How Many Feet in a Carbon Footprint?

[PeriodThree]

If so, then I stand corrected. Do you have any sources? I know I did not provide any sources for my statements. Citing sources always adds a great deal to a debate because there is a real opportunity to learn and for the dialog to reach a higher level.

Having sources is good:
On sub replacement fertility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
Census data for the world here:
https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/agggen

In my opinion, and I need Neil's confirmation on this, the central issue in Neil's post is overpopulation, not 'being green.' Neil's use of the term, 'green,' is a proxy for the main theme of controlling our population size and continued growth. Being 'green,' per se, is not the issue, but a way of pointing a finger at the problem of current, world overpopulation.

Neil used language I find inflammatory. He argued:

"Reducing the size of the human population by not contributing to its continuing expansion, is, by contrast, very very green. Not having a baby makes a large and immediate difference compared to having one. It's conscious choice."

Neil uses 'green' is a proxy for 'good.' He is pretty clear here in his argument that not having children is morally superior to having children.
It is obvious from his framing that the conscious choice is to not have children, and that having children is the unconscious, the anti green, the bad choice.

I find that argument to be wrong and deeply offensive. I also believe that when people who claim the Green mantle make arguments like this that they drive people away from their other good and valid points.

Basically I think Neil is wrong on the facts, wrong from the position of my personal morality, and wrong from the tactical position of advancing the causes he claims to advocate.

Another important observation in Neil's post (and again, I need his confirmation) is that he is not singling out the U.S. Neil is talking about global overpopulation and this includes all nations. I'm the one who mentioned the U.S. but not because the U.S. alone has the population or attitude problem. I mentioned Americans because the Wacco List audience is composed primarily by Americans. My bad, if only for obfuscation of the real issue of WORLD overpopulation.

I absolutely acknowledge that you are the one who explicitly singled out the US. That is why I specifically replied to your post. I think that one can infer from context that Neil includes the US, which I believe is a mistake, but since he didn't make that explicit claim I did not respond to him.

[Zeno Swijtink]

Clearly we need to improve our full-lifespan management of trash.

In my involvement with the Russian River Cleanup I have wondered how much we don't catch.

We keep statistics of how much garbage we remove from the river but I don't have any idea what percentage this is of the stuff that leaves the river at Jenner and gets into the ocean. Are we making progress? No idea!

Any of your techno-geeks have insights about how to measure that?

[MsTerry]

With that said, I asked 'Am I missing something?' with respect to the problems of plastics, and you responded that I was missing a continent sized problem.

In the pedantic department, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the size of a continent,

since you didn't take the time to read the articles, let me quote for you;

And the scale of the phenomenon is astounding. I now believe plastic debris to be the most common surface feature of the world's oceans. Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet's surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris. What can be done with this new class of products made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How can the dictum "In ecosystems, everything is used" be made to work with plastic?

A quarter of the earth surface? maybe that is a little pedestrian for you.

[MsTerry]

With that said, I asked 'Am I missing something?' with respect to the problems of plastics, and you responded that I was missing a continent sized problem..

and here is another qoute

The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5 x 10¹⁵) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen first hand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.

you see, if we pollute our water sources, we pollute ourselves.

[PeriodThree]

You say that as though I am arguing in favor of pollution.

I don't particularly need a pedantic lecture from you on the evils of pollution.

and here is another qoute

you see, if we pollute our water sources, we pollute ourselves.

[Zeno Swijtink]

You say that as though I am arguing in favor of pollution.

I don't particularly need a pedantic lecture from you on the evils of pollution.

Rich,

Do you have a breakdown of the sources of plastic pollution in the Pacific?

Appreciate your contributions to this Bulletin.

Zeno

[MsTerry]

You say that as though I am arguing in favor of pollution.

I don't particularly need a pedantic lecture from you on the evils of pollution.

From your pedantic reply I surmise that I am dismissed just as you dismiss garbage.

I hesitate to touch this issue, but the problems of plastic seem solvable and overrated when compared with our other issues.

If the problems of plastic are solvable, why don't we?
eg; plastic bags are collected but don't get recycled or reused
the plastics that are reused into lumber have a lifespan of 30 years, what happens to them after that?

Am I missing something?

Yes, you still are
Think of the Earth as a little room that is closed off on all sides.
Nothing goes in, nothing goes out.
How many chemicals would you like inside your room to use, burn, manufacture or experiment with?
What would you do with your garbage?

[Valley Oak]

Kim (may I call you that?), don't take it so personally. I know that might seem strange coming from someone who has taken it personally a lot. You might be surprised how miffed the other person is as well. I'm realizing this myself.

I understand how it might feel. I especially get incensed when I come across someone who stridently supports the war in Iraq or opposes abortion, is against gay marriage, etc. If that ever happens to you, then just close the browser for few hours or a day and do something else. Later on, you can think about how important it is to reproach someone and if so, how best to do it. How does that sound?

Take care and take it easy. Life is too short and the excess stress isn't worth it.

Edward

From your pedantic reply I surmise that I am dismissed just as you dismiss garbage.


If the problems of plastic are solvable, why don't we?
eg; plastic bags are collected but don't get recycled or reused
the plastics that are reused into lumber have a lifespan of 30 years, what happens to them after that?



Yes, you still are
Think of the Earth as a little room that is closed off on all sides.
Nothing goes in, nothing goes out.
How many chemicals would you like inside your room to use, burn, manufacture or experiment with?
What would you do with your garbage?

[PeriodThree]

From your pedantic reply I surmise that I am dismissed just as you dismiss garbage.

When I am faced with a problem I break that problem down into parts in order to solve each part. I initially made a list of the problems I know about plastics. One of the things on that list was the 'Environmental effects of disposal.'

Somehow you have drawn the conclusion that making a list is the same as dismissing a problem.

If the problems of plastic are solvable, why don't we?

This seems like a strange thing for you to write. It feels like the sort of argument people make when they want to be negative and condemn, and don't really want a problem to be solved.

There are a lot of people working on solving the full life cycle problems of plastic. Progress is being made on many fronts.

eg; plastic bags are collected but don't get recycled or reused

I think the answer to the problems of plastic grocery bags is to stop using
them. That seems to be the growing consensus:

(China bans free plastic grocery bags)
https://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiap...ags/index.html

(Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags)
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/world/europe/02bags.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

the plastics that are reused into lumber have a lifespan of 30 years, what happens to them after that?

This feels like more of that same philosophy of the perfect being the enemy of the good. You seem to feel that reusing something for 30 years is bad because it doesn't solve the whole issue.

