How environmentalists are like smokers who tell others not to smoke … while smoking
Below is an idea for the new book that I probably won’t use so figured I’d share it here. I’m sure I’ll use it in conversations with the media.
I may develop it more. I like the idea. I should probably specify the behaviors of environmentalists whose counterparts I show in the smokers’, though I hope it’s obvious. For example, vaping represents all the technologies and efficiencies that people want to reduce pollution and depletion but augment it, like carbon capture, electric vehicles, and lighter packaging for doof.
I see many environmentalists like cigarette smokers who tell others not to smoke while smoking themselves. They do the equivalent of the following:
They get angry at Big Tobacco while not acknowledging that they themselves are funding their lobbyists, advertisers, executives, and politicians as much as anyone by buying their products.
They promote new technologies like vape pens that they call “clean” for emitting less smoke, but increase their dependence.
Thus they talk about a transition to so-called “clean” technologies, citing how many more people vape, without acknowledging that the increased efficiency is driving more cigarette smoking, even if the ratio of vaping to smoking is increasing.
They promote plans like educating children on the harms of smoking, again while smoking themselves. Since their mode of education mostly means telling them facts, numbers, and instruction that their own behavior contradicts, kids learn from them that smoking is like cursing: you have to act like you don’t do it until you’re older, then you do it all the time but act like you shouldn’t.
They don’t listen to other people who smoke to understand why they smoke, so instead of compassion, they try to coerce, not acknowledging that their coercive measures intensify the resistance in people who might otherwise agree with them.
Nearly every tactic environmentalists I’ve heard environmentalists propose has come equivalent with the cigarette smoker which the latter view exposes as absurd.
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