environment = wolf by the ears

Are Green Products really Green?

Mediocre article, I think I already linked to one debunking biofuels somewhere, just threw it in for that coupon-clipping flavor. Anyway, your garden variety nuisance-liberal would like to see the G take a higher hand in protecting the environment. The rest of the world wants to see us taught a lesson too, and the PRC thinks we should fork over some of that American technology they dig so much to help developing folk like them stay green.

Now you kids' Uncle Hanno is a man of destiny - highly trained in optimization and 'been through a few dire straits. I could tell you the like of Al Gore and detergent with a green-leaf-symbol on the jug is not in keeping with the aesthetic of a solution, or any part thereof, to the problem. I mean, we're antithetical to the environment, been taking out species since day-1, so what can be gained by giving a populist authority and counting the dimensionless brownie points we score on the grocery-list?

No one will ever give up their quality of life, as they see it - could just turn the joint into a happy hobbit colony, end up consuming to get ones rocks off as one always will but never again seeing the big picture, in the manner of a Roman patrician, perhaps. But it's the consumption that's doing it, and that's a part of ourselves most people can't escape from - so I say, why fight it? If there's to be the American way of life, let it be in such a manner that we might reach the next plateau, like whatever scares us back into using fission or corn-farmer becoming an esteemed vocation, as early as possible - then we take some of that GDP and tell Brazil to quit cutting down trees. They won't be selling us subsidized steel if we resume making our own so we'll have a little more sway on 'em that way too.

I mean, I'm not superstitious, we're animals too, unless the G comes out with hats and bats people will always serve themselves - but we can be more than that if we get past it, rather than crippling ourselves with unemployment, stinted GDP, crappy cars and low buying power. It's like, we spend time trying to change our basic nature, as if we could, and end up wasting our higher realities. And I don't know if a solution that involves the continued existence of the rain forests will come from those higher realities, but it if it isn't going to, why fight it? We'll just end up older and crappier, as a species, when the **** hits the fan...