I disagree. I think we make human progress by identifying the problems we have and then working on solutions.

Other people have declared a 'war on plastics' or a war on EMF or a war on any damned thing that has attracted their attention. Once that 'war' has been declared than evidence specifically does not matter.

(Example: 'War on Plastics: rejecting the toxic plaque' https://www.culturechange.org/e-letter-plastics.html, with quotes like 'Whether or not scientists can measure a substance should not be the point. ')

Yes, you still are
Think of the Earth as a little room that is closed off on all sides.
Nothing goes in, nothing goes out.
How many chemicals would you like inside your room to use, burn, manufacture or experiment with?
What would you do with your garbage?

You keep up with this assumption that I need to be educated. And then you work to educate me with information which is not always true.

For example, a lot comes into the Earth - think of that Sun we have and that "174 petawatts of incoming solar radiation" that we get at any given time.

And you might want to do a quick search for the definition of the word 'chemical.' Chemicals are good.

I assert that people who abuse the word chemical as a synonym for 'toxic' are doing something bad, and usually are doing this intentionally.

Words have meaning. They reflect and create our shared reality. Misusing words is, at least to me, a form of abusing reality. I find misusing words in order to advance a personal or political interest to be, well, abusive.

The Dihydrogen Oxide 'scare' is an amusing, but also scary reflection of how people seem to think. https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

From that page "A similar study conducted by U.S. researchers Patrick K. McCluskey and Matthew Kulick also found that nearly 90 percent of the citizens participating in their study were willing to sign a petition to support an outright ban on the use of Dihydrogen Monoxide in the United States."

ie. 90% of those surveyed were willing to support banning water.

Use, or misuse, words and you can get 9 out of 10 people to ban water.

[MsTerry]

Edward,

We can make a difference by changing what is right in front of us.
Look at Zeno he single-handedly took care of the Russian River.
It is easy to say plastic has problems but somebody else will solve it.
6 Billion People isn't necessarily a problem if that is the peak number.
6 billion and growing IS a problem.
The solution is usually distribution of wealth and resources and education which stimulates a balanced look at life

MsTerry

Kim (may I call you that?), don't take it so personally. I know that might seem strange coming from someone who has taken it personally a lot. You might be surprised how miffed the other person is as well. I'm realizing this myself.

I understand how it might feel. I especially get incensed when I come across someone who stridently supports the war in Iraq or opposes abortion, is against gay marriage, etc. If that ever happens to you, then just close the browser for few hours or a day and do something else. Later on, you can think about how important it is to reproach someone and if so, how best to do it. How does that sound?

Take care and take it easy. Life is too short and the excess stress isn't worth it.

Edward

[Valley Oak]

I agree. We can make a difference by changing what is in our local communities. That is an outstanding work of community involvement on Zeno's part and I thank him energetically for his generous service. He is an example to follow and a leader. We need more people like him.

I also agree that most solutions are a matter of distribution of wealth and resources and education, which stimulates a balanced look at life.

But I also believe that 6 billion people is far too many and that we must urgently try to bring that number down to at least half as much. This is an overpopulation of one species and nature has its 'methods' for uncontrolled organisms. Let's just hope that ours is smart enough to control its conduct before nature takes its ugly, corrective course.

Edward

Edward,

We can make a difference by changing what is right in front of us.
Look at Zeno he single-handedly took care of the Russian River.
It is easy to say plastic has problems but somebody else will solve it.
6 Billion People isn't necessarily a problem if that is the peak number.
6 billion and growing IS a problem.
The solution is usually distribution of wealth and resources and education which stimulates a balanced look at life

MsTerry

[Sciguy]

PeriodThree

Congratulations on your insights. It is rare to find anyone in the environmental movement stating clearly that chemicals are not simply invented to poison us. There are 41 billion pounds of chemicals manufactured or imported into the US every single day. They must be serving some fundamental and important function to maintain that kind of volume. And of course they do. We use them every day in myriad ways that we hardly even recognize. It will not do to retreat behind a wall of fear and behave as though chemicals need to all be banned because they are all just toxic. The word toxic has been egregiously misapplied by fear mongers who find it easy to scare everyone to gain personal control. I am not disputing that there is pollution and poison. Fear is always based on some kind of reality. But fear, when it is being stirred up, may lead to nothing but more fear and no solutions. Chemicals can be handled in far more intelligent ways than we use today, ways that will eliminate that pressure to discard, which leads to the felt need to find some place, any place, to just get rid of them. This is where the concept of regulation has brought us. Regulation means to carve out a portion of the environment and declare it to be suitable for legal pollution. What if we decided as a society that the notion of discard is no longer going to be acceptable. What if we actually mounted a program of research into ways to totally eliminate discard and replace it all with reuse? I have worked in this field for thirty years and I can assure you that there is no such program anywhere in this country. Instead there is an acceptance of the idea that discard must be accepted and allowed for forever.

The same analysis can be brought to bear on this subject of plastic excess, whether floating in the ocean or wherever. How can we continue to design plastic parts (think about flimsy disposable grocery bags as one example) for discard and then be surprised when the deleterious effects build up all over the planet. Periodthree, you posed as one of your four points, reconciling environmental success with the disposal of plastics. It is clear to me that this kind of reconciliation cannot exist. Therefore, let us change the formulation of the problem: let's eliminate the acceptance of discard (disposal) and see what happens. If we do that we will institute a policy that no product can be designed for discard, but must be designed for perpetual reuse. So flimsy plastic bags will cease to exist, to be replaced by sturdy bags that will be used thousands of times before they ultimately disintegrate. And when they do reach some kind of unusable status, who says that they need to be then discarded? What if they were designed from the start to be dismantled and passed on to well understood next pathways which reuse whatever function remains - as cloth or fiber or molecules? And the same approach would be applied to every plastic (or any other material) part or object, not just bags. This approach is known as Zero Waste (see www.zerowasteinstitute.org).

There really is no need for handwringing. The solution to discard is to stop designing that way - to stop accepting it. For all practical purposes there is no research done in this country that is based on this principle. Imagine what could be accomplished if research into eliminating our lazy, uncivilized approach to resources i.e. garbage creation, were being carried out in every university.

So long as any problem is framed in terms of how to reconcile or accommodate discard or disposal or putting garbage somewhere, no solutions will ever emerge.

Someone pointed out the enormous quantity of energy we receive from the sun every day. That is the fact that makes all this possible. We don't have a closed system here, in which waste would in fact be thermodynamically unavoidable. We have an open system bathed in energy, which is perfectly capable of producing no waste at all. So why do we accept wasting behavior so readily? Pure intellectual laziness, joined to the enormous political power of the garbage industry. Let's change the assumptions and see if we can make a more sensible world.

