--On 1/30/07 10:40 AM -0600 Jonathan Grabert
<jonathang@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
From the US Energy page I checked out during my research
<http://www.eia.doe.gov/>
I found out that indeed there are pros and cons to both
using virgin pulp for making paper and to recycle. They use
energy in different ways and produce different kinds of
waste. However, the *net* energy usage is *lower* when you
*do* recycle than when you do not. So this would be *good*
for the environment. Recycling is especially good when no
chlorine nor acids are used, and when soy ink is used. As
consumers we can choose to buy only these kinds of products
to encourage all companies to produce environmentally
responsible products.
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.
I think discussion is great! I think backing one's
arguments with research and hard facts is great! It seems P&T
used old data to support their argument as well as people
from ONLY one side of the argument (John, great research on
that btw). Their show seems clearly biased and I have not
found any hard data that supports their arguments now
(perhaps in 1996, that was ELEVEN -11- years ago! Industry
REALLY changes in that amount of time). I will say this,
though, when you compare the recycling of aluminum to that of
paper, it seems that it is not worth recycling paper because
the gains are so much smaller. But notice, there are still
gains from recycling, no matter how small, and the more we
recycle, the better the gains will be, especially for the
environment.
L
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.h
> tml>. 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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