Just because these guys are libertarians doesn't mean that they're wrong.
You're attacking the messenger, not the message. (Not that calling someone
a libertarian is necessarily an attack, but in this case it is.)
Like you, I felt like I had to study up on what was said in the program. I
went back and read the sources, and some other information. (I'd recommend
Bjorn Lomborg's _The Skeptical Environmentalist_, which was featured in
P&T's season 1 episode on the environment.) What I've read absolutely
supports what P&T say. It takes money, energy, and time to recycle paper,
and the net effect is *bad* for the environment.
Lastly, I just wanted to say that it's really good of Andy to promote this
discussion. It takes a lot of courage for him to even consider denouncing
recycling. I take a lot of heat for it, but for Andy, a self-proclaimed
hippy, to do so is even bigger.
J/
----- Original Message -----
From: "ginohn" <ginohn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Eco Foundation Discussion List" <eco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 11:43 PM
Subject: [Eco] BS on the BS
OK, so I finally watched the Penn & Teller Bullshit! show on uncycling,
and I remain unconvinced. P&T used a very short, vague list of supporters
to represent their cause, and I had to do some extra searching to find
out who they were and what they represented. Here is the cast of
characters that I tracked down:
Daniel K. Benjamin is a senior fellow at Property and Environment
Research Center (PERC), a conservative libertarian think tank which
publishes policy papers and press releases to further their agenda. This
guy's statement was used through most of the show. His "ground breaking
paper" was not a peer reviewed scientific paper, rather it was a policy
paper out of the Hoover Institute titled Political Environmentalism. The
Hoover Institute, a conservative libertarian think tank which publishes
policy papers and press releases to further their agenda, is funded in
part by Exxon Mobil, ARCO, Ford, General Motors, and Proctor and Gamble.
Angela Logomasini works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a
conservative libertarian think tank which publishes policy papers and
press releases to further their agenda. They are infamous for arguing,
sometimes in paid commercials, that global warming is not a problem,
second hand smoke is not a problem, and recycling is a problem. This is
not surprising since much of their funding comes from Amoco, Coca-Cola,
Ford, Philip Morris, Pfizer, and Texaco.
John Tierney was not named in the show, but for some reason Penn spent a
long time quoting one of his opinion pieces from the New York Times,
where Tierney had a short stint as an op-ed writer. The quote that Penn
took from Tierney's 1996 article went like this: "Recycling may be the
most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a
waste of human and natural resources." The entire article can be found
here:
<http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/garbage.html>.
Needless to say, it's a ten-year old opinion piece, and doesn't carry as
much weight for me as it must have for P&T. Incidentally, the article,
titled "Recycling is Garbage," broke the New York Times Magazine's hate
mail record, according to Wikipedia. A series of rebuttals to some of the
article's claims can be found here:
<http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/611_ACF17F.htm#summary>.
If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say Penn & Teller (or at least Penn)
are conservative libertarians interested in furthering their agenda.
While I've got no problem with that, I don't think Bullshit performs
quite the thorough research it pretends to. Like they say, "Everybody got
a gree-gree," and P&T do too, in spades, and they're promoting theirs
quite effectively. They tell people to do their homework, yet their own
incomplete homework has a selective bias - the same kind of selective
bias I've heard Penn rail against on his radio show. That smacks of
hypocrisy and trickery. (They are tricky guys. I love their magic shows.
BTW, Penn Jillette is also a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank which publishes policy papers and press releases
to further their agenda.)
In general, I like Penn & Teller. They are funny and brash. And I happen
to agree - possibly holding onto some gree-grees of my own here - with a
lot of their skeptical viewpoints against some very popular gree-grees
(gods, ufos, ghosts, etc.). When it first began airing, I hoped their
show would advocate and advance critical thinking, but after watching a
few episodes I now consider BS to be "for entertainment purposes only,"
and even as entertainment, it's kind of mediocre compared to other P&T
products. The incessant cussing doesn't bother me so much, but when Penn
calls a guy an asshole just for having a different viewpoint and working
for a cause he believes in, whew. Even if the cause _is_ bogus, insulting
the guy kind of distracts me from P&T's arguments a bit, and it detracts
from the arguments themselves. Not that I'm going to start believing in
ufos or the Boy Scouts (two other issues that BS took to task), but I
won't be able to get my answers from Penn & Teller's show. I'll do my own
research elsewhere, thanks.
:-j
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