5 Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don't Work)
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Between the hybrids, the reusable canvas shopping bags and cloth diapers, everybody's doing their little bit to save the world. Entire industries have sprang up to cater to us socially-responsible types who want to leave behind a better world for the robots to inherit once they take over. But, most of the time, making you feel better is about all it does. For instance... #5.
Buying Organically Grown Food
Why People Do It: Seems like a no-brainer. Organic food eliminates the use of chemical fertilizers, hormones and pesticides. Getting rid of all those nasty chemicals means healthier foods and less contamination to the planet. And anything that's organic or natural has to be better for you, right? It's like you're eating the opposite of Twinkies here. Why They Shouldn't: So what's the problem with eating healthier food and saving the Earth? Nothing, except that the food may not be any healthier. And that's even if you can afford the (much) higher prices. Oh, and the impact on the planet may actually be worse.
The funny thing about those chemical fertilizers and pesticides is that they were invented for a reason, and that's to increase food production. Turns out organic farming is pretty damn inefficient. Holding hands and thinking peaceful thoughts does dick all against pests that want to eat your crops and weeds that want to choke them out. The current acre of farmland produces 200 percent more wheat than it did 70 years ago. The same goes for meat and poultry. The chemicals did that for us. Take them away, and suddenly you're getting less food per acre of land. According to some guy who won a Nobel Prize, we could feed 4 billion people if we went all organic. This sounds great except maybe to the 2.5 billion people who would be left without anything to eat.
Despite all the claims that chemicals used in farming are bad for us, it turns out cancer rates have dropped 15 percent since farmers began using chemicals. How is that possible? Well it's mainly due to people being able to afford more fruits and vegetables, because the chemicals allow more to be grown. That's one reason the average life expectancy in the US went up by almost 10 years between 1950 and 2000. As for the environment, it turns out organic farming has its own issues. Because it is much less efficient, there is actually a shortage of organic food available. This leads to people having the food shipped in from much further away. We're no scientists, but we think that doing things like shipping organic milk 900 miles over the highway in a truck belching diesel fumes is probably canceling out any environmental benefits you might have gained from going organic.
Oh, and did we mention organic farming uses a lot of manure to fertilize crops? This results in a greater risk of contamination. Although organic produce only accounts for one percent of the food supply, it accounts for eight percent of the E. coli cases in the U.S. Basically, you are at greater risk of eating a shit sandwich, which is admittedly organic, but still. #4.
Rejecting Vaccinations
Why People Do It: Because the chemical cocktails in vaccines are poisoning our children! Depending on what websites or episode of Oprah you watch, vaccines contain poisonous mercury, and are causing everything from autism to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is about as scary a medical term as you can have without using "flesh-eating" or "dick-melting." Why They Shouldn't: In a word: science. While the folks pushing the anti-vaccination agenda mean well (though some seem to be doing it out of a knee-jerk fear of "Big Pharma") their claims aren't backed up by the actual studies.
Apparently the whole autism scare was based on a 1998 report which has since been rejected by all the major health organizations, and was even retracted by its authors in 2004. In the scientific world, that's the equivalent of calling bullshit on yourself. As for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, studies actually showed that the cases of SIDS actually went down 40 percent even as vaccination rates went up. This is science's way of saying "You are fucking wrong."
A lot of the arguments against vaccination focus on the fact that a preservative used in some vaccines contains mercury. There are only two problems with this: the type they were using wasn't dangerous, and they stopped using it in 2001. We're not saying vaccines have no risk. As with any drug, there is a chance some kids may have a bad reaction. But the odds of serious side effects are fairly slim compared to the risk of catching the disease if children are not vaccinated. The thing is that when enough parents decide not to vaccinate their kids, those little germ factories start doing what they do best and epidemics break out. Then you end up with a little snotty babies running around infecting people like some kind of really cute zombie apocalypse.
#3.
