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Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter. I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups

Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter. I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill.... The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.

dionidium 16y ago
I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  The impact of any one individual's environmental choices on my life is basically zero. People in aggregate matter, but individuals have minuscule effects. At least, for the people that I interact with. Things might be different if I spent a lot of time chatting with Senators. But I don't. Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  To put it another way, I think the whole effort to frame environmental policy as a matter of personal virtue is both ineffective and cruel. Lecturing people is not an effective way to change their behavior. And in many cases, people make environmentally poor decisions because they don't have much choice. Many many jobs in the US effectively require that you have a car. Many affordable residences also effectively require that you own a car and drive a lot. People need jobs and they need shelter, and for many people their existing jobs and homes lock them into having one car per adult in the home. In other policy areas, we've decided that an issue is important enough and should be taken out of the realm of personal virtue and placed into the realm of social action. My brother is disabled. He doesn't have to go around begging for coins so that he can eat this month. There's no opportunity for you to demonstrate your personal virtue by donating cash to him. Instead, we've all decided that seriously disabled people shouldn't have to go around begging to survive, so everyone is going to have a chunk of cash taken from their paycheck used to cover Social Security Disability Insurance. We lose a bit of cash, but in exchange we get to live in a society where severely disabled people don't die on the street because they can't work. We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue. We should do the same thing with climate change. Greenhouse gases are bad. So put a tax on them and let the market find a way to reduce them. Then we won't have to harass random people who make lifestyle choices we don't like; instead, people will make choices that in aggregate are more effective at mitigating climate change. In the story above, the truck driving apartment dweller would have more cash to spend than the car driving McMansion dweller, which will be far more effective in getting the McMansion dweller to change her behavior than any amount of lecturing, no matter how technically correct it is. Trading sanctimony and self-righteousness for policy effectiveness seems like a huge win to me.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue. I'm glad that your brother is now able to live a more rewarding life without having to degrade himself or wonder where his next meal is coming from. On the other hand, I'm sad that as a society, we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue. In some ways, I can no longer be as virtuous as I might like: I have less money to give because it's been taxed away from me to give to others; or I've got less time to give, because my time is dedicated to earning that money that is being taken from me. I have no evidence to support this, but I sometimes wonder if the fact that so much of virtue is taken away from us, that we're not in the habit of being virtuous, and that in turn makes it more difficult for us to make bigger overtures. Just a thought... This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will. Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists. There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity. Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per-person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs). As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject. There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.
- nollidge 16y ago
  > There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists. Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for anything.
  - cema 16y ago
    Yes, but not all such "religions" are fashionable.
  - stoney 16y ago
    There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't -- Robert Benchley
    - cema 16y ago
      Well, there are at least two kinds of people in the world then. -- cema
ja30278 16y ago
I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill.... I've never really understood why people get worked up over landfills. Digging a giant hole and filling it with trash is a perfectly rational solution. It isn't as if we're importing mass from space and converting it to trash...we're digging up stuff from the ground, using it for awhile, and then putting it back in a slightly different form. If we ever find a use for the styrofoam in landfills, we can mine it back out again.
- three14 16y ago
  I don't get worked up over landfills, but I do get worked up over all those bits of styrofoam that never make it into the landfills and hang out on the beach or in a park or wherever they happened to land - I'd greatly prefer those bits be replaced by something biodegradable.
  - gcheong 16y ago
    According to this website (http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6 http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6) it takes at least 180 days for a corn-based cup to biodegrade in a compost. Biodegradable or not, it's probably more efficient to hire people to just clean up the trash periodically instead of hoping for a biodegradable solution.
    - three14 16y ago
      And even more efficient yet if people throw out their trash. The point is that people don't hire workers to clean up trash where I see all of it.
- gcheong 16y ago
  Modern landfills can actually be used as an energy source to some extent: "More recently, it has been recognized that this landfill gas represents a usable energy source. The methane can be extracted from the gas and used as fuel. In the North Wake County Landfill, a company collects the landfill gas, extracts the methane, and sells it to a nearby chemical company to power its boilers." From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/landfill6.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...

dionidium 16y ago

I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.

