Originally a column in the Guardian[1], which explains a lot. If you give your loved ones store bought presents you are massacring people in the Congo, killing rhinos, and generally destroying the world. Apparently those presents will all be thrown out within a week. Merry Christmas.
This article, and the title especially, repulses me a quite a lot.
The author does not draw a nexus between Christmas gifts and dead rhinos.
The article compares the environmental impact of what Anglo-European societies generally consider socially acceptable consumer consumption - frivolous holiday gifts - to what those same societies consider socially unacceptable consumption, powdered rhino horn.
The author is pointing out that there is a double standard which is convenient for us, and not for the other.
Care to refute his assertions at all? I'm as irritated by monbiot as the next person, but here I think he is pretty correct. The congo is indeed kept in a state of perpetual war by our desire for so-cheap-they're-disposable electronics. This is well known and well documented.
His assertion that buying my children Christmas presents will be killing rhinos? Please. He ticks off a bunch of unrelated bad things that happen in the world as a result of consumption. He lists a bunch of stupid presents some people buy. And then he makes the illogical leap that if you give gifts you are guilty by association, trying to tarnish Christmas as it goes. This is almost perfect Guardian hard left sanctimoniousness.
Do you not have a cell phone because they are evil? I just upgraded to a nice new iPhone 5. I won't be disposing of it for many years. I wasn't aware that people tended to.
This shouldn't really be a HN story, as it is fundamentally political.
I am sure HNers have no problem discussing politics where it directly effected them - that's news. But where it effects others 'that's just politics'.
This is relevant because it is related to your / our actions. It is relevant because these 'bad' things are actually related. There was a time when we in the western world could claim ignorance.
And the reason he gets under your nose is he is a self described polemicist.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, ... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Yes, he's a political polemicist, hence shouldn't be on HN. I wouldn't want to see a Fox News columnist on here either. (I don't like extreme politics of any shade. Yes, he is extreme, even if you agree with him.)
A serious discussion of how tantalum's use in electronics is damaging to the people of Congo would be appropriate, this is not.
That is one thing I like about monbiot, he references his work. I check his facts. Not all polemicists are the same. I have never seen a fox 'journalist' reference facts.
When a polemicist references another polemicist does that count as facts? I watched the "Story of Stuff" referenced in his article in a class this semester. At one point the claim was made that Chinese peasants are being “forced” into cities and leaving a lifestyle “that has sustained them for generations”. That’s not even a remotely balanced take on the situation. Urbanization in China has lifted millions of people out of grinding poverty.
Statistics proves that trade between nations reduces the likelihood of their engagement in wars (as documented, e.g., in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.) Therefore the western countries by buying cheap cell phones and what not made in poorer countries make them more peaceful (this of course in addition to helping hundreds of millions of people avoid extreme poverty.) If we followed the author's call and stopped buying things, wars would be more likely to start all over the world and many more people would be killed, probably also in Congo.
I'll refute it, Christmas gifts are also made of wood, our excessive consumption has lead to the complete halt of deforestation in Honduras, therefore if you'd like to prevent deforestation in Honduras you should keep consuming.
While the words of my point may be true, the overall meaning is bullshit because the deforestation stopped because there were no more trees left.
Also, I read his article on smartphone, if there were no content on the internet I would have no need for a smartphone, therefore reading mr. Monbiot's articles contribute to the massacre of the congo. He should probably stop writing lest he kill even more people.
He should probably also start talking about the wonders of North Korea where the people are so caring about the earth that they would rather starve than consume.
His assertions are all well documented, but by this line of reasoning combined a basic understanding of Economics, we are all guilty no matter what we consume or to what extent we consume it.
Like most, this article deals with the most proximal causes, but neglects to examine the way that the production of even unrelated goods can be related economically. Toning down the consumption of consumer electronics in the first world will likely do little to solve the situation. Just draft up the S+D curves and you can see why.