Recycling
Why People Do It: We've all been raised to believe that unless we all recycle, our forests will soon be barren and we'll be living among mountains of our own filth, Wall-E style. Recycling is also supposed to use fewer resources and create less pollution. What could possibly be wrong with that? Why They Shouldn't:
The image of the paper industry hacking down every tree until we were all gasping for lack of oxygen was always ridiculous; we've increased the number of trees over the last 50 years as logging companies plant more to ensure future supply. Equally silly were the warnings most of us got hammered with growing up, about tales of overflowing landfills, full of trash that takes thousands of years to biodegrade. At least in America, we were never in danger of walking through streets of garbage. Some expert at Gonzaga University, with a lot of time on his hands, calculated that at current rates all the garbage in the US over the next 1,000 years would fill up a 35 square mile landfill 100 yards deep.
This sounds like one of those "Holy shit!" scary figures until you consider this is about one tenth of one percent of the land currently used for grazing in the US. Also, this would be the accumulation over 1,000 years by which time we should have bigger things to worry about, like overthrowing our robotic overlords. As for saving resources by recycling, this is where it gets tricky. Partly this is because whether or not recycling saves resources depends on whether you consider human labor to be a resource (that is, the effort to pick up, sort and transfer the items to be recycled). Recycling requires more trucks, more crews and more people to oversee the entire process. In Los Angeles alone there are twice as many garbage trucks than there would have been without the recycling program. Just like those douchebags who drive to the gym to run on a treadmill but still hop in the car to go the one block to the corner store to pick up their pork rinds and soda, it's not clear just how much benefit there is at the end of the day. Also, re-using something is not always better than just tossing it away. A chemist at the University of Victoria calculated that you would need to use a ceramic mug 1,000 times before you would see benefits over using disposable polystyrene cups for those 1,000 cups of coffee. This is because it takes far more energy to make that mug and takes energy and water to wash it after each use.
Now obviously you can't take that to the extreme and go to a lifestyle of all-disposable dishes and clothes, and where every ink pen is sold in box made up of three pounds of cardboard and plastic. But the problem was never as bad as they kept telling us. |
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For the mug, just don't wash it after each use. If you're the only one drinking coffee out of it, what's the big deal?
"The current acre of farmland produces 200 percent more wheat than it did 70 years ago. "
And yet... the rate of hunger has not gone down by 200%. Because the whole issue is more complicated, like the fact we pay farmers to not grow as much food as they possibly can, even though there are people starving to death.
However I still greatly enjoyed your article especially the carbon trade section.
Mmm. Nice, Big, long and thick comments. Sounds like an intelligent debate. But this is the internet after all...Who will cast the first "LOL f*g," I wonder? Hm...seems too good to be true. People expressing opinions and making sense and learning from one another? Sounds like a wet dream. Someone, wake me up. Or at least pinch me.
First of all, all of the evidence I see in the bit about organic foods is just correlational evidence. In order to prove that to be true, there would have to be a focused study specifically for the effects of organic food on the environment, and not simply a Cracked writer's assessment of the facts. The reason organic foods might be less environmentally sensible might be the fact that people aren't quite ready to financially back the methods yet, and just like anything else, the prices will go up before they go down.
Second, why do people think that the fact that we're not running out of space for garbage is a good and logical backing for not having to recycle? Is it only going to be a problem when we do start running out of room for garbage? Because I am pretty sure the world will be ended by then, although the ill effects of having garbage buried under the grass will kick in much sooner than that. As for the mug thing, I will easily use a mug, glass, plate or any other dishware more than 1,000 times.
http://bit.ly/12w7ZV
I agree with all of this with one major caveat to the vaccine thing: In light of the "crisis" of the H1N1 virus (the press having whipped up a big panic thanks to the WHO and CDC over something that has thus far proven less of a worry than... the flu), there has been a major effort to allow pharmaceutical companies to "fast-track" the testing of vaccines developed for diseases which have been deemed to warrant this. So the questionably neutral WHO will now get to shout "pandemic" and suddenly the press is telling everyone they should get vaccinated, not mentioning that the patients will actually be the test subjects, and not mentioning that there are very real and untested differences with many new vaccines being so implimented. That's the real issue with Big Pharma here; as long as they are held to a real standard there's no reason not to vaccinate, but there should be real concern if they are allowed to bypass the proper scientific process in order to combat a possibly fabricated threat.
For anyone that wrote comments detracting from the points made in this article, you should read the red text that links to where the author got his facts from. These are all fact based assessments, made my people that aren't just comedy writers on a website. Everything in this article is true, and this is evident in the articles that this article was based on.
