U2's 360 Tour

The original article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it makes a good point. Here is a choice quote:

"The carbon footprint generated by U2's 44 concerts this year is equal to carbon created by the four band members traveling the 34.125 million miles from Earth to Mars in a passenger plane."

I believe that we have a God-ordered duty to be good stewards of the planet. I don't believe in being wasteful, but in a lot of ways naively jumping on the green bandwagon is wasteful. For example, buying a plugin-electric car will actually increase your energy usage, as the current models of cars coupled with the current electricity grid are not as efficient as gasoline engines. You may not be using as much gasoline, but you have also displaced your energy consumption from one area to another, which in this case is probably coal.

With that in mind, I think that energy price is a fairly good indicator of that energy consumption balance. All told, all costs have to eventually be paid. It's just not possible to avoid, the equation has to balance. There are all kinds of resources that go into making things happen, and oil is not the only one that goes in to transportation and energy. Time is another one, and I think it's a far more important resource than any concern about running out of oil, but that's not the point of this post. If we're just talking about natural resources, I have yet to hear any talking heads mention anything about the dangerously low reserves of platinum in the world, a vital resource for dozens of different technologies inseparably linked to a number of the most viable alternative energy (e.g. the hydrolysis process necessary for extracting hydrogen from water for use in hydrogen fuel cells requires a relatively large amount of platinum).

The loss of non-renewable resources is just one argument for finding developing alternative energy sources. The other argument is the reduction in pollution that is allegedly irreversibly damaging the planet. I do not believe that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are a significant enough proportion of the atmosphere to have a large enough impact on the climate to cause catastrophic climate change. As an analogy, spitting twice into the ocean is 100% more than spitting once, but it's not going to adversely affect anything. However, my views on the merits of the anthropogenic cause for global climate change do not matter. Sticking to the lowest cost alternatives you have available to you, you will do more towards "minimizing your carbon footprint" than buying a Toyota Prius will do (the metals and chemicals in the NiMH batteries of the Prius aren't that great for water tables, either). One tactic satisfies both view points.

We, the people of the middle and lower classes, live in a state of price consciousness. We account for roughly 95% of the population in this country, but we do not account for 95% of the energy usage. Yet we are told by our "betters" that we need to make up the slack in the energy usage. No one on either side of the political aisle denies that such policies like Cap-and-Trade will increase energy prices significantly. Such increases mean a whole lot more to people with only 10% of their income as "disposable" versus 90%.

The upper crust of the upper class do not pay attention to the price of the things they use. They don't have to. The time spent worrying about price costs more to them than it does to waste money by not worrying about price. This article is an excellent example of how this leads to phenomenal hypocrisy. Celebrities and politicians jet around the world to give talks, run events, and play concerts to tell the rest of us how bad we are for using so much carbon.

We could all stand to be less wasteful. One positive outcome of the current global economic depression is that it will make people more price conscious. This is necessary for the health of any society at any time, regardless of the state of the environment or the economy. Unfortunately, it may not mean much when those who are affected the most are those who have the least room for change in their habits. I'm not one for taxing certain classes of people at higher rates than others -- I believe flat taxation is essential for the concept of equal protection under the law -- but I cannot also abide the politicians and rock stars using the rest of us as their personal dumping ground.