Paul

When I am faced with a problem I break that problem down into parts in order to solve each part. I initially made a list of the problems I know about plastics. One of the things on that list was the 'Environmental effects of disposal.'

Somehow you have drawn the conclusion that making a list is the same as dismissing a problem.



This seems like a strange thing for you to write. It feels like the sort of argument people make when they want to be negative and condemn, and don't really want a problem to be solved.

There are a lot of people working on solving the full life cycle problems of plastic. Progress is being made on many fronts.




I think the answer to the problems of plastic grocery bags is to stop using
them. That seems to be the growing consensus:

(China bans free plastic grocery bags)
https://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiap...ags/index.html

(Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags)
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/world/europe/02bags.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin



This feels like more of that same philosophy of the perfect being the enemy of the good. You seem to feel that reusing something for 30 years is bad because it doesn't solve the whole issue.

I disagree. I think we make human progress by identifying the problems we have and then working on solutions.

Other people have declared a 'war on plastics' or a war on EMF or a war on any damned thing that has attracted their attention. Once that 'war' has been declared than evidence specifically does not matter.

(Example: 'War on Plastics: rejecting the toxic plaque' https://www.culturechange.org/e-letter-plastics.html, with quotes like 'Whether or not scientists can measure a substance should not be the point. ')





You keep up with this assumption that I need to be educated. And then you work to educate me with information which is not always true.

For example, a lot comes into the Earth - think of that Sun we have and that "174 petawatts of incoming solar radiation" that we get at any given time.

And you might want to do a quick search for the definition of the word 'chemical.' Chemicals are good.

I assert that people who abuse the word chemical as a synonym for 'toxic' are doing something bad, and usually are doing this intentionally.

Words have meaning. They reflect and create our shared reality. Misusing words is, at least to me, a form of abusing reality. I find misusing words in order to advance a personal or political interest to be, well, abusive.

The Dihydrogen Oxide 'scare' is an amusing, but also scary reflection of how people seem to think. https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

From that page "A similar study conducted by U.S. researchers Patrick K. McCluskey and Matthew Kulick also found that nearly 90 percent of the citizens participating in their study were willing to sign a petition to support an outright ban on the use of Dihydrogen Monoxide in the United States."

ie. 90% of those surveyed were willing to support banning water.

Use, or misuse, words and you can get 9 out of 10 people to ban water.

[MsTerry]

There are 41 billion pounds of chemicals manufactured or imported into the US every single day. They must be serving some fundamental and important function to maintain that kind of volume. l

This statement seems to say that since we are importing chemicals and using them, therefore we must need them.???
What would we be missing out on?
Food preservatives? food coloring? Tooth brushes in 50 colors and 100 styles?
Please educate us on what we would miss out on?
And of course, how we will suffer as a consequence.
Let's look at a commonly known chemical : CHLORINE

Chlorine (IPA: /ˈklɔəriːn/, Greek: χλωρóς From the Greek word khlôros (green), "), is the chemical element with atomic number 17 and symbol Cl. It is a halogen, found in the periodic table in group 17 (formerly VIIa or VIIb). As the chloride ion, which is part of common salt and other compounds, it is abundant in nature and necessary to most forms of life, including humans. In its common elemental form (Cl₂ or "dichlorine") under standard conditions, it is a pale green gas about 2.5 times as dense as air. It has a disagreeable, suffocating odor that is detectable in concentrations as low as 3.5 ppm^[1] and is poisonous. Chlorine is a powerful oxidant and is used in bleaching and disinfectants. As a common disinfectant, chlorine compounds are used in swimming pools to keep them clean and sanitary. In the upper atmosphere, chlorine based molecules have been implicated in the destruction of the ozone layer.

Is this the kind of fear mongering you are talking about?

Your commitment to zero waste is laudable, a commitment to less chemicals would get you there much faster

[Valley Oak]

Wow, Paul, this idea of 'designer garbage' is fabulous. I wonder what needs to be done to get it implemented? I suppose that posting the idea on an online BB is a small start.

Thanks!

Edward

PeriodThree

Congratulations on your insights. It is rare to find anyone in the environmental movement stating clearly that chemicals are not simply invented to poison us. There are 41 billion pounds of chemicals manufactured or imported into the US every single day. They must be serving some fundamental and important function to maintain that kind of volume. And of course they do. We use them every day in myriad ways that we hardly even recognize. It will not do to retreat behind a wall of fear and behave as though chemicals need to all be banned because they are all just toxic. The word toxic has been egregiously misapplied by fear mongers who find it easy to scare everyone to gain personal control. I am not disputing that there is pollution and poison. Fear is always based on some kind of reality. But fear, when it is being stirred up, may lead to nothing but more fear and no solutions. Chemicals can be handled in far more intelligent ways than we use today, ways that will eliminate that pressure to discard, which leads to the felt need to find some place, any place, to just get rid of them. This is where the concept of regulation has brought us. Regulation means to carve out a portion of the environment and declare it to be suitable for legal pollution. What if we decided as a society that the notion of discard is no longer going to be acceptable. What if we actually mounted a program of research into ways to totally eliminate discard and replace it all with reuse? I have worked in this field for thirty years and I can assure you that there is no such program anywhere in this country. Instead there is an acceptance of the idea that discard must be accepted and allowed for forever.

The same analysis can be brought to bear on this subject of plastic excess, whether floating in the ocean or wherever. How can we continue to design plastic parts (think about flimsy disposable grocery bags as one example) for discard and then be surprised when the deleterious effects build up all over the planet. Periodthree, you posed as one of your four points, reconciling environmental success with the disposal of plastics. It is clear to me that this kind of reconciliation cannot exist. Therefore, let us change the formulation of the problem: let's eliminate the acceptance of discard (disposal) and see what happens. If we do that we will institute a policy that no product can be designed for discard, but must be designed for perpetual reuse. So flimsy plastic bags will cease to exist, to be replaced by sturdy bags that will be used thousands of times before they ultimately disintegrate. And when they do reach some kind of unusable status, who says that they need to be then discarded? What if they were designed from the start to be dismantled and passed on to well understood next pathways which reuse whatever function remains - as cloth or fiber or molecules? And the same approach would be applied to every plastic (or any other material) part or object, not just bags. This approach is known as Zero Waste (see www.zerowasteinstitute.org).

