To those of you who proclaim to care about the environment, protesting and being angry at the government, and wanting to make this world a better place- please, consider the points I’m about to make. There probably aren’t many people more sensitive to the problems in the environment than me. Air quality and chemicals have affected my severe allergies (refer to this previous aticle) and asthma to the point where I haven’t left my house or opened the windows for a month. With that said, I believe people are so confused about what’s actually happening. I’m not criticizing people for speaking out against the Government and Corporate America. I just want people to get a clue because my life actually does depend on the success of these movements. So, ask yourself, what works?

Who am I to say I know more than you? Who am I to say the points I’m about to make matter more than what you’re doing? True, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions and I won’t argue with that. To say the traditional protesting and speaking out is the wrong way to cause the change you want, I’ll use this metric: what works. You can argue all you want about human rights, neglect by Corporate America, corrupt government, wah wah wah. At the end of the day, what matters is what works. Is there some big conspiracy by Corporate America, rich people, and the government against you? No, not really. The simple fact is economics, politics, and scientific innovation moves the world. It doesn’t matter if you like it that way or not. No one person or group of people conspired to make it so. It is because it works. It is how the nature of the world took its course.

The Technical Details
From the way in which people address the technical details of the problems we face, it is clear that the common person does not fully understand the problem at hand. Now, before you close this page, let me ask you this. Are you an engineer or a scientist? Were math and science your strong points in high school or college and did you take advanced courses in those? The dangerously low number of engineer and science graduates in the U.S. says you probably answered no to those questions. If you don’t have the training and thus the capacity to understand the problem and the possible solutions, how credible do you complain about the progress being made? Probably not very. As an engineer, I’m telling you that the truth is, achieving these goals of saving the environment, using alternative energy, recycling, bla bla bla isn’t as easy as it sounds. Its actually very difficult.

Then you say, that’s why we need to put more money and people behind these efforts. Are you going back to school for a degree, no several degrees, in the sciences? (again, the U.S. is behind in engineer and science graduates.) Are you saving working hard to save and donate or are you spending your discretionary funds on iPods? Are you voting to determine how your government spends your tax dollars? (58% voted in the 2004 Presidential elections.) What I’m getting at is, going out in a rally to hold up signs and chant will not magically make innovative technology appear. Making more people aware of the problems won’t make the problems go away. Its just as annoying as a backseat driver…you’re not in control, you don’t know what’s going on exactly, but you keep complaining.

Without going into too much detail, my sister and I were discussing about this book on recycling that was printed on non-permanent ink. The author’s point was regular books printed with permanent ink can only be recycled a limited number of times. It also had something about using a type of plastic for its cover or part of the book. Why is this author complaining about the current methods of recycling and pushing for improved recycling when we’re not even using the current recycling to its full potential. The author should just use their journalism skills to get more people to recycle. There are a lot of very smart and very motivated people out there developing technology for 30 or 40 years down the road (yes, that’s how long it takes for a lot of technology to develop). So, if you thought of something new to help the world, it’s probably too late to use right now and someone else probably thought of it long ago. Right now, it is much more important to make the current recycling more effective and efficient. That is done by volume. Its simple economics.

Complicated technology, such as those used in recycling, cost millions and years to develop. The more paper you recycle the cheaper the technology gets because you’re spreading the millions it cost to develop over more recycled paper. For instance, if you recycled 1 million tons of paper, each ton would only cost $1. But if you only recycled 1,000 tons, each ton would cost 1,000,000/1,000 = $1000. With the technology in place, if it costs the same to recycle 1,000 tons instead of just 10 tons of paper, why spend another million to develop better recycling technology? Also, recycling is very energy intensive. This is how hard it is to develop technology. You might be burning so much coal or gas to have enough energy to recycle a piece of paper that, in the end, you save a piece of paper but you’ve destroyed a whole forest.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 1:05 am and is filed under Non-Stocks, Society & Culture, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.