JasonCloud, we will never run out of room for garbage. Like the article in the New York Times said that was linked to above, A 35 square mile dump would hold enough garbage for 1000 years!! And guess what, when it was filled, they would cover it with plants, make a nice safe park, and make another dump. I only recycle things that are economically feasible, such as aluminum because it costs more to mine that particular substance than it does to recycle it. I reuse plastic bags from the grocery store, and I reduce my consumption of them if I can carry any groceries. Recycling is only part of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and it is the easiest one for people to do because they don't have to change their ways. They can still use whatever they want, and then recycle it and feel good about themselves. Reducing consumption and reusing products takes much more effort, but also produces tangible benefits such as a reduction in consumption, which ultimately leads to lower production of waste.
But please, before you comment on anything read the other articles linked to in this article if you don't think the author makes a good argument. I think he does, but if you need more convincing click on the red.
I also concur with all save the recycling. Yes, the increasing number of garbage trucks is a problem, but perhaps a reasonable and logical recylcing system hasn't yet been established. Ever live in Japan? They have (albeit for foreigners) a complicated, intricate but EFFECTIVE means of garbage disposal; they seperate it at home and a different type of trash is picked up on different days.
I do want to say though, "some expert" and "a chemist" is not a very convincing argument. As with those who claim that vaccines cause SIDS or autism, who are we to say that they are a credible source?
Yes the information is logical, but recycling is a worthwhile goal, for every country on the planet, simply because we could very possibly one day run out of room for the garbage.
But that's ok because it will be a long time from now and we will supposedly be worrying about robots (who will have to deal with all of our filfth and refuse anyway, so their problem, right?)
Shifting the blame (especially to the future) is just a bit pathetic. But other than that, fantastic article.
i agree with all except the recycling thing.
just kept laughing at braf's comment "research all the effects before injecting our bodies with stuff.. especially babies.. they can be really fragile." hilarious satire there. if it was.
also improved agriculture techniques could most definitely feed the world, just most places with starvation have poor conditions for growing crops (environmental and governmental) and it costs way too much to just ship food there.
One small example of why recycling is bullshit:my supermarket uses recycled plastic bags. The problem is that the "new,improved" bags are
so thin,one has to double and somtimes triple bag your items.
so you end up using the same amount of plastic,so what's the point?
Another example of how the hippies not only proliferated,but took over.
Braf,
"creating jobs" is the absolute worst idea that anyone has ever tried. It seems like a good idea to have half the population doing jobs that are worthless, until you go and try to buy something and find out that half of what you bought is worthless.
Labor is the ONLY cost of business; whether its the labor of the men in drilling and refining, or the labor of the guy selling a product, or the labor of a lawyer spending time trying to figure out how to squeeze as much out of the system. Paying people to do absolutely nothing, or actually make life worse, is counterproductive.
CUTTING jobs is the only way to create them, as paradoxal as that sounds.
A lot of flaws in the logic here annd there. In the recycling article for example, it's a good thing recycling costs more/ takes more man power than making a new one. This means more jobs for the population and a better economy. Besides, it's not about what costs more but about reusing what we used instead of throwing it in a landfill.
Also, Organic farming tastes better :P . Food corporations suck.. I don't think they have any intention of making food healthier or more available through technology.. the bottom line is profit through mass production. It makes our food cheaper (which is good for us) but non-organic farming has its flaws too. It's not like improved agriculture techniques are feeding the world and fighting world hunger through its efficiency (even though we probably could make it do that).
So guys.. don't jump on the bandwagon and denounce all things green just because the article said so.. you're being just like what this article denounces- getting in a bandwagon without thinking all around.. and by the way I have a little nephew in a third world country who is in a coma(lost his senses) now because the doctors gave him some random shot to cure him after a mosquito stung him.. I'm just saying, we should first do a lot of studies and research all the effects before injecting our bodies with stuff.. especially babies.. they can be really fragile.
Nice, Kcaz64. Nothing quite as classy as a Holocaust reference.
I'd call you a moron, but you're mostly right (you're still an ass, though). Triclosan can't cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics, although it CAN cause it to become resistant to triclosan and other similar biocides. The upside is that this is much harder for bacteria than becoming resistant to antibiotics, so it won't happen as much. The downside is that we rely on triclosan for dermal decontamination of antibiotic resistant patients.
