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Old 10-17-2008, 07:00 PM   #35 (permalink)
filtherton
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Location: In the land of ice and snow.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcgeedo View Post
filth, you may call it what you like, of course. If they used an "average" car and an "average" power plant, I'd call it an estimate, too. But when they use a very low emission car and a very high emission power plant to make their numbers look better, they are lying. It's cooking the books, just like Enron, AIG and all the others, which seems to set off the people on this forum like kicking a hornet's nest.

Saving energy is a good thing. Just tell the truth about it. When the "greens" lie about stuff like this, you have to wonder what else they are lying about to sell their belief system.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics and all that. It might not be entirely representative of average values, but that doesn't make it a lie. It's not cooking the books like Enron, AIG or any of the others. Those companies committed fraud or were managed incompetently and the net result was the devaluing of massive amounts of innocent people's investments.

The only folly in estimates like these is perhaps reading more into them than you should. Now, in some sense that's the point: certain people are meant to read more into it than they should, because they are the portion of people who only respond to things like this. These people don't do the math themselves. For the green movement to have any impact it will have to be able to effectively reach these people.

It's pretty standard stuff in the field of mass persuasion known as advertising. One of the main PR problems of the Environmental Movement has roots in its member's naive notion that all it takes to change people's behavior is telling them about dire consequences of that behavior. Anyone familiar how humans actually act can plainly see that this isn't the case.

There will always be people who respond to dire consequences, but there will always be people for which the consequences aren't necessarily all that interesting.

The green movement is offering a product and that product is concern for the environment. If it succeeds in changing people's behavior toward the environment it will in large part be due to the fact that many environmentalists have come to understand that when it comes to getting people to do what you want, there are many lessons to be learned from Madison Avenue.

Certainly there are folks who take advantage of "green" connotations to sell us things we don't need. But that's capitalism. That's caveat emptor. Oddly enough, the only folks who seem complain about it are the very same folks who are most ardent proponents of capitalism and also most insistent that people who don't exercise personal responsibility deserve what they get. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but it seems a bit contrived. American capitalism works because people are easily duped into doing things they didn't initially want to do. What's wrong with the green movement taking advantage of this fact?

Besides, anyone who take the time to do the math will still see that significant energy savings would ensue if people switched to CFLs en masse.

Look at your reaction: you don't doubt the energy saving properties of CFLs, you probably didn't before you heard this statistic (I have to admit that I don't know you). If you had just taken their word for it, you'd still be impressed about the energy saving properties of CFLs.

It's a win-win. Anyone who wouldn't use CFLs just because they did the math and found the stat misleading probably wouldn't use CFLs anyway.
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