Sure. so how do we factor in the post-use waste issue? It seems rather too tricky to reduce to mere numbers.
Our refrigerator is now about 40 years old and still works great. You are right that it isn’t as energy efficient as the new models but that isn’t because it wasn’t known how to do it 40 years ago but that the emphasis wasn’t on that aspect of design.
I don’t think that a more efficient cooling unit would have been all that much more expensive and even if it were somewhat costlier once the need for it was established it could have been and would have been done.
Cleanest air in 500 years, eh? I didn’t know the British were so environmentally advanced that you have air pollution records back that far. I’m impressed!
Gee, really? By whom? For instance, let’s see what The Institute for Public Accuracy thinks of them.
**Brooking’s - The Stablishment’s Think Tank**:
– bolding mine.
Why am I not surprised?
Sam:
You’ve made quite a few claims in this thread that need to be inspected more closely. Starting from the top:
Under this deceptively simple statement lies a universe of complexity. By some measures, the US is probably as clean, or cleaner, than many other “developed” nations. By other standards, not.
Canada is, on average, significantly colder than the US, hence the per capita difference. But this fact doesn’t have a bearing on whether or not the energy utilized in Canada is “cleaner,” or “dirtier,” than the energy utilized in the US.
I would like to see some evidence for those claims, please.
A bit further down, in post # 44, you note:
There’s definitely some truth to that observation, but then you then turn around and employ precisely the same technique yourself, concentrating on the statistics of one single pollutant (SO2).
I refer the reader to Mtgman’s excellent response to this statistical sleigh of hand, found here. I just want to add that this map of SO2 production, as seen from the Arctic Circle, shows little significant difference between the dense population centers in the US and Europe, and suggest that one explanation of the statistical difference in your cite is the relatively SO2 free zone that stretches from the Mississippi westward.
Actually, with regard to SO2, I wouldn’t be surprised if some sections of Europe, especially eastern Europe, are worse than the US. But otherwise, as far as this claim goes, I think your going to have to back it up, Sam.
Without the misleading statistics this time, if you don’t mind.
Well, I addressed your claim of ‘misleading statistics’ in the pit thread. Posting reasonable statistics that address one aspect of pollution is not ‘misleading’ simply because it is not comprehensive. It would be misleading if I found a whole bunch of other statistics that did not agree with that, and chose not to post them. But that’s not the case. I posted the first link I found after googling “U.S. SO2 emissions”. I didn’t even know if the U.S. was particularly good or bad on that score - it’s simply the first environmental pollutant I thought of.
Accusing me of ‘statistical sleight of hand’ is pretty ridiculous, considering that I linked the entire source document, which lists the SO2 emissions rate for every country, and which attempts to normalize the data to account for population density. Or did you miss that? Or the fact that I specifically also used Canada for an example, which is from the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of overall population density. I was more than fair. Of course, you are free to provide your own statistics, rather than just going on about how incomplete mine were. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in a debate? Provide counter-examples, rather than just calling your opponent names?
As for Canada using more energy because it’s colder, there’s some truth to that, of course. But Canada also employs high energy industry like irrigation farming and lots and lots of mining.
I’m still looking for more data, but I think it’s going to support my point of view that the U.S. is better than average for industrialized nations in most environmental catagories. I could be wrong, and I welcome data that refutes my position. But for example, the U.S. has about 27% of the world’s GDP, but only produces 23% of the world’s man-made greenhouse gases.
And don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that everything is hunky-dory and there’s nothing wrong with the environment. My original message was a direct response to what I saw as gratuitous and unwarranted America-bashing in the OP. The fact that the U.S. may be bettter than other countries in looking after the environment is in no way meant to imply that there are no environmental problems in the U.S.
Anyway, I just found some more interesting data. For instance, from the World Bank we have a list of major cities in various countries around the world, along with their air quality. Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago are listed. Compare them yourself with other major cities around the world.
So the presence of former Republicans means the organization can’t be centrist? That will probably be a surprise to the Brookings Institute. Here is a list of the Brookings Institute’s Board of Trustees, along with brief bios, as of 2003. After looking through the bios of the first 5 trustees (of which there are dozens), I found the following:
– Chairman James A. Johnson – “From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Johnson was Executive Assistant to Vice President Walter F. Mondale, where he advised the Vice President on domestic and foreign policy and political matters.”
