Bill McKibben's excellent eco-hypocrisy

What’s he doing shopping at all?? Shouldn’t he be getting his food only from his pea patch on his penthouse?
Anti-Carbon group? Shouldn’t he then be trying to eliminate himself and all its members?

Expedience trumps Ideology every time.

I guess being an eco-activist and global warming alarmist means never having to apologize for being a hypocrite.
“Some fights, like global warming, are necessarily hard…..”
Yea, especially when there are enough of us skeptics out there who know the whole thing is a lot of B.S.

In Austin TX they have banned plastic bags. I ended up having to buy some other bags that were apparently “green” because they were umm… The color green.

He must have forgotten his cloth bags at home.

He has to do his own shopping like a peon? Guess Al Gore’s monthly check doesn’t cover the housekeeper salary.

The plastic bag crusade baffles me. Since you’re supposed to wash the cloth bags whenever you put meat or produce in them, how do they save resources? Everyone I know uses the plastic bags twice, once to bring food home and the second to line tiny trash cans in bathrooms. What do they expect us to do with all the black goo leftover from refining crude if we don’t make plastic out of it?

Et Tu Bill ? Must be thinking about his garbage cans. Is that at his local Wallmart ?

How is he going to walk home with all those groceries?

RobRoy says:
October 5, 2013 at 9:15 am
Actually, plastic grocery bags don’t work well. The groceries fall out of them in the car.
====
uh Rob, tie the handles together

He is just like the Priests of old acting as the intercessionaries between the masses and God (GCM’s). All their sins are absolved.
The take home lesson here is to lock up your sons, daughters and wealth whenever these oracles come around.

Actually the plastic in the bags come from natural gas.

All of the stuff in the plastic bags is obviously organic produce (no meat!) grown within an easy walk to the store by oh so sincere and earnest environmental studies graduates.
Local sheep provided the wool for his sweater.

He is just an idiot that keeps on giving. Just priceless. Whoever took that pic should get an award. 🙂

Gunga Din says:
October 5, 2013 at 9:10 am
“Plastic Free” or “Save the Trees”. What’s a shopper to do?
(I wonder if the frame of his glasses is metal or wood?)
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
My guess would iinclude plastic and metal.
Steve T

Not only does his 350.org organisation fly so much, they even boast about it.

“Now the tour is going global — first to Australia, then to New Zealand, Fiji, and beyond!”
maths.350.org – Found 30 May 2013

As for authoring a dozen books, let’s just hope they are extra absorbent and fit for toilet purposes.

aren’t plastic bags recyclable?

Let’s see what the unnecessary things McKibben can avoid?
A partial list of products made from Petroleum (144 of 6000 items)
http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm
Plastic bags are derived from natural gas. When you use a plastic bag you are already recycling, otherwise the ethane in natural gas would be burned off and add to co2 emissions. I do understand the case for not using non-biodegradable bags that can be a litter problem.

The reason was littering – ragged bags flapping stuck in trees and hedges, also damaging wildlife.
That’s true. The British countryside has been completely destroyed by roving gangs of litterers, and you can no longer see the grass for the plastic.
Oh, no, actually, it hasn’t.
I lived in Britain for years, and never once remember seeing a ‘ragged bag stuck in a tree or hedge, damaging wildlife’. I’m sure they exist, but they’re clearly rare enough that I never saw one. Which isn’t surprising, given people use them to carry stuff, and don’t just drive around the country throwing them everywhere.
This is just more nanny-state claptrap from small-minded Greenists who hate oil companies and love making petty rules to harass the majority who just want to live their lives. I mean, really, with the global economy collapsing around our ears, does anyone actually think governments should be worrying about what kind of bags people use?

Jimbo-
Great stuff! Nice find, and thanks for posting it here.

Life is hard. It is even harder if you are stupid or a hypocritical green loon. But then I repeat myself.

Eventually it will come down to carbs.
It always does.