There really is no need for handwringing. The solution to discard is to stop designing that way - to stop accepting it. For all practical purposes there is no research done in this country that is based on this principle. Imagine what could be accomplished if research into eliminating our lazy, uncivilized approach to resources i.e. garbage creation, were being carried out in every university.

So long as any problem is framed in terms of how to reconcile or accommodate discard or disposal or putting garbage somewhere, no solutions will ever emerge.

Someone pointed out the enormous quantity of energy we receive from the sun every day. That is the fact that makes all this possible. We don't have a closed system here, in which waste would in fact be thermodynamically unavoidable. We have an open system bathed in energy, which is perfectly capable of producing no waste at all. So why do we accept wasting behavior so readily? Pure intellectual laziness, joined to the enormous political power of the garbage industry. Let's change the assumptions and see if we can make a more sensible world.

Paul

[PeriodThree]

Ms Terry,

Are you intentionally trying to parody 'anti-chemical' people or are you sincere?

Your commitment to zero waste is laudable, a commitment to less chemicals would get you there much faster

'Chemical' is that special word we use to describe Atoms either alone, or bound with other Atoms into 'Compounds.' It is a descriptive word, and I'd love it if you, and others, would stop using 'Chemical' as a pejorative.

Everything around you is a chemical. Nitrogen is a chemical, Oxygen is an incredibly reactive and toxic chemical (breathing pure oxygen under normal pressure can kill you after a day or so), Hydrogen, Water, Salt, almost everything is a chemical, or a mix of chemicals (exceptions are electrons and photons).

[PeriodThree]

Wow, Paul, this idea of 'designer garbage' is fabulous. I wonder what needs to be done to get it implemented? I suppose that posting the idea on an online BB is a small start.

Given context and history the idea that posting the idea on Wacco is a small start is a laugh out loud funny comment. Paul is generally recognized as having first used the term 'zero waste' in his company Zero Waste Systems Inc, founded in the 1970's. In 2005 he published the book _Getting To Zero Waste_, and as he noted, runs the Zero Waste Institute web site: https://www.zerowasteinstitute.org/

The idea of Zero Waste is huge, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_waste

[Valley Oak]

Rich, I'm very happy to read the good news that the concept of 'zero waste' has been well underway for such a long time now. Where have I been? What can I and others do to help out or jump in the band wagon? Write our representatives and ask them to legislate 'designer waste' policy or what?

My wife and I never throw any of our waste paper products aways, which is a mind boggling amount, considering that we are people who accumulate an especially large quantity of paper garbage. For example, we are now using everything paper to cover the ground outside our house and then covering that with compost to control the high growing grass and weeds. And then planting gardens on top of it all. We even go to Safeway to pick up extra cardboard boxes to lay on the ground. We have almost a half acre of land and plan to cover about a third of it by recycling all of our waste paper.

I know this must sound mickey mouse but it is an idea that we got from Earth Activist Training participants.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Edward

Given context and history the idea that posting the idea on Wacco is a small start is a laugh out loud funny comment. Paul is generally recognized as having first used the term 'zero waste' in his company Zero Waste Systems Inc, founded in the 1970's. In 2005 he published the book _Getting To Zero Waste_, and as he noted, runs the Zero Waste Institute web site: https://www.zerowasteinstitute.org/

The idea of Zero Waste is huge, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_waste

[neil]

Hi Edward,

The term "overpopulation" implies some standard by which the population is measured and determined to be too large. There can be many such standards, and different standards will result in different determinations, that is, in different "maximums" beyond which there is said to be "overpopulation."

For example, if we use "easy access to pristine wilderness for everyone" as our measure, then even 1 billion people on earth (one-sixth the current number) might be "overpopulation." But if we use "900 calories and 2 quarts of water per person per day (whether they need it or not)" as our measure, then clearly there could be many more people before being "overpopulated."

Would "sustainability" be a better measure? We find the same kind of problem: different standards of measure give different determinations of sustainability. In the end "sustainability" is no less difficult to to pin down than the idea of "overpopulation."

On the other hand it is, I think, an objective fact that the human population on this planet is growing rapidly. Even if the rate of expansion (percent change year to year) is slowing some, annual growth in real numbers is increasing each year. And each one of our growing numbers needs food, water, and other resources in order to live, and makes a correspondingly significant impact on the environment.

You are right, Edward, I am mainly addressing how global population impacts environment, and where we have choices relative to that impact. The fact that a small handful of countries may have a slightly declining population seems insignificant in the face of our global increase. Similarly, the fact that one racial group may be growing slower or faster than another hardly seems relevant; it is our aggregate (to use Zeno's term) human activity which is so severely impacting the biosphere. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the resulting erosion of ecosystem stability, effect people everywhere, regardless of social and political designations.

In so far as our individual choices and actions can have impacts on the environment, then the individual choice to bring another human into the world or not has a correspondingly large environmental significance.

I'm not advocating a policy of birth control, but awareness and choice. I'm not saying it's wrong to make and have more babies, only that each additional person who does come into the world increases the aggregate human impact on the environment. For the term "individual carbon footprint" to be objectively meaningful it needs to somehow reflect the emissions impact of offspring.

Neil

In my opinion, and I need Neil's confirmation on this, the central issue in Neil's post is overpopulation, not 'being green.' Neil's use of the term, 'green,' is a proxy for the main theme of controlling our population size and continued growth. Being 'green,' per se, is not the issue, but a way of pointing a finger at the problem of current, world overpopulation.

Another important observation in Neil's post (and again, I need his confirmation) is that he is not singling out the U.S. Neil is talking about global overpopulation and this includes all nations. I'm the one who mentioned the U.S. but not because the U.S. alone has the population or attitude problem. I mentioned Americans because the Wacco List audience is composed primarily by Americans. My bad, if only for obfuscation of the real issue of WORLD overpopulation.

Thanks for the comment,

Edward

[MsTerry]

'Chemical' is that special word we use to describe Atoms either alone, or bound with other Atoms into 'Compounds.' It is a descriptive word, and I'd love it if you, and others, would stop using 'Chemical' as a pejorative.

Everything around you is a chemical. Nitrogen is a chemical, Oxygen is an incredibly reactive and toxic chemical (breathing pure oxygen under normal pressure can kill you after a day or so), Hydrogen, Water, Salt, almost everything is a chemical, or a mix of chemicals (exceptions are electrons and photons).

You are so sweet, Rich, to take the time to give us a physics lesson!
According to sciguy

Sciguy wrote:
There are 41 billion pounds of chemicals manufactured or imported into the US every single day. They must be serving some fundamental and important function to maintain that kind of volume. l

Are all those cute, fuzzy little chemicals safe Rich?
How many of them would you want in your house?
Or maybe even on your body?
Please let me know, without pejorative.

