A study shows that global warming skeptics’ actual behavior is more environmentally responsible than Warmists’, and that enviro-weenies feel they are entitled to do a little polloting:
The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, followed more than 400 Americans for a full year. On seven occasions—roughly once every eight weeks—participants revealed their climate change beliefs, and their level of support for policies such as gasoline taxes and fuel economy standards.
They also noted how frequently they engaged in four environmentally friendly behaviors: recycling, using public transportation, buying “green” products, and using reusable shopping bags.
The researchers found participants broke down into three groups, which they labeled “skeptical,” “cautiously worried,” and “highly concerned.” While policy preferences of group members tracked with their beliefs, their behaviors largely did not: Skeptics reported using public transportation, buying eco-friendly products, and using reusable bags more often than those in the other two categories.
This pattern was found consistently through the year, leading the researchers to conclude that “belief in climate change does not appear to be a necessary or sufficient condition for pro-environmental behavior.”
It’s more important to signal virtue than to actually be virtuous.
I saw this on Monday and the other radio station was talking about it yesterday.
Of course, I don’t buy the statement that the researchers were surprised by their findings. Well, maybe I can, given that they are probably typical brainwashed lefties.
You know, as a meta-ish sort of comment, this ties in with something I mentioned the other day: the left loves to make new laws but is very bad at actually enforcing them. The boring old rubber-meets-the-road activities it takes to actually implement something are not nearly as fun as thinking up new (stupid) things to do.
It’s like those people who show up to neighborhood meetings, supposedly from the neighborhood, who are yelling at the rest of the neighbors that cars are evil and that driving is unsustainable, yet they are the only people who showed up to the meeting by car.
I vividly remember environmental activists coming to my home on a “smog” night in Boulder in a car when the bus stop was an entire block away. I’m guessing their Subaru had visible emissions, too–that seemed to be the official hippie-mobile at the time.
There is a very beautiful picture on that article’s page.
Even skeptics will use something if it is convenient and makes sense – which most “green” