Too green? Too much information? Global warming a natural process? Give up yet?
If you believe a rag published in Manhattan, many Americans are overloaded with eco-info, advice on what to do to be more responsible in using the earth's resources. The explosion of green as marketing and political and social and ethical and trendy and...well, you know. We're just greening all over the place.
Partly the problem is complex and conflicting information. I own a Prius and cannot really find the bottom line on whether I shoud be driving a giant old Jeep instead. Here's one blog that tried to sort through the who's-greener? issues, and then gave up without a conclusion. Nonetheless, on strictly economic grounds I like getting over 40 MPG.
TOO MUCH CHOICE?
Two clear problems: too much choice and too much marketing.
Choice: our grandparents never had the coice of bottled water v. tap water v. filtered-at-home water. Now one woman's written and had published a whole book on the history of bottled water. It's almost 250 pages long. And I've succumbed to a couple blogs on bottled water, well mostly on the bottles which can contain some tasteless toxins.
Marketing: here's a bit from a recent press release stressing the "greenness" of the product being hyped: "Fish Don't Fart(TM)*...EPA claims, '. . . in the U.S., cattle emit about 5.5 million metric tons of methane per year into the atmosphere, accounting for 20% of U.S. methane emissions.' Go green. Eat fish. " Fish Don't Fart! A phrase for the Green Age...but wait, they do defecate in my drinking water.
Global extinctions & global warming
For those not yet overloaded on information, here's some, and there's precious little you can do about it now. You're millions of years too late. Research at the University of Wisconsin shows that every major extinction event over hundreds of millions of years [if you disbelieve in evolution, you're reading the wrong blog] had one thing in common: major shifts in sea and ocean levels. Ooops, isn't that one of the predictions coming from global warming warners?
Here's an excerpt of the research summary: "changes in ocean environments related to sea level exert a driving influence on rates of extinction, which animals and plants survive or vanish, and generally determine the composition of life in the oceans. Since the advent of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, scientists think there may have been as many as 23 mass extinction events..." Do I hear 24? What am I bid for 24 on MEE Hit List?
And if you hanker after more things to worry about, the British Royal Society just gave its top science writing prize to the global warming disaster scenario book, Six Degrees. If temps get too high, Americans will get out, says the author, and that will surely reduce our emissions, methane or otherwise.