[PeriodThree]

"You are so sweet, Rich, to take the time to give us a physics lesson!"

It is possible I am misreading your message, it happens, but your use of the term 'you are so sweet' to describe my point feels to me like sarcasm to dismiss my point as being unimportant.

"Are all those cute, fuzzy little chemicals safe Rich?"

Again, this feels to me like you are using the sarcastic phrase 'cute fuzzy little chemicals' to dismiss my point.

'Chemical' is an important word. Everything in nature (with a few exceptions, like light) is a 'chemical.' It feels to me like you wish to create and maintain a pejorative connotation to an important word which I assert should be kept as a judgment free descriptive word.

I personally care very much for the meanings of words. They are important to me. Again, this is my interpretation, but it feels to me like you are using sarcasm in order to dismiss the importance of actual knowledge (that 'Chemical' has a specific meaning), or perhaps simply the importance which I place on actual knowledge, in favor of emotion ('you are so sweet' and 'cute fuzzy little chemicals.')

It appears to me that you are strongly in favor of the pejoration of the word 'Chemical' from a descriptive term to a judgmental form. I am not.

It feels very important to me that we maintain the ability to communicate using a shared language.

[Zeno Swijtink]

"You are so sweet, Rich, to take the time to give us a physics lesson!"

It is possible I am misreading your message, it happens, but your use of the term 'you are so sweet' to describe my point feels to me like sarcasm to dismiss my point as being unimportant.

"Are all those cute, fuzzy little chemicals safe Rich?"

Again, this feels to me like you are using the sarcastic phrase 'cute fuzzy little chemicals' to dismiss my point.

'Chemical' is an important word. Everything in nature (with a few exceptions, like light) is a 'chemical.' It feels to me like you wish to create and maintain a pejorative connotation to an important word which I assert should be kept as a judgment free descriptive word.

I personally care very much for the meanings of words. They are important to me. Again, this is my interpretation, but it feels to me like you are using sarcasm in order to dismiss the importance of actual knowledge (that 'Chemical' has a specific meaning), or perhaps simply the importance which I place on actual knowledge, in favor of emotion ('you are so sweet' and 'cute fuzzy little chemicals.')

It appears to me that you are strongly in favor of the pejoration of the word 'Chemical' from a descriptive term to a judgmental form. I am not.

It feels very important to me that we maintain the ability to communicate using a shared language.

My MacBook dictionary defines the noun 'chemical' as:

"a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, esp. artificially"

What dictionary do you use?

[PeriodThree]

My MacBook dictionary defines the noun 'chemical' as:

"a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, esp. artificially"

What dictionary do you use?

"A substance with a distinct molecular composition that is produced by or used in a chemical process"
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition.

"A substance characterized by definite molecular composition."
McGraw Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms.

"Of, pertaining to, or relating to the science of Chemistry or to the substances and phenomena of which it treats."
Oxford English Dictionary

"What is a Chemical?"
https://chemistry.about.com/od/chemi...atchemical.htm

I had not seen it before, but this blog post pretty accurately sums up my position:

"While this website is fun, it reminds us that chemicals are everywhere. Nature is chemicals. We breathe oxygen, a chemical. We drink dihydrogen monoxide (water), a chemical. Our own bodies and every other living organism is made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a chemical.


A scary chemical name doesn’t make it a scary chemical. Chemicals do not equal poison."

https://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com...hmo-story.html


chemical:Any substance having a defined molecular composition."
https://science.education.nih.gov/su.../glossary1.htm

I don't think the MacBook app is really the number one best source for definitions:
https://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/05/dict...-app-on-blogs/

Cheers,
Rich

[Zeno Swijtink]

"A substance with a distinct molecular composition that is produced by or used in a chemical process"
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition.

"A substance characterized by definite molecular composition."
McGraw Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms.

"Of, pertaining to, or relating to the science of Chemistry or to the substances and phenomena of which it treats."
Oxford English Dictionary

"What is a Chemical?"
https://chemistry.about.com/od/chemi...atchemical.htm

I had not seen it before, but this blog post pretty accurately sums up my position:

"While this website is fun, it reminds us that chemicals are everywhere. Nature is chemicals. We breathe oxygen, a chemical. We drink dihydrogen monoxide (water), a chemical. Our own bodies and every other living organism is made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a chemical.


A scary chemical name doesn’t make it a scary chemical. Chemicals do not equal poison."

https://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com...hmo-story.html


chemical:Any substance having a defined molecular composition."
https://science.education.nih.gov/su.../glossary1.htm

I don't think the MacBook app is really the number one best source for definitions:
https://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/05/dict...-app-on-blogs/

Cheers,
Rich

So it is you and the blogger you are referring to who use an unusual definition of the word "chemical." No basis to be stern to people here who use the word in the more current, OED, sense.

Sure, in some sense everything physical is chemical, in the sense that everything physical is build up out of molecules with a chemical structure, but that does not make every substance a "chemical."

To the extent that you object against using "chemical" as a scare word I may agree with you, except for the fact that we allow industry to introduce many new chemicals into the environment without any clue what effects these, or their breakdown products, have.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0623213748.htm

Which _is_ scary in my opinion.

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=34369

I am amazed by what seems your ability to succumb to a Technological Sublime!

[Sciguy]

If I may weigh in to this comment...

From my perspective, this business of defining chemicals to be one thing or not something else is off the mark.

I think that what gets people exercised is not the chemicals that are naturally in the ocean or our food or that make up our bodies. I think the nexus for conflict lies with synthetic chemicals that are made by industry for some functional purpose but that end up in our environment, including our bodies, by inadvertence.

I don't think there is any doubt that many poisons are made by industry which end up where they don't belong, poisoning human, animal and other life to some extent. We don't need to argue whether this happens or not.

For me, the important question is what our response will be. For example, for twenty years I have been listening to claims, which I find hysterical, claiming that dioxin or dibromoethane or some polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) is the worst poison that has ever been unleashed on the world by an evil chemical industry. To me, this is an indication of the kind of hysteria that contaminates serious discussion. None of these loud proclamations have any credibility. Sure, they refer to chemicals which should be contained. But they can't all be the worst ever released. Next year, some other chemical will be condemned the same way. A few years ago, people would chuckle about the carcinogen of the week. The excessive hysteria was so obvious that the public rejected it wholesale.