– President Strobe Talbott – "Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001 and a key architect of U.S. foreign policy for the past eight years. . . . A Rhodes scholar [at Oxford University, where he was good friends with Bill Clinton: source], "
– Zoe Baird – “She was also associate counsel to President Jimmy Carter and attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice. Ms. Baird served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and on the International Competition Policy Advisory Committee to the Attorney General. Ms. Baird was President Clinton’s initial nominee for Attorney General of the United States.”
I should also point out the presence of some woman named Theresa Heinz – "Teresa Heinz, formerly Teresa Simões-Ferreira, is now married to U.S. Senator John Kerry. "
. . . Of course, we all know that Theresa Heinz is really just a right-wing mole.
How interesting that your article didn’t talk about the Brookings Institute’s many members who have liberal connections. Nor did your article impune Gregg Easterbrook as a (shudder) conservative. Unfortunately, you appear to have been duped into not posting your article’s conclusion (“The Brookings Institute is not a liberal organization”), but their implication (“The Brookings Institute is a conservative organization”) in support of their unstated assumption (“Conservatives can’t be trusted”).
Do you think that corporations are so inherently evil that being called a CEO is an insult?
Statements like that hurt your argument because they make you appear irrational. It looks to the impartial observer like your enemy is “corporations,” and not pollution. You look like you’d oppose whatever corporations are doing merely because they’re corporations.
Of course, that may be exactly what you’re doing. And if that’s the case, then you may need to re-examine the fundamental tenets of your beliefs. As (I believe) SimonX pointed out, corporations can’t be evil because they don’t have souls or personalities or even the capacity for independent thought. If you’ve got a problem with a corporation, then your beef should be with the people running the corporation, not the legal structure of the entity.
Unfortunately, I believe, the legal structure of the corporations makes it easier for people to hide behinds its legal structure to do things they would never do to other people if they were personally liable.
Certainly true, David Simmons. Limited liability is why corporations were created. But when corporations do bad things – like pollute excessively or needlessly – then that’s not the fault of the corporate structure, but of the people running that particular corporation. Why blame the corporate structure?
In fact, doesn’t villifying the corporation let the execs off the hook? The idea that the structure should incur blame merely because doing bad things is easier excuses some of the moral culpability of the corporate execs. They can’t be blamed because they thought they’d get away with it.
I totally disagree. That fucker from Tyco is an asshole whether he gets off or not. And the structure should share none of the moral culpability.
I have to disagree. Yes, corporations are made up of people but they operate under the corporate laws and within its structure. Therefore, it is entirely fair and correct to pin any blame (or give any accolades) to the corporation itself (xyz corp. is/is not a good citizen). Trying to isolate specific people out of a corporation has the same validity (none) as the gun proponents argument that “guns don’t kill people. People kill people”.
When a corporation makes a decision, it is rarely on some whim from the CEO or similarly high-placed executive. Tying this back to the OP, the decision to try to market to and convince consumers that disposable toilet wipes would be good for them (convenient and cost effective) was not a decision initially made at the highest corporate levels. It was instead developed in some marketing group. It then bubbled around and through a lot of internal levels. But the overriding concern when developing this product wasn’t “Is there a real need for this”? or “Is this an ecologically smart direction for our company to proceed in”? but instead “Can we make money off of this”? and “Can we convince consumers that they need this”? I’m confident that someone raised environmental questions at some point in the decision process and it appears that the answer to that question was “Who gives a crap”?, since they went ahead with the project (and now other companies have jumped in playing copycat with similar products on the same theme).
As for Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, he didn’t commit his crimes all by his lonesome. While he had a lot of power, the corporate structure and management (as it existed at that point in time) allowed him to get away with his cheating and excessive spending.
No. But I think corporate leadership (that that has been made public, at least) has been sufficiently inadequate of late for it to be understood as such.
Well, people will be people and some bad ones will become corporate executives. Therefore, I think the corporate legal structure needs some checks and balances (where have I heard that phrase?) so that bad eggs don’t have free reign to get away with bad acts.
I don’t blame the legal structure for the acts. The people did them. But blaming the people alone without revising the corporate form doesn’t prevent it from happening again, and again, and again.
People also have free rein to not preview and commit violations like this. English spelling is entirely too hard - I give up.
Upon further consideration I think you and I are on the same side, Age Quod Agis.
My prime example is the Ford Pinto fuel tank. The executives were told of the fire hazard and decided that it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits that to redesign and retool to put the fuel tank elsewhere.
