I’m going to get straight to the point with this one.  Things can not be described as “green” or “not green”.

Everything has an impact, no matter how eco-friendly it is trying to be.  The alternative phrase might be “greener”, but then this falls foul of nothing to compare it to.  There has to be a reference “thing” for the new “greener thing” so it can be “greener” than the reference “thing”.

This is semantic, yes.  But what else is there? The words we use are all we have to try and get our meanings across - it’s no good saying “yeah, but you know what I mean”.  That’s lazy.  So to make “green” actually mean something, there has to be a comparison. To get numbers to compare two items, the impact of designing, making, transporting, using and decommissioning the item must be taken into account.  This could well be very difficult.  Difficulty is no excuse for giving up, however.

Thoughts on a postcard, please

Nick

Ok, enough people waffling on about “global warming”, “climate change”, “cO2″ offsets etc etc. Back to basics for me. I dont know what is happening with the climate. This is fine, I am not jumping to premature conclusions based on weak media articles. An argument requires premises and supporting evidence to reach a firm conclusion. Therefore, for anyone to present their conclusions, I want to start seeing the following fundamentals addressed:

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People often cause themselves untold amount of trouble, and then spend half their lives telling other people about said trouble. I want to get things done in my life, so I haven’t got time or energy to listen to their self inflicted woes. If people make bad choices and refuse to change things, then I have no time for them.

Weighing matters up, if I spend time listening to other people’s (boring) dramas, then I am not doing things that are important to me. Whining people will take ALL of my time if allowed to, and will only get themselves in more trouble anyway. Therefore, I will spend NO time listening to them, and get on with important and pleasurable things instead. Some authors talk about “toxic characters”, and their toxins rubbing off on people that support their attention seeking ways. Bye bye, toxic people.

Everyone is jumping on the “green” bandwagon. However, cutting polluting effects of their products by 1% does not give companies the right to splash “GREEN!” all over it. That is such cynical marketing, and misses the point completely.

This leads on to another point about advertising in general. They are professional liars who slant things to make their stuff look better than it is. This sounds obvious, but even being aware of it is not enough to protect me from the barrage of lies that are fired at me every day. I can only pray that people are sharp enough to resist. It is short sighted for advertisers to promise the earth to make people buy things, only for them to realise afterwards that they have been skanked.

Which leads to another point. Why do I care? Commerce requires a constant obsolesence, otherwise companies would sell one perfect item to everyone that wants one, and then go bust due to lack of sales. We don’t need all this “stuff”. What would happen if we all realised that? Serious economic changes, and not for the benefit of shareholder driven companies that need constant expansion. Constant expansion needs a constantly increasing number of people to sell things to. We only have limited space and consumable resources. Where is this leading? Am I taking a too abstract and long term view? Maybe, but that’s the way I think, and I don’t want to play the circular purchase game. And I certainly don’t believe in “Green” air travel, or “Green” cars. They just aren’t green, so stop trying to make us think they are, lying companies.

After DNS fun, endless FTP sessions and copying databases across servers, Ferret’s Domain is now powered by Windmills. Which is hopefully where it staying forever, because I really don’t want to have to do that again