As far as paper grocery bags are concerned they can have a minor, little, irritating problem…cockroaches. Supposedly they commute in the bags. And anywhere there’s a concentration of food, such as grocery stores, there’s going to be creatures trying to eat it.
As far as the cloth grocery bags are concerned they have their problems too. I’ve been told you can’t wash them; at a minimum the dye will leech out. And after they’ve been used a bit one can rest assured that there’s going to be unpleasant things coming to life around the fibers within them.
And as far as glass bottles are concerned one thing that occurred as the glass fell into disfavor compared to metal cans and plastic is that the widespread presence of broken glass in our alleys began to disappear.
I guess our ecowarriors want us to rediscover all these treats.

The common plastic bag IS recyclable. WalMart has a bin where you can bring them back. So does Hannaford Supermarket (Bill must live in New England). Any bags I don’t use for liners (if I didn’t, I’d have to buy special liners ) I bring back.
1. What’s all the fuss about?
2. I find it disturbing (somehow) that he shops at the same grocery chain as I do.

The register looks like the register that Alister Dabbs (of The Register, aka El Reg) had to fight with
(see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/04/something_for_the_weekend_shopping_hell/).
I suspect the antipode of Deus ex machina…
Here in Germany we’re, erm, encouraged to use cloth or reusable grocery totes. Not a bad idea,
except that they often are made in China, with various chemicals added to improve stability,
appearance, and reduce cost, etc. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, I expect. Goodness knows what
actually is in the wax that some of them are coated with…..(hey, maybe they glow in the dark
for safety on the way home….)(maybe cook dinner at the same time…).
The recycling fee for one-way bottles/etc. has met with mixed success, probably because there
are some folks who would rather chuck bottles, cans, etc. no matter how high the fee is.
Kind of funny thinking my parents and parents-in-law, all of whom endured the depression and WWII
(and following) were very concerned with “sustainability”, because they were the
ones being sustained by avoiding waste. My mother-in-law (here in Germany) would
often use food after the “sell-by” date, and found it difficult to simply toss cans and other
packaging material as it might come in handy some time. She made it to 90, so I think
going a few days or weeks longer (on the food) didn’t matter so much after all.
The “Greatest Generation” didn’t need the Greens or anyone else to tell them what to do.
They just avoided waste….waste not, want not.
In Scouts we were always advised to leave a campsite in better shape that that
in which we found it. I think that probably applies to everything………

Many years ago Johnny Carson asked Paul Ehrlich why he was wearing a very expensive suit if such things were part of the reason Earth’s population was doomed. Ehrlich’s answer was of the sense that when one was sailing on the Titanic an extravagance of such nature did not matter. Bill McKibben might say a similar thing. The real answer is they want to and they can. We, however, are supposed to feel guilty for eating.
At the grocery store, I find someone stocking shelves and ask for the cardboard box. Most get crushed there in the aisle. I can use it over, and over, and over. And do.
===============
Jeff says:
October 5, 2013 at 1:50 pm
About those “sell by dates” and the other wordings –
Such things are advice about the peak quality (or plateau of quality) of the product, so do not represent the date after which food should not be used. A lot of food is thrown out and thus wasted because of these dates. Here is a start on the topic:
http://www.eatbydate.com/sell-by-date-definition/
Folks are trying to improve on the sorts of things put on boxes so as to not have so much good food tossed.

The one-size-fits-all dimbulbs are annoying. I always walk to the grocery store. It’s uphill and about ½ a mile. I never drive.
Plastic bags are the only bags that are both sufficiently strong and capacious enough for me to walk the ½ mile home with all the groceries.
The bags are, of course, recycled.
Some of the “save the world” crowd have all the analytical abilities and tolerance of granite.