At least we're not shooting everything into space after Christmas. That's the only way we'll actually deplete resources. Wealthy posh people like Monbiot needs to make up things like scarcity so they can lecture us on consumption.
I'm not a big fan of buying lots of rubbish for Christmas, but it's purely because I don't really see the point and could do with saving the time and effort.
> That's the only way we'll actually deplete resources.
Like we could recycle everything. Or like energy was currently free and non-polluting. Whoever the guy is, he actually gave good arguments in this article.
Throwing plastic toys into landfill is recycling, it's just not at the pace some require to offset their upper class guilt. Energy, we'll run out of it when we the sun burns out and we've depleted the other nuclear sources, not by taking stored energy from the sun and burning it to produce a gas that is then recombined with energy from the sun to give us fuel again.
Yes, and the Earth will recycle itself after the Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel.
You're completely ignoring time here. We may never get to recycle the landfill because the pollution will kill us before. Yes, the Earth will clean itself up in a thousand years, the plastics will decompose, and the Sun will refuel the Earth, but those things are irrelevant if humanity is dead by that time. If we want to keep rising the standard of living on the entire planet, we need to stop poisoning ourselves and trashing everything around us in such a stupid way.
Interesting aside, monbiot actually publishes (publically) all his earnings. So you can find out exactly how (not particularly) wealthy he is. He started a campaign to encourage other journalists / columnists to do the same.
| That's the only way we'll actually deplete resources.
"Depleted" doesn't mean the resources are no longer present. It means they are no longer available efficiently. 1kg of Gold is more valuable in a big pure lump than when it's spread over millions of smashed-up connectors in the world's landfills. Same number of atoms, just more accessible.
The helium in a party balloon really does escape into space, sadly. Big time depleted.
We don't typically find gold in 1kg lumps. IIUC it is quite sparse even in the ore processed in gold mining. Surely running a bunch of connectors through an appropriate purification process would be cheaper than processing a similar volume of ore? If it's not, that tells us something too.
I predict this will be the real killer app of self-assembling and -maintaining nanomachines: processing landfills into ingots of useful material. That's a pretty long range prediction however.
If markets are working more or less efficiently, digging natural gold must still be cheaper. There's a lot of toxic stuff in landfill and it's usually located close to population centres.
Gold-harvesting nano robots would be awesome. Just don't let those suckers loose downtown...
Yeah, that's kind of what I was alluding to with my "that tells us something too" comment. We can't assume that markets are "efficient" in the general case, but we can say that there must be some point at which the ratio of the concentration of gold (or platinum, etc.) in landfills to that in mines will prove irresistible to someone talented enough to harvest it. Long before that point, recyclers will figure out which connectors they want to buy at a premium. They already are quite keen to purchase old catalytic converters.
WRT letting nanomachines loose outside the landfill, I'm not actually as concerned about the "gray goo" scenario as some are. It has seldom been a problem in other engineering endeavors that mechanisms have required too little maintenance, and so in a sense all of our machines face an uphill battle. One could probably make a thermodynamic argument that a given volume of soil contains only so much potential energy, and then calculate how much gold can be moved with that. Then "if the gold concentration is below this value, do nothing" could be a good safety rule to design in.
The gray goo scenario requires self-replicating nanomachines, so not applicable to harvesters that can't replicate.
The problem of where the energy comes from for micro- and nanomachines is very tough. But if you can make the landfill harvesting work, no doubt they'd harvest the hell out of the electronics in an office tower.
Robot foraging and energetics is my area of expertise. Pleasantly surprised to see a cogent comment come up on HN, thanks and nice to meet you!
I've been to the highest yielding part of one of the biggest gold mining operations in the world. I went 2.3km under ground, and down 6km of tunnels horizontally, to a part where they were getting 40 grams of gold per cubic ton of what is essentially hard rock.
This article, and the title especially, repulses me a quite a lot.
[1]http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/on-12th-...