Charlie's Diary: Magical thinking … the belief that because doing something about climate change (and environmental degradation and peak oil and the whole dismal litany) is better than doing nothing, any particular something they can point to clearly must be done, however irrelevant it might be to dealing with the underlying problem. It generates make-work, an annoying wheel-spinning tail-chasing pursuit of distractions, at the cost of grappling with the very real and very serious problems we face.
As someone says in the article he links to, "I don't really mind too much what your plan is, but it's got to add up." If you have no numbers of your own and a couple of calculations on the back of a napkin are enough to show that your plan is either not remotely feasible or insignificant, you're not helping your cause.
(Helpful link: the units program can help with a lot of calculations by keeping track of the units of measurement for you. Use the -v option for clarity. If you're on a legacy system that doesn't come with it, use an on-line version.)
⇦ The id of the Net | ⇨ BBC News: It's not the Gates, it's the bars |
21 July 2008, 7:19 UTCcomment by Thorne Lawler
A solution for the masses might be any of the following:
- A cheat-sheet listing as many popular, well-known environmentally conscious activities as possible, correlating each one with the things it effects and giving a rough guide to the magnitude of the effect, mitigating/nullifying factors, etc.
- A DIY calculation 'guide' showing the numerical magnitude of a few well-known environmental problems, the per-capita improvement required to nullify them, and offering some guidelines for determining your own input value, or the input value of any given scheme.
- A list of common evironmentally-minded misconceptions and no-value, self-defeating 'green' activities, expressed in the most general, non-judgemental, simplified-language way possible.
Any and all of the above would ideally be an A4 page, well-presented, and with some small-print citations worked into the layout, so that the message would effectively self-destruct when it became outdated.
I'm sure such things exist, although I would give even odds of finding any such prefab wisdom encumbered with other agendas. :(
21 July 2008, 10:29 UTCcomment by sabik
@Thorne: Hmm, firstly, this seems a bit like making a system fool-proof: there's probably too many ways to get this wrong to make it practical to enumerate them all — they wouldn't fit on one sheet of paper. Indeed, the source of the "it's got to add up" quote above apparently has a whole book dedicated to just the numbers for sustainable energy, let alone the rest. That's why I was suggesting general concepts — have numbers, do calculations.
Another thing is that a lot of the people involved have (or should have) fact-checkers and other staff dedicated to making sure they aren't too far off-base. If for whatever reason they ignore or dismiss those, the best reference sheet in the world isn't going to help them - they'll just ignore or dismiss that, too.
Finally, I suspect there may be some amount of reporting bias at work. Let's face it, most ideas are rubbish. If we filter out the rubbish ideas of the diligent, we're left with their good ideas, which are relatively few, and all the ideas of the others, most of which are rubbish.