Why are we treated to such screaming invective? It seems to me that this is a process which continues because it pays off. Environmental groups, such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the Basel Treaty Working Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council (to pick out just a few) have found that scaring the public yields dividends that reasoned and reasonable discussion do not. Members flock to join and throw dues and volunteer time at these organizations.

Personally, I find the situation to be repugnant. Lying to the public is not something I am willing to do, nor will I respect it when I see it. The problem is that it can never lead to solutions. All it does is focus attention perpetually on problems. Identifying problems is important, but only insofar as it leads to solutions. For me, the solutions are the only important part. For the environmental community as it has developed, the problems are the payoff.

What I try to do is to tease out the reasons why chemicals are developed and why they end up in the wrong places. I don't know all the reasons of course, but I can see some of them. I see that there is a social pressure to discard and throw away, which is viewed as a fundamental and inescapable pressure that can never change. I see that there is no research done anywhere to try to find the ways in which the urge to create waste can become an idea of the past. When I analyze production and products, I cannot see discard as anything absolutely necessary. I point out many ways in which discard can be eliminated, including chemical discard. It is clear that figuring some of the more technical methods will require continued research, while figuring out some of the social and political forces is fairly obvious.

So what does the environmental community get behind? Instead of using their noodles for innovative methods, they hunker down behind the EPA and the other agencies of government. It never seems to penetrate that these are the same agencies that steal our taxes, that prosecute vicious wars, that lie to the public repeatedly and that search for ways to force us to waste all the resources of the planet (such as the EPA refusing to allow California to raise CAFE standards). Somehow when viciously attacking every user or producer of chemicals, this government has an angelic halo. Somehow the environmental community just can't get enough regulation. Regulation after regulation, always more, always more severe, always more lawsuits, always higher fines, but never any positive, meaningful research into different ways of organizing society, politics and industry.

What is chemical regulation after all? It means that some portion of the environment is separated out and is legally allowed to be polluted. If the limit of public discharge into public waterways for hexavalent chromium is set at 350 ppb, this means that we have removed 350 ppb of water from any pressure for cleanliness. We have decided to give up, and have abandoned 350 ppb of our rivers to pollution. Then we do the same for silver, for zinc, for cobalt, for fluoride, for PCB's, for malathion and for thousands more chemicals. What would be the result if instead of roping off whole pieces of the environment for legal pollution, we were to adopt an attitude of a perfectly clean world. It would be more difficult, because we would have to sponsor research into ways of achieving that better world. What I recommend is that we set out to redesign industrial processes subject to the constraint that discard of any sort is no option. What could be accomplished if we actually tried to build a better world.

But does the environmental community embrace a better world? No, they prefer to holler and harrangue us about the evils of chemicals all the while accepting the notion of pollution. It works for the organizations, but it condemns the rest of us to perpetual pollution.

When individuals act in hysterical fear of chemicals, I don't imagine it brings them benefit. I think they are playing out the hysteria of the larger, organized environmental community which is exploiting public fear for their own purposes. I think we need to break this cycle of hysteria and begin to seek reasonable and effective solutions to environmental problems. And if that means that the big environmental organizations go to hell, then, at least in this regard, good riddance. They are not advancing the struggle for a cleaner environment with their screams of chemical hatred, even if they do garner beaucoup members.

If you take a look at my Zero Waste website, you will only find attempted solutions, not fear mongering. It doesn't pay off as well but it suits me better.

Paul Palmer

My MacBook dictionary defines the noun 'chemical' as:

"a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, esp. artificially"

What dictionary do you use?

[Valley Oak]

Yes, apparently there are many ways to define overpopulation or sustainability. And which definition(s) we should use depends on what our goals are as a world community. Disgracefully, there are no goals. As we have seen in this thread, people are still more concerned with issues of patriotism and religiousity (‘be fruitful and multiply yourselves to death as a species’) than they are with the ‘Satanic and anti-American’ work of population control or sustainability or even being at choice about them. Even being at choice has been attacked in this thread; perhaps it reminds them of being pro-choice about abortion, which would indicate their position on this last issue as well. They see the central topics of this thread as a serious threat to their belief system, all the while, the issues of overpopulation, sustainability, and being at choice are completely ignored and any attempts at addressing them are attacked.

What do you think some of the things are that people can do besides not having any children at all? Educating the public? There are other people who have been trying to do this for the last forty years or so but our numbers keep growing and there is animosity towards the notion that there is a problem in the first place. What can be done?

The lost of biodiversity, the general erosion of the environment, etc, are all serious matters with serious consequences but folks don’t seem to give a damn and even find it objectionable. People want to have their cake and eat it too and life is not that way. The irony is that precisely the same groups of people who like to use that axiom are the ones who so strongly reproach any idea of choosing to have less children; this is because of their deeply seeded conservative ideologies.

Do you feel that having only one child is an adequate approach? Or do you feel that it must be zero children right away? In my opinion, if people are aware of the dynamics of population growth, the impact it’s having on the environment, and the ensuing unsustainability, then the only logical course of responsible action is to have less children. Even if a couple decides to have two children to replace the mother and the father, that is too many. Couples must limit themselves to only one or even no children to respond in time to avoid world ecological collapse, mass starvation, wars, civil wars, and bloody dictatorships. The term, ‘individual carbon footprint’ indubitably must include the emissions impact of offspring.

Edward

Hi Edward,

The term "overpopulation" implies some standard by which the population is measured and determined to be too large. There can be many such standards, and different standards will result in different determinations, that is, in different "maximums" beyond which there is said to be "overpopulation."

For example, if we use "easy access to pristine wilderness for everyone" as our measure, then even 1 billion people on earth (one-sixth the current number) might be "overpopulation." But if we use "900 calories and 2 quarts of water per person per day (whether they need it or not)" as our measure, then clearly there could be many more people before being "overpopulated."

Would "sustainability" be a better measure? We find the same kind of problem: different standards of measure give different determinations of sustainability. In the end "sustainability" is no less difficult to to pin down than the idea of "overpopulation."

On the other hand it is, I think, an objective fact that the human population on this planet is growing rapidly. Even if the rate of expansion (percent change year to year) is slowing some, annual growth in real numbers is increasing each year. And each one of our growing numbers needs food, water, and other resources in order to live, and makes a correspondingly significant impact on the environment.

You are right, Edward, I am mainly addressing how global population impacts environment, and where we have choices relative to that impact. The fact that a small handful of countries may have a slightly declining population seems insignificant in the face of our global increase. Similarly, the fact that one racial group may be growing slower or faster than another hardly seems relevant; it is our aggregate (to use Zeno's term) human activity which is so severely impacting the biosphere. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the resulting erosion of ecosystem stability, effect people everywhere, regardless of social and political designations.