MichaelSalib 16y ago
The impact of any one individual's environmental choices on my life is basically zero. People in aggregate matter, but individuals have minuscule effects. At least, for the people that I interact with. Things might be different if I spent a lot of time chatting with Senators. But I don't. Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.
MichaelSalib 16y ago
To put it another way, I think the whole effort to frame environmental policy as a matter of personal virtue is both ineffective and cruel. Lecturing people is not an effective way to change their behavior. And in many cases, people make environmentally poor decisions because they don't have much choice. Many many jobs in the US effectively require that you have a car. Many affordable residences also effectively require that you own a car and drive a lot. People need jobs and they need shelter, and for many people their existing jobs and homes lock them into having one car per adult in the home. In other policy areas, we've decided that an issue is important enough and should be taken out of the realm of personal virtue and placed into the realm of social action. My brother is disabled. He doesn't have to go around begging for coins so that he can eat this month. There's no opportunity for you to demonstrate your personal virtue by donating cash to him. Instead, we've all decided that seriously disabled people shouldn't have to go around begging to survive, so everyone is going to have a chunk of cash taken from their paycheck used to cover Social Security Disability Insurance. We lose a bit of cash, but in exchange we get to live in a society where severely disabled people don't die on the street because they can't work. We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue. We should do the same thing with climate change. Greenhouse gases are bad. So put a tax on them and let the market find a way to reduce them. Then we won't have to harass random people who make lifestyle choices we don't like; instead, people will make choices that in aggregate are more effective at mitigating climate change. In the story above, the truck driving apartment dweller would have more cash to spend than the car driving McMansion dweller, which will be far more effective in getting the McMansion dweller to change her behavior than any amount of lecturing, no matter how technically correct it is. Trading sanctimony and self-righteousness for policy effectiveness seems like a huge win to me.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue. I'm glad that your brother is now able to live a more rewarding life without having to degrade himself or wonder where his next meal is coming from. On the other hand, I'm sad that as a society, we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue. In some ways, I can no longer be as virtuous as I might like: I have less money to give because it's been taxed away from me to give to others; or I've got less time to give, because my time is dedicated to earning that money that is being taken from me. I have no evidence to support this, but I sometimes wonder if the fact that so much of virtue is taken away from us, that we're not in the habit of being virtuous, and that in turn makes it more difficult for us to make bigger overtures. Just a thought... This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will. Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists. There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity. Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per-person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs). As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject. There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.

nollidge 16y ago
> There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists. Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for anything.
- cema 16y ago
  Yes, but not all such "religions" are fashionable.
- stoney 16y ago
  There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't -- Robert Benchley
  - cema 16y ago
    Well, there are at least two kinds of people in the world then. -- cema

ja30278 16y ago

I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill.... I've never really understood why people get worked up over landfills. Digging a giant hole and filling it with trash is a perfectly rational solution. It isn't as if we're importing mass from space and converting it to trash...we're digging up stuff from the ground, using it for awhile, and then putting it back in a slightly different form. If we ever find a use for the styrofoam in landfills, we can mine it back out again.

three14 16y ago
I don't get worked up over landfills, but I do get worked up over all those bits of styrofoam that never make it into the landfills and hang out on the beach or in a park or wherever they happened to land - I'd greatly prefer those bits be replaced by something biodegradable.
- gcheong 16y ago
  According to this website (http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6 http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6) it takes at least 180 days for a corn-based cup to biodegrade in a compost. Biodegradable or not, it's probably more efficient to hire people to just clean up the trash periodically instead of hoping for a biodegradable solution.
  - three14 16y ago
    And even more efficient yet if people throw out their trash. The point is that people don't hire workers to clean up trash where I see all of it.
gcheong 16y ago
Modern landfills can actually be used as an energy source to some extent: "More recently, it has been recognized that this landfill gas represents a usable energy source. The methane can be extracted from the gas and used as fuel. In the North Wake County Landfill, a company collects the landfill gas, extracts the methane, and sells it to a nearby chemical company to power its boilers." From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/landfill6.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...