Likewise, some critized former Vice-President Al Gore for exaggerating parts of "An Inconvenient Truth" but he may have understood that mobilizing people for a war on climate change requires a certain amount of spin, just like any war.
There is a common denominator in there; war. Will people only respond to a crisis?
Is recycling successful?
Widespread 'voluntary' recycling has been in vogue since the 1950s but recycling was nothing new before then. I have a "Captain America" comic book from the 1940s that is much more valuable than it would otherwise be because most people recycled them in the paper drives of World War II(2).
In World War II, 'mandatory' recycling was terrifically successful. Since then, not so much. Is it apathy? Last week, a YouGov survey conducted on behalf of the by the Environmental Transport Association in England stated the public is bored by green talk. Or is it skepticism and concerns about hype?
Hype has power and the backlash can be severe. John Tierney, the blogger we all want to be when we grow up, pretty much broke loose environmental Hell in 1996 when he wrote(3)
Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups--politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations--while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.
And he's right. After graduation from college I spent the summer working for Pennsylvania PIRG, an enviromental lobby, raising money for various causes, some that made sense (like a bottle bill rather than government recycling) and some that did not (killing nuclear energy). The one thing that resonated with people was keeping the government out of recycling.
The reasoning of people who donated: boy scouts collecting bottles and returning them for the deposit while a private company recycled them and made money = common sense. Government employees making us separate garbage and losing money in the process = the kind of plan a government would create.
The 'landfill' crisis, as you may know by now, was basically invented by activist groups and exaggerated by the media. This is always something to keep in mind when you receive a barrage of newspaper and magazine articles on anything that sounds either too good or too dire to be true.
I am not saying that looking at disposal was bad, it certainly was not. There was no reason to be throwing grass clippings in the garbage and mulching mowers became popular because of the attention but that is not worth the billions spent on recycling each year.
Global warming and acid rain
One of the strangest reasons I have heard for not being concerned about global warming was "They said the same thing about acid rain and that never happened." That goes along with "Y2K was exaggerated" because in both instances there were no problems because people got into crisis mode and made changes.
Was the Y2K issue worth the billions it cost? I am not qualified to make that judgment but a back of the envelope calculation tells me nothing would have happened that would have equalled that expenditure. It was nice to give COBOL programmers something to do.
But the Y2K issue is a pretty good lesson as a society. At the time the legacy programs people fretted about as the year 200 approached were written, every bit in computer software was important. They could not reserve space for the extra two digits needed to put a centuries into those programs. The choice was to go ahead and create a computer-based industry and become more efficient to the tune of trillions of dollars or wait until computers got better and no Y2K issue would have existed. They made the wise choice to make do with what they had and let the future handle the problems. They weren't burdening their grandchildren, they were believing in them.
This is one thing the contrarians in the global warming debate also have in their favor. Putting a stop to progress does not always make sense but we shouldn't tackle everything today. We could, for example, send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. At approximately 4.35 light years away it would take 43,000 years to get there. In 100 years, it may only take 6 years to get there. Sometimes waiting to try something does make more sense. So it goes with global warming. A half a degree or a degree celsius in 50 years will not doom the planet but putting a hard stop to CO2 today would kill a lot of economies so investing even a fraction of the money that would otherwise be lost today into cleaning up greenhouse gas emissions in the future or lessening them now makes the most sense.
And that is what's being done. The BMW Hydrogen 7 Mono-Fuel engine that just completed testing in some cases produces cleaner air than it takes in. That's brilliant.
Global warming is obviously real and the debate seems to be over mostly semantics. There are more people and more cows emitting methane and more crops being grown and all that contributes to warmth. We can rely on science to find solutions to these problems or follow James Lovelock and assume 90% of the planet must be eliminated(4) to go back to some idyllic pastoral utopia that never actually existed.
I tend to have faith in science when it comes to solving problems.
In getting back to the point, do we need to be in crisis mode for things to work? Sure we do. In World War II sugar was rationed and people recycled paper and metal efficiently, two things that are still recycled efficiently now but that doesn't work with newer products because magazines have too many contaminants and plastic is too heterogeneous. The world was at war. A crisis. Solutions were needed and recycling had to be done until they could be found.
The environmental war lacks the same urgency because no rational person can contend hundreds of thousands are dying because of global warming. However, for every ridiculous example of supposedly sound environmental science leading to disaster, like coral reefs in Florida made of old tires because we supposedly lacked landfill space, there are problems from the past we never hear about today because action was taken, like acid rain.
Keep acid rain in mind the next time you look at a Prius. If everyone in America drove one, the batteries would kill the planet a lot faster than CO2.
Instead, opt for environmentally terrific ideas that are not motivated by automobile marketing groups and environmental lobbyists raising money, like luxury train beds made from garbage bags.
Heck, I'd have those in my house.
NOTES:
(1)Tim Cooper, 'Challenging the ‘refuse revolution’: war, waste and the rediscovery of recycling, 1900–50', Historical Research doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.2007.00420.x
(2) Obviously there was some conflict in that acquisition. Higher values for comic books were basically rewarding the greedy people who felt like keeping their 10-cent Captain America was more important than defeating Nazis, something I could not endorse. With age I mellowed and regarded them like any historical document from the period. A LIFE magazine from that era is not expensive at all because a lot of people kept them. Comic books were regarded as kid stuff (so should be recycled) and LIFE magazine was not (so okay to keep) and that seemed rather arbitrary.
(3) I can't find a link in the NY Times archive so this is a reprint from Natural Resources Defense Council, who didn't like what he had to say very much.
(4) Controversial scientist predicts planetary wipeout, Daily Mail, 29th November 2006 but, really, you could pick any article he has ever been in.
On the contrary, the use of contrived crises to promote change has been so overused that the public is becoming inured to the abuse of the tactic.
They see it more and more as political opportunism, radical-chic agitprop, identity politics and self-promotion. A recent study by Texas A&M socialogists found that the more informed people were on climate change the less concerned they were about it.
This, as opposed to the Club of Rome's 1992 statement that contrived problems were better than none. Or the statement by the climatologist that exaggerated alarmist predictions were preferable if it helped mobliize the public. Now we come to find that global warming is mostly in line with CO2's slower warming curve, we're 3/4's of the way to a doubling of concentrations and haven't seen calamitous temperature spikes yet - indeed, we've instead seen TEN YEARS of a new equilibrium of stabilized temperatures.