[Eco] BS on the BS

[Jonathan Grabert]

Just because these guys are libertarians doesn't mean that they're wrong. 
You're attacking the messenger, not the message.  (Not that calling someone 
a libertarian is necessarily an attack, but in this case it is.)

Like you, I felt like I had to study up on what was said in the program.  I 
went back and read the sources, and some other information.  (I'd recommend 
Bjorn Lomborg's _The Skeptical Environmentalist_, which was featured in 
P&T's season 1 episode on the environment.)  What I've read absolutely 
supports what P&T say.  It takes money, energy, and time to recycle paper, 
and the net effect is *bad* for the environment.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that it's really good of Andy to promote this 
discussion.  It takes a lot of courage for him to even consider denouncing 
recycling.  I take a lot of heat for it, but for Andy, a self-proclaimed 
hippy, to do so is even bigger.

J/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ginohn" <ginohn at comcast.net>
To: "Eco Foundation Discussion List" <eco at lists.looneylabs.com>
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 11:43 PM
Subject: [Eco] BS on the BS


> OK, so I finally watched the Penn & Teller Bullshit! show on  uncycling, 
> and I remain unconvinced. P&T used a very short, vague  list of supporters 
> to represent their cause, and I had to do some  extra searching to find 
> out who they were and what they represented.  Here is the cast of 
> characters that I tracked down:
>
> Daniel K. Benjamin is a senior fellow at Property and Environment 
> Research Center (PERC), a conservative libertarian think tank which 
> publishes policy papers and press releases to further their agenda.  This 
> guy's statement was used through most of the show. His "ground  breaking 
> paper" was not a peer reviewed scientific paper, rather it  was a policy 
> paper out of the Hoover Institute titled Political  Environmentalism. The 
> Hoover Institute, a conservative libertarian  think tank which publishes 
> policy papers and press releases to  further their agenda, is funded in 
> part by Exxon Mobil, ARCO, Ford,  General Motors, and Proctor and Gamble.
>
> Angela Logomasini works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a 
> conservative libertarian think tank which publishes policy papers and 
> press releases to further their agenda. They are infamous for  arguing, 
> sometimes in paid commercials, that global warming is not a  problem, 
> second hand smoke is not a problem, and recycling is a  problem. This is 
> not surprising since much of their funding comes  from Amoco, Coca-Cola, 
> Ford, Philip Morris, Pfizer, and Texaco.
>
> John Tierney was not named in the show, but for some reason Penn  spent a 
> long time quoting one of his opinion pieces from the New York  Times, 
> where Tierney had a short stint as an op-ed writer. The quote  that Penn 
> took from Tierney's 1996 article went like this: "Recycling  may be the 
> most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time  and money, a 
> waste of human and natural resources." The entire  article can be found 
> here:
> <http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/garbage.html>.
> Needless to say, it's a ten-year old opinion piece, and doesn't carry  as 
> much weight for me as it must have for P&T. Incidentally, the  article, 
> titled "Recycling is Garbage," broke the New York Times  Magazine's hate 
> mail record, according to Wikipedia. A series of  rebuttals to some of the 
> article's claims can be found here:
> <http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/611_ACF17F.htm#summary>.
>
> If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say Penn & Teller (or at least  Penn) 
> are conservative libertarians interested in furthering their  agenda. 
> While I've got no problem with that, I don't think Bullshit  performs 
> quite the thorough research it pretends to. Like they say,  "Everybody got 
> a gree-gree," and P&T do too, in spades, and they're  promoting theirs 
> quite effectively. They tell people to do their  homework, yet their own 
> incomplete homework has a selective bias -  the same kind of selective 
> bias I've heard Penn rail against on his  radio show. That smacks of 
> hypocrisy and trickery. (They are tricky  guys. I love their magic shows. 
> BTW, Penn Jillette is also a research  fellow at the Cato Institute, a 
> libertarian think tank which  publishes policy papers and press releases 
> to further their agenda.)
>
> In general, I like Penn & Teller. They are funny and brash. And I  happen 
> to agree - possibly holding onto some gree-grees of my own  here - with a 
> lot of their skeptical viewpoints against some very  popular gree-grees 
> (gods, ufos, ghosts, etc.). When it first began  airing, I hoped their 
> show would advocate and advance critical  thinking, but after watching a 
> few episodes I now consider BS to be  "for entertainment purposes only," 
> and even as entertainment, it's  kind of mediocre compared to other P&T 
> products. The incessant  cussing doesn't bother me so much, but when Penn 
> calls a guy an  asshole just for having a different viewpoint and working 
> for a cause  he believes in, whew. Even if the cause _is_ bogus, insulting 
> the guy  kind of distracts me from P&T's arguments a bit, and it detracts 
> from  the arguments themselves. Not that I'm going to start believing in 
> ufos or the Boy Scouts (two other issues that BS took to task), but I 
> won't be able to get my answers from Penn & Teller's show. I'll do my  own 
> research elsewhere, thanks.
>
> :-j
>
>
>
>
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