Edited to remove (most) of the inflammatory crazyness
Mobius said:
He's getting annoyed because these Pompous ASSHATS are BRAGGING that
Some variation of "just doing my bit for the environment mate" is far from bragging. Like I said, it's far more likely that they're trying to get approval. Which is silly, but not exactly arrogant.
Well, let's see.
If we ignore the idea of getting a billion people to spit at the same time and getting them into the Sahara; I can pretty much say that each person's spittle will dry almost instantly; but that's just first hand evidence. Let's look at facts.
It was an analogy. You don't use facts to refute analogies, you go all metaphysical and such.
Anyhow:
Various cynics said:
...Being smug and misinformed is not better than being a cynic. For instance, more energy is used during the manufacturing of a single car than the car will ever use up itself during its lifetime. So replacing the worlds gas guzzlers with hybrids is an awful, ironically bad solution, and those who have already bought into it are actually unwittingly contributing to the problem pretty badly...
...BUT...if Mr. American Corporation (Not blocked by Kyoto) is producing billions of plastic bags; that's speeding the apocalypse up by a year.
Sorry, 364 days and 23.5 hours. I forgot about your bags.
Recycling may be a good thing, but there's NO reason to joyous about staving off Armageddon when someone's undoing the whole country's work....
...Bullshit I say. Nothing an individual does, or even several thousand individuals is going to make a difference when big business still operates the same way. And if history has anything to say, THEY ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE THEIR WAYS FOR THE GREATER GOOD....
...If anyone can get something like that together, I will of course be down to help. But until then, every other effort is no more than a simple masturbatory activity...
...I'm not saying that "green" shopping bags are effective, though. they are actually cancelled out several times over by the CO2 emmisions made by the products contained in the bag itself...
To the people saying that doing things to help the environment is useless, because lots of people/large companies/the Eastern hemisphere is producing more gasses and crap than the green folk are saving:
So what? Factories don't "negate" turning your lightbulbs off at night, the biproducts created in building a car don't "negate" the fact that the car is a hybrid, and the fact that you're the only one in your street that puts your coke cans in the recycling bin doesn't "negate" the fact that you're recycling the bloody can! The only way it could be negated is if they
increase their consumption in response to you decreasing. Which they don't.
Say, if you're responsible for 10% of your street's usage of oil, and you decide to cut down your heating by half, does the fact that your neighbour's mother-in-law comes to visit for the week, and demands that they turn up the heating somehow make you going cold worthless? No! The mother-in-law would've visited and been cold
regardless of the state of your thermostat. If you told your neighbour that you were cutting down on your heating, and he, in response, turned
up his heating, then yes, it would be a negation. But that doesn't happen. Unless you're neighbours with a douchebag.
Or, if company A cuts production to comply with new greenhouse gas production guidelines, but company B is becoming more popular, and starts to pump more shit into the air, company A has still cut the total output of gas. On the other hand, emissions trading [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emissions_trading]
is negation.
The whole argument of "it doesn't matter what I do, someone else is doing it worse" is just a ridiculous and contrived attempt at justifying why they don't have to bring their own damn bags to the supermarket. To be honest, I don't really care if people don't buy the GW theory, or, if they do, that they can't be bothered to put any effort into preventing it. What
does get to me, though, is when people use such a crappy and half-assed excuse to justify themselves, instead of not being a coward and just accepting that they're not even trying to remedy the situation.
