Amerika

Humanity faces an environmental crisis, but to get to that, we must first get through the bickering problem. That is, humans tend to bicker — fight over details and miss the big picture — when we talk about the environment.

This happens because at this point, humanity is insane. Many are naturally operating at low levels of realistic thinking (this is the measure of sanity, when you think about it) but the few who could be sane have driven themselves mad with egalitarianism.

Consequently, any discussion of the environment gets quickly poisoned by human neurosis. As part of that, recently a group of “scientists” published a study claiming that non-white people in America suffer for pollution from white people.

You have to dig down a bit, but eventually the root of the methodology is revealed:

We track 19 end-user types, which we aggregate here into four groups (personal consumption by each of three racial–ethnic groups, as well as government consumption), and 389 end-use categories, which we aggregate here into seven groups (electricity, food, goods, information and entertainment, services, shelter, and transportation).

In other words, white people are wealthier, therefore are able to afford more of the stuff that everyone wants. This stuff generates pollution. Through a magic sleight-of-hand, this becomes translated into whites generating more pollution.

A saner view sees the problem as the production and consumption, with the note that the majority will use more of anything we produce, therefore this argument can be technically but not honestly applied to them.

Keep it up, “science.” Soon you will be viewed as propaganda mouthpieces available for sale to the highest bidder, and that is more accurate than our reverential worship of science now.

Tags: pollution, racial disparities, realism