be in play now as well. Why not keep our options open (i.e., keep government intrusion to a minimum) as we sort through the ideas of the locavores, recyclers, carbon-offset advocates, and hybrid hypers?
