I tend to think that people who try their best to help the environment are well-intentioned people who usually aren’t really doing that much to help the environment. I’ve written before about people feeling so good about themselves in terms of helping the environment that they feel entitled to do things that hurt the environment more. The most helpful analogy I have is an obese person going for a 5 minute jog, then feeling so good that they went out and exercised that they eat a triple chocolate cake. One step forward, two steps back. I re-use bags when I go to the grocery store, so I feel entitled to take multiple trans-Atlantic flights every year to get an education I could easily obtain within a couple miles of my house.
Cracked.com has a list of 6 socially conscious things that only look like they help:
- Driving energy-efficient cars
- Eating local
- Purchasing reusable bags
- Using biofuels
- Volunteering overseas
- Rescuing oil-covered birds
The site has a pretty good description for each of why people do it and why, in the end, it doesn’t do all that much.
I won’t take any sort of moral high ground against people who make these efforts. I just think it’s necessary to point out the actual results of these actions, instead of just their intentions.
March 31, 2011 at 11:38 am
Very interesting list, though the title of the article is wrong for driving hybrids and reusing plastic bags. In those cases, the act itself is actually helpful, people jut don’t follow through. Which is what you were talking about in your summary of the article.
The other 4 aren’t ways that people justify eating cake after running, but are ways of say just eating the cake but thinking it is as good as the running.
March 31, 2011 at 11:01 pm
I do think it’s funny how people can focus on small details rather than the big picture, often missing the actual results.
I will agree with Benjamin, though, in that these examples aren’t very similar to the fat person analogy. Unless the hybrid car driver thinks, “I get such good gas mileage now, I’ll drive way more than I did before,” driving a hybrid is actually beneficial. And unless the reusable bag owner throws out his reusable bags, I don’t see how that is any more or equally wasteful.
What I’ve been trying to think realistically about lately is where to draw the line, how to balance, environmental and realistic. For example, Greenpeace is fighting to stop development of nuclear plants, citing renewable energy as the only decent alternative. I will obviously agree that renewable energy is our goal, but am slightly more realistic: if we stop nuclear, it will still take years before wind or solar can power even a small fraction of what we use daily, and we’ll thus continue using coal, which, in my opinion, is far worse than nuclear. (Coal kills thousands of people a week in mining accidents, creates far more CO2, and actually provides more radiation than a nuclear plant, in the average case scenario. Sure, the worst case for nuclear is pretty bad, but so far our global track record is pretty good.)
That’s neither here nor there, I suppose.
I think it’s great that they mentioned “volunteering overseas”. Perfect example.
April 2, 2011 at 4:54 am
Driving a hybrid or reusing plastic bags are both good things for the environment, PROVIDED everything else is held equal. But the point is that those actions usually happen concurrently with actions that negate their positive effects. The 5 minute run the obese person is going on can, in my mind, somewhat be considered bad because it has caused this obese person to eat the triple chocolate cake. Everything else equal, going for a five minute run is good. But if it induces that person to do things that cause a net loss, it is bad.
Similarly, if hybrid cars make people drive twice as much, and thus use just as much gas, getting a hybrid doesn’t really do much. The driver might not consciously think “I’m gonna drive twice as much now.” But the fact that driving is that much cheaper will induce these actions. In fact, it might give that person a false sense of “doing something” and they’ll feel entitled to do other things that are wasteful.
One study has shown that plastic bag bans have been a net loss for the environment. Why? The idea with the bans is that people will bring reusable bags or recycle paper bags. But people didn’t do that. They bought more paper bags and more often than not did not reuse them. ALL ELSE EQUAL, the ban would have worked. But we have to consider the negative unintended consequences of everything.
I agree with you that nuclear power is a “least bad” energy source for the time being.