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Environment – Page 5 – I am … unhindered by talent

A serious case of misplaced priorities


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Alert! One of our eagle-eyed readers (Lambo) pointed out in the comments that the details of this chart are almost certainly broken, and that the PCRM may not be quite the upstanding source that we might have hoped for. I think the larger point probably still holds, but this graph needs to be taken with more salt than is dietarily good for you. See the comments for more.

Chart showing how messed up our food subsidies are

We are what we eat, and (all too often) we eat what’s cheap, and what’s cheap is what we subsidize.

Or, turning the thing around…

We subsidize unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible foods, so it’s hardly a surprise that, as a nation, we eat tons of the stuff.

To cleanse your pallet, I’ll leave you with a delicious organic mushroom from River Nene Farms…

To become a gorgeous soup

It would be helpful if our hot water heater produced black balloons


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I keep going on about how hard it is for well meaning people to make good decisions without accurate feedback, and this video has a nice way of visualizing the problem. Now if I could just get all our appliances to make balloons like that…

Coin operated gas meters were common in the UK for many years, and in some ways it would be nice to return to something like that. It would make you think a second before automatically hitting that light switch when you enter a room, and it would certainly encourage you to turn the damn thing off when you leave. We still haven’t gotten a bill from all the utilities we’re connected to here in the UK, and we went months with absolutely no feedback on our energy consumption. If there’d been little meters on everything, we would have very quickly learned where the big energy sinks were. As it is, we’ll probably never really know.

It’ll obviously never happen, but I can dream.

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for the pointer.