This article on Slate attempts to answer the question “Are blackboards more environmentally friendly than whiteboards?” It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the environmental movement. Representative chunk:

As with mechanical pencils—the subject of the Lantern’s last back-to-school column—the main issue here is the plastic: Plastic manufacturing requires petroleum, a nonrenewable resource.

(Hard to believe I missed that column on mechanical pencils! Click at once!)

Look: if saving the planet requires billions of individuals to interrogate every decision they make, up to and including the decision to purchase a blackboard or a whiteboard, the planet is obviously doomed.

Fortunately, there are mechanisms by which we can coordinate the decisions of many people at once. A crude one is regulation—making it illegal for people to sell blackboards, or whiteboards, or whichever one we’ve decided is marginaly worse for the environment. A more sophisticated one is through taxation. If petroleum were taxed, then whiteboards (or blackboards, or whichever uses more plastic) would become incrementally more expensive than blackboards (or etc.), and so people would buy fewer whiteboards (etc.) without having to write to “environmental-advice columnists” in online magazines before buying a fucking whiteboard.

Unfortunately, a meaningful number of people get off on their own self-righteousness, and these people have enough free time to read and write columns about how to make sure your smallest decision is maximally virtuous, and so other people will continue to believe that meaningful environmental change requires them to devote their free time to making meaningless comparisons of consumer goods, and the constituency that supports environmental measures will be confined to middle-class people looking to gratify their ethical vanity.

September 11, 2009 ▮ media, politics