In so far as our individual choices and actions can have impacts on the environment, then the individual choice to bring another human into the world or not has a correspondingly large environmental significance.

I'm not advocating a policy of birth control, but awareness and choice. I'm not saying it's wrong to make and have more babies, only that each additional person who does come into the world increases the aggregate human impact on the environment. For the term "individual carbon footprint" to be objectively meaningful it needs to somehow reflect the emissions impact of offspring.

Neil

[Zeno Swijtink]

If I may weigh in to this comment...

From my perspective, this business of defining chemicals to be one thing or not something else is off the mark.

I think that what gets people exercised is not the chemicals that are naturally in the ocean or our food or that make up our bodies. I think the nexus for conflict lies with synthetic chemicals that are made by industry for some functional purpose but that end up in our environment, including our bodies, by inadvertence.

I don't think there is any doubt that many poisons are made by industry which end up where they don't belong, poisoning human, animal and other life to some extent. We don't need to argue whether this happens or not.

For me, the important question is what our response will be. For example, for twenty years I have been listening to claims, which I find hysterical, claiming that dioxin or dibromoethane or some polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) is the worst poison that has ever been unleashed on the world by an evil chemical industry. To me, this is an indication of the kind of hysteria that contaminates serious discussion. None of these loud proclamations have any credibility. Sure, they refer to chemicals which should be contained. But they can't all be the worst ever released. Next year, some other chemical will be condemned the same way. A few years ago, people would chuckle about the carcinogen of the week. The excessive hysteria was so obvious that the public rejected it wholesale. (snip)

Paul,

I appreciate your urge for a positive, solution oriented approach and the website of your organization, the Zero Waste Institute is stuffed with great ideas, initiatives and accomplishments, but I find your diatribe against what you claim to be the hysteria of some environmental organization itself bordering on hysteria.

I understand that you need to profile yourself as different, but is your strategy not counterproductive? Aren't these environmental organizations as likely allies for you as Dow Chemical? I understand that it is Dow Chemical and similar companies that you have to win over in the end for Zero Waste to take off. Or do you have other experiences?

I wonder what you make of the "Green Chemistry" movement? Is the support by the EPA serious?

https://www.epa.gov/greenchemistry/pubs/whats_gc.html

[MsTerry]

Paul
Thank you for your educated explanation.
I too believe in Zero Waste. The problem comes in when products are designed as a one-shot-solution. the results usually ends up in our waterways or the air. (eg chlorine)
Can you list what a person can do on a direct impact and personal level.

If I may weigh in to this comment...

From my perspective, this business of defining chemicals to be one thing or not something else is off the mark.

I think that what gets people exercised is not the chemicals that are naturally in the ocean or our food or that make up our bodies. I think the nexus for conflict lies with synthetic chemicals that are made by industry for some functional purpose but that end up in our environment, including our bodies, by inadvertence.

I don't think there is any doubt that many poisons are made by industry which end up where they don't belong, poisoning human, animal and other life to some extent. We don't need to argue whether this happens or not.

For me, the important question is what our response will be. For example, for twenty years I have been listening to claims, which I find hysterical, claiming that dioxin or dibromoethane or some polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) is the worst poison that has ever been unleashed on the world by an evil chemical industry. To me, this is an indication of the kind of hysteria that contaminates serious discussion. None of these loud proclamations have any credibility. Sure, they refer to chemicals which should be contained. But they can't all be the worst ever released. Next year, some other chemical will be condemned the same way. A few years ago, people would chuckle about the carcinogen of the week. The excessive hysteria was so obvious that the public rejected it wholesale.

Why are we treated to such screaming invective? It seems to me that this is a process which continues because it pays off. Environmental groups, such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the Basel Treaty Working Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council (to pick out just a few) have found that scaring the public yields dividends that reasoned and reasonable discussion do not. Members flock to join and throw dues and volunteer time at these organizations.

Personally, I find the situation to be repugnant. Lying to the public is not something I am willing to do, nor will I respect it when I see it. The problem is that it can never lead to solutions. All it does is focus attention perpetually on problems. Identifying problems is important, but only insofar as it leads to solutions. For me, the solutions are the only important part. For the environmental community as it has developed, the problems are the payoff.

What I try to do is to tease out the reasons why chemicals are developed and why they end up in the wrong places. I don't know all the reasons of course, but I can see some of them. I see that there is a social pressure to discard and throw away, which is viewed as a fundamental and inescapable pressure that can never change. I see that there is no research done anywhere to try to find the ways in which the urge to create waste can become an idea of the past. When I analyze production and products, I cannot see discard as anything absolutely necessary. I point out many ways in which discard can be eliminated, including chemical discard. It is clear that figuring some of the more technical methods will require continued research, while figuring out some of the social and political forces is fairly obvious.

So what does the environmental community get behind? Instead of using their noodles for innovative methods, they hunker down behind the EPA and the other agencies of government. It never seems to penetrate that these are the same agencies that steal our taxes, that prosecute vicious wars, that lie to the public repeatedly and that search for ways to force us to waste all the resources of the planet (such as the EPA refusing to allow California to raise CAFE standards). Somehow when viciously attacking every user or producer of chemicals, this government has an angelic halo. Somehow the environmental community just can't get enough regulation. Regulation after regulation, always more, always more severe, always more lawsuits, always higher fines, but never any positive, meaningful research into different ways of organizing society, politics and industry.

What is chemical regulation after all? It means that some portion of the environment is separated out and is legally allowed to be polluted. If the limit of public discharge into public waterways for hexavalent chromium is set at 350 ppb, this means that we have removed 350 ppb of water from any pressure for cleanliness. We have decided to give up, and have abandoned 350 ppb of our rivers to pollution. Then we do the same for silver, for zinc, for cobalt, for fluoride, for PCB's, for malathion and for thousands more chemicals. What would be the result if instead of roping off whole pieces of the environment for legal pollution, we were to adopt an attitude of a perfectly clean world. It would be more difficult, because we would have to sponsor research into ways of achieving that better world. What I recommend is that we set out to redesign industrial processes subject to the constraint that discard of any sort is no option. What could be accomplished if we actually tried to build a better world.

But does the environmental community embrace a better world? No, they prefer to holler and harrangue us about the evils of chemicals all the while accepting the notion of pollution. It works for the organizations, but it condemns the rest of us to perpetual pollution.