At any rate, these interactions are far more like a battlefield, with adaptive tactics, rather than any genocidal metaphor you might come up with. And it doesn't matter, because antibacterial soap is crap. It doesn't work any better than ordinary soap. But hey, enjoy your biocidal chemicals.
The anti-bacterial soap part is totally wrong.
The bacteria that survive aren't surviving because they're the stronger bacteria, they're surviving because they just happened to not be where the purge fell.
How many people were resistant to the furnaces in Nazi concentration camps? Anti-bacterial soap is the same thing, but for bacteria.
Anti-bacterial soap doesn't work through anti-biotics (like penicillin mentioned in the article), it works by blowing the f**k out of bacteria with chemicals that destroy them.
You know what? My kid died from a rare fatal vaccine reaction. Rare being the operative word, as in it almost never f*****g happens. We can't vaccinate our children so I would appreciate if people who don't have a genuine medical contraindication would pull their heads out of their asses and vaccinate theirs.
Totally not a hippie scumbag here, just heard a lecture on organic foods though, and there are a lot of generalizations about organic food here. It's not as inefficient as it is made out to be because bugs don't bother it as much as you'd think. Also manure is not employed at all or employed very little. It's the sissies that use manure. Real organic farmers use different types of minerals to enrich the soil. It produces better vegetation and actually creates a lot of natural immunities to pests. A healthy organic crop will be 80% (or more) harvested. This is all according to the lecture of some amish looking guy from indiana who apparently "fathered" organic farming, though I can't find his jism in the history books anywhere, or his f*****g name for that matter. So who knows?
The saddest thing about this article is that it appears at Cracked. (No offense, guys.) It's loaded with truths that should be in Time, Newsweek, NYT, etc. But hey, why would those guys spoil a good panic that produces dire headlines?
Environmentalists are pretty much always wrong about pretty much everything. Doom is always just around the corner for them. (For a supreme example, see "The Population Bomb" by Paul Erlich or "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al "Convenient Private Jet" Gore.) Still, their endless crusade to protest us all back to the stone ages has gained some traction lately. Thank heavens there's someone -- anyone -- pushing back against all the feel-good hippiebabble.
The only thing you didn't push hard enough in #3 is the fact that recycling usually costs more than just making a new one, and the "green" product is frequently inferior. Example: A ream of recycled paper is far more expensive than virgin paper, and the overpulped fibers don't feed well in many printers.
#5: Amen to that. I used to manage a potato processing plant that contracted occasionally to an all-organic ready-made food company (Amy's Kitchen). It's tough to make a profit when your smallish potatoes lose half their mass to bugs and worms. So what do you do? Make it way too expensive! (Only the rich deserve to eat healthy, right?) They gave me free samples of their stuff. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as products with a few chemicals in them.
#1: Carbon offsets are a sick joke. But they won't be so funny when they become laws. Forcing companies to buy carbon credits will be a huge tax on everybody, as admitted by several democrat and republican senators. And, as pointed out, they do nothing except make people feel better and give companies something to brag about in ads, especially since CO2 has never been proven to cause Gorebull warming, which is also unproven.
Relax, people. Polar bears are plentiful (look it up). The US easily feeds itself and scores of other countries (we throw away hundreds of tons of crops every year just to keep prices up). The average global temperature has actually been decreasing for the past decade (look it up). We should be responsible and sustainable, but we don't need to throw away our standard of living and become another armpit, third-world country to do it, despite what the neo-hippies say.
I knew my hatred for organic food was well-founded!
Gotta love the knee-jerk hippies who don't bother to think about whether or not what they're doing is really saving the world, or any potential negative consequences for what they're doing, and the ridiculous scare tactics they use. I know too many people who think that way. "Well, this way sounds 'green,' it must be good!"
And even if the autism/vaccination link held any water, I'd rather be autistic than dead, but hey. That's just me.
UMMMMM..... Safe mercury... Thats a binary element dude... how does that work again?
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yea sstar, i might wash mine after 5 cups or so. i dont give a s**t, its not like the coffe residue in there is gonna make my next one take bad.
anyway, this is a fantastic article. people r way too crazy with global warming and stuff they dont even look at the real facts of it all. u guys need to make one about obama...