So when the shit hit the fan it was the corporate stockholders who paid the price. I think that if the executives could have been held personally liable in some way they might have made a different decision. Of course, in theory the stockholders could have thown the executives out but I think we both know that is something that corporate executives don’t really fear.
I haven’t any solution but:
“It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. It is enough for him to tell us just how fast they grow.”
C. Northcote Parkinson,
Parkinson’s Law
Perhaps the most useful statistic for this particular thread would be Municipal Waste Per Capita. This data is a little wonky, I find it hard to imagine New Zealanders produce nine times the municipal waste per capita that Americans do. With a couple data points being so far above the norm I’d tend to suspect some sort of sampling or conversion error. Some other sources could probably be located to confirm or disprove this number. According to the EPA Municipal Solid Waste in The United States: 2001 Facts and Figures(PDF, pg 14) the per capita MSW generation of the US is approx 9 lbs of MSW per capita per day. This means the people of New Zealand would be producing approx 81 lbs of MSW per capita per day. So people throw away half their body weight in various kinds of trash per day. Pretty impressive. Or a data SNAFU.
In any event, of the countries we have data for the US produces more municipal waste per capita(things like disposable toilet brush heads) than the majority of the others.
Enjoy,
Steven
Mtgman: I saw that same table last night, and decided not to use it for the same reason you mentioned: The data for New Zealand looked screwy, so I didn’t trust it.
But here’s another problem we’re going to have discussing this: Is a per-capita measure the correct one? Or should it be as a percentage of GDP? If Americans are twice as productive and make twice as many goods as country B, then is it bad if it also produces twice as much waste per capita? That’s a hard question to answer.
Also, I think you need to consider landfill availability. For instance, I wouldn’t hold it against Canada if it produced twice as much waste per capita as, say, Japan. Waste disposal in Canada is bound to be much, much cheaper than it is in Japan, and therefore I would expect that economic decisions that trade off waste against something else would be biased more towards allowing more waste. This is as it should be. “Waste output” is not a universal good or bad - it’s simply a cost to be considered in comparison to other costs. For example, consider disposable dishes. If you have a problem with water quality, but you’ve got oodles of landfill space, it might make perfectly good sense from an environmental standpoint to choose to trade off landfill space for less detergent use. Likewise, countries that use more nuclear power are bound to have more nuclear waste, but probably release a lot less SO2 into the atmosphere.
So maybe this discussion is going to go nowhere. I can point to air quality in the U.S., which appears to be quite good these days, and water quality, which is also quite good and dramatically better than it was a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, Americans do produce a lot of waste and use a lot of energy, but they also produce a lot of goods.
Once again, I started this to provide some data to refute the implication in the OP, which is that Americans are somehow worse than others in wanting to screw the environment (“Screw the planet, I’m American!”). I never meant to suggest that America was devoid of any environmental problems. I just don’t see it as being uniquely bad. Japanese hunt whales. The Soviet Union polluted its rivers and built dangerous nuclear power plants. The U.K. has serious problems with various emissions. New Zealand was polluting its rivers by overfertilizing its land. Canada has bled some fishing areas dry by seriously overfishing them. The list goes on.
I’m not sure that GDP is all that great either since it is improved by wasteful spending, or at least spending that doesn’t increase the value of the assets of the country. For example, my house burns down. I build another to replace it at a cost of $200,000 which increases the GDP by that amount. There used to be one house and there still is. It is newer and might be worth more on the market but its intrinsic value as a living place isn’t any more that the one that burned down.
Some good points. On the disposable dishes though, the “waste output” of the production needs to be considered. Sure, the consumer doesn’t use water and detergent to wash them but how about the factory that produces them. I don’t know about paper plates in detail, but I do know that paper making uses an awfull lot of water which comes out of the mill polluted. Plastic manufacture likewise. So maybe we have just moved the water problem from one place to another.
Some waste is an inevitable byproduct of manufacturing and there are a lot of tradeoffs in trying to determine how far to go in reducing it. On the other hand, the mere production of a lot of goods isn’t an absolute good either. The goods might be mostly figurative hoola hoops.
And as the world population continues to increase we all are going to have to do better. But I can’t do much about Japan et al. However if we hold the feet of our politicians and business leaders to the fire, they will be forced to bear down on their counterparts in foreign countries to maintain a “level playing field.”
Maybe. How else will we get across the idea that we, globally, can’t indefinitely foul the nest?