When individuals act in hysterical fear of chemicals, I don't imagine it brings them benefit. I think they are playing out the hysteria of the larger, organized environmental community which is exploiting public fear for their own purposes. I think we need to break this cycle of hysteria and begin to seek reasonable and effective solutions to environmental problems. And if that means that the big environmental organizations go to hell, then, at least in this regard, good riddance. They are not advancing the struggle for a cleaner environment with their screams of chemical hatred, even if they do garner beaucoup members.

If you take a look at my Zero Waste website, you will only find attempted solutions, not fear mongering. It doesn't pay off as well but it suits me better.

Paul Palmer

[kpage9]

Thank you Rich for calling out the sarcasm. I'd like to extend your point to all who communicate this way. An additional and possibly irrelevant observation: talk show right-wingers use sarcasm and ridicule to the near-exclusion of logic and sincere listening. They are also prone to imputing silly or destructive motives to others--it's really their stock in trade: "The liberals want our little girls to go out and get abortions" ..."The homosexuals have an agenda to recruit our sons into their lifestyle" kind of thing. And it totally overlooks the actual point another person is raising, so the issue never gets dealt with. Darn close to "you want to live in a house full of (toxic) chemicals" (paraphrase).

This is not to say I'm accusing PeriodThree of being a right-winger. I have no idea what his/her politics are. I just want to be able to hear his/her point clearer, in a form that actually honors that point--something like "I get worried when it seems like the line between toxic substances and others gets blurred, and I want us to acknowledge the dangers floating around our world." Or something. PeriodThree, your thoughts deserve to be heard.

"You are so sweet, Rich, to take the time to give us a physics lesson!"

It is possible I am misreading your message, it happens, but your use of the term 'you are so sweet' to describe my point feels to me like sarcasm to dismiss my point as being unimportant.

"Are all those cute, fuzzy little chemicals safe Rich?"

Again, this feels to me like you are using the sarcastic phrase 'cute fuzzy little chemicals' to dismiss my point.

'Chemical' is an important word. Everything in nature (with a few exceptions, like light) is a 'chemical.' It feels to me like you wish to create and maintain a pejorative connotation to an important word which I assert should be kept as a judgment free descriptive word.

I personally care very much for the meanings of words. They are important to me. Again, this is my interpretation, but it feels to me like you are using sarcasm in order to dismiss the importance of actual knowledge (that 'Chemical' has a specific meaning), or perhaps simply the importance which I place on actual knowledge, in favor of emotion ('you are so sweet' and 'cute fuzzy little chemicals.')

It appears to me that you are strongly in favor of the pejoration of the word 'Chemical' from a descriptive term to a judgmental form. I am not.

It feels very important to me that we maintain the ability to communicate using a shared language.

[PeriodThree]

Zeno's comments here made me think a lot.

I realized that much of my internal tension over these issues comes from
the conflict between comparing organizations based on their principles, goals, and ideals versus comparing them based on their processes.

Dow Chemical, and the rest of the capitalist world, is filled with people who are trying to create and market products and services within complicated sets of physical, social, legal, regulatory, marketing, cultural, economic, and other constraints.

The constraints they operate within are immensely complex, but measuring success is brutally simple: corporate activities either generate economic value or they do not.

In contrast, individuals and groups operating within the public policy sphere do not have a simple method for measuring success, nor are they forced to operate within the same constraints.

A simple example is the CAFE fuel economy standards: advocates for higher standards hope to set one constraint under which the automakers must operate, but the advocates are not responsible for figuring out which other constraints to bend in order to achieve higher fuel economy.

(I personally think we should have higher CAFE standards, but that doesn't change my structural analysis).

Industry needs to figure out how to satisfy the trade offs between fuel economy, performance, safety, comfort, marketability and profitability, while activists only need to focus on politics and public opinion.

The public policy debate is important at establishing constraints under which industry must operate, but to be blunt, public policy activism may set constraints which benefit the creation and preservation of social goods, such as cleaner air or access to wilderness, but it does not produce those social goals.

With some important exceptions, such as preserving wilderness, the problems of implementing the policies which will lead to the social good is left to industry.

ie. The Sierra Club is not going to help GM meet higher CAFE standards.

Solutions are going to be created, and problems solved by corporations, academia, research labs, and by independent researchers, tinkerers and random freaks.

And those solutions are going to come from applying something approximating human reason to the problem.

OTOH, the process of creating a new social consensus, especially around environmental issues, appears to me to be at best agnostic with respect to reason, and more often actively and intentionally antithetical to reason.

(Another way of saying that is that some/most environmental activism is done by intentionally pushing the fear and hysteria buttons).

Paul's points in his screed against environmental groups seem literally inarguable. He is absolutely correct in identifying the use of fear in order to provoke action which most groups use much of the time.

Zeno, your finding his diatribe to 'itself border on hysteria' is obviously an ad hominem attack, and coming from you I find that pretty weak sauce.

The real question to me, and where a lot of the tension in my thinking comes from, is to what degree is it acceptable to sacrifice reason, and in fact to descend to fear, in order to alter the political, social, and legal constraints under which we operate in order to create change which will benefit us all?

Is it okay to lie and create fear in order to save the planet? How about just 'exaggerate' and create discomfort?

Paul,

I appreciate your urge for a positive, solution oriented approach and the website of your organization, the Zero Waste Institute is stuffed with great ideas, initiatives and accomplishments, but I find your diatribe against what you claim to be the hysteria of some environmental organization itself bordering on hysteria.

I understand that you need to profile yourself as different, but is your strategy not counterproductive? Aren't these environmental organizations as likely allies for you as Dow Chemical? I understand that it is Dow Chemical and similar companies that you have to win over in the end for Zero Waste to take off. Or do you have other experiences?

[Zeno Swijtink]

Zeno's comments here made me think a lot.

I realized that much of my internal tension over these issues comes from
the conflict between comparing organizations based on their principles, goals, and ideals versus comparing them based on their processes.

(snip)

Thoughtful post. Sorry I don't have the time right now to do justice to it. And sorry for the ad hominem. I must have felt personally attacked, being active in the Sierra Club, and a member of some of these other organizations Paul mentioned!

By the way, the Sierra Club works with industry: Look at the Apollo Alliance website and the groups that form part of the alliance.

See also the measured response of the Sierra Club about Ford and GM technological innovations at

https://www.sierraclub.org/globalwar...ort/energy.asp

This discussion reflects one going on in the environmental community that was initiated by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. See their book Breakthrough. From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

The Death of Environmentalism was an earlier paper of them that created quite a stir. You would enjoy it since it probably hits the right tone for you and covers similar ideas in great detail.