Perspective

The world or at least the western world seems to be having a mass frenzy of self examination about the environment. The young girl that seems so angry about everything and is blaming big business (or so it seems to me, but it could as well be grown ups generally) for ruining her future is embarrassing large global enterprises into having a more eco-friendly corporate policy. It seems to be working (the embarrassing bit, not sadly the actual impact on anything bit) at least in the UK where all political parties are promising zero carbon this and that by what seems like the middle of next week if the electorate just vote for them at the 12th December general election. This is all just fine as I believe that the world is in an environmentally sticky position and something needs to be done. It's just that perspective is massively missing and the action is being focussed on in all the wrong places.

Now I don't want to sermonize, rant or moralise about things, particularly the rights and wrongs of the whole environmental question, but it does seem to me that turning off lights or no longer using single use plastic bags doesn't really help much despite what the media and environmental activists may say. This isn't a popular position to have but I recently found someone that agrees with me. Here's an excerpt (read the whole thing here):

But we aren’t very good at thinking about scales and proportions. In general, I think, we assign things a value of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and bracket them all together in those two categories. For instance, we feel good when we take a bag-for-life to reduce plastic bag use. But you can make 1,000 bags for 6kWh, while boiling a kettle takes about 0.1kWh, so you could make 16 plastic bags for the energy cost of just one round of tea.

From a purely climate point of view, your plastic bags are largely irrelevant. Reducing plastic waste is also good, of course, although again, Western countries account for a tiny fraction of the ocean pollution we worry about — almost all of it comes from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, in fact.

This last comment caught my eye for as someone spending a lot of time in Penang, Malaysia, I see the evidence of this every day. The above article redirected me to the underlying statistics (see here) from the Our World in Data website from which I found a whole raft of data supporting this position. Basically, if nothing changes to the way in which pollution of all sorts is made, anything done by virtually anybody in the West is simply a rounding error.

Now...

... and projected

What a dismal prospect and I will leave you with this additional factoid:

None of this is meant to make you stop taking care over the small things: look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, as they say. There’s nothing wrong with stopping using plastic bags, although you need to be very careful that you don’t lose your cotton bags-for-life, since they use about 100 times as much energy to make.

Keep your perspective.