MarkG 11.07am – I still live in Britain, about a mile and a half from a stop off on a major route. My opinion of the people who stop off to but a coffee and a burger and then chuck the rubbish out of the window because they can’t be bothered to take it home with them makes my blood boil as they are littering ‘my’ beautiful countryside. Coupled with the plastic drinks bottles, the odd beer bottle (thanks a lot for the broken glass) and empty fag packets, I have a very low opinion of the general driving public. Maybe if they had a plastic bag in the car they might be more inclined to take it home and bin it there, but I think that might be wishful thinking. The village organises a litter pick once a year and I can’t describe some of the stuff we pick up. It is revolting.

Since McKibben’s body contains a large amount of carbon atoms, his zero carbon world would be a world without McKibben.

‘Rube’ is the word that comes to mind

First world problems.
I NEVER shop where someone charges me for a plastic bag. And if they try to I make sure they know that I’m not coming back, and that’s the reason. Yes, it’s petty, but if enough people did it they would have to take notice.
NO plastic bag goes to waste here, they are reused. I’ve yet to see anyone throw a plastic grocery bag into the street.
And if bags are blowing in the wind or getting stuck in fences or trees, then pick them up. Don’t think you need to inconvenience the world because of your little issues. Personally I think most bags that do escape to blow in the wind are falling right out of the stupid city-owned garbage bins that almost every place in the first world are going to.
But if you’re one of these anti-plastic-bag campaigners but you still use them, then you are of less value that pond scum.
They enacted a cigarette butt law here: up to $1000 if you’re caught throwing one out your car window. In case anyone didn’t notice, cars don’t come with ashtrays anymore, and yet a large percentage of the population DOES smoke. I once had a cop follow me home because he saw I was smoking and wanted to see what I did with the butt. I’m sure anyone reading this will know what I was tempted to do with it… (I have a dollar store ashtray that fits in a cupholder, and I keep some water in so the combustion stops immediately when I throw them in.)

bubbagyro says:
October 5, 2013 at 2:04 pm

“Polyethylene can be easily produced (and is produced) from sugar cane or corn. (Bioethanol source). So we can relieve the offensive oil stigma from the entire conversation. Of course, bioethanol ultimately starves poor people, especially in developing countries—do the McKiddings of the world even care? Or is depopulation, removing these “useless eaters” their real goal? Sometimes I wonder…”

Gapminder kCal/capita/day 1061-2006
Doesn’t look like successful depopulation strategy to me… Even in Africa, some progress – note that this is per capita, so Ehrlich’s starvation scares have entirely missed the point. The biggest failure amongst the catastrophists yet still revered by leftists the world over; unfortunately, I don’t have a statistic of IQ correlated with political leanings.

If I forget to take my planet-saver bag into the store (about 8 out of 10 times), I just get a couple of the veggie bags and use those.
So FU** YOU Bill
… but I do recycle them too, when possible.

I didn’t know a whole lot about common plastic materials like Poly Ethylene and Poly Propylene and the like till I started into the Automotive Plastic Injection Molding industry. Basically, all in a nutshell, if what the enviro-mental nuts were saying about plastic were true you’d be able to walk from New Yuck city to London on a fifty foot thick mat pf plastic waste.
By the bye I understand tha the mat of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas and as deep as the Golden Gate Bridge and that you’re supposed to be able to see from space doesn’t even exist.
In the case of auto parts, we mix what are called UV inhibitors into the materials used to make parts so that the stuff doesn’t immediately start to break down in the presence of sunlight.
The latest land fill technology that I am aware of, you bury plastic with the right bacteria and properly ventilate the landfill to the intake manifold of a device called an Enerator or more commonly a “Thunder-Punkin” and you get electricity from methane gas.
The real enviro-mental agenda is to reduce the human population of planet earth. I think that the Green Peace nazis had it all figured out to half a billion of the “right” people.

Not that I care how the man bags his groceries, but if he’s gonna talk the talk, he oughta walk the walk.

Where are Bill’s hemp bags?

Save the Trees? “Recycle your breadcrumbs! Save the Wheat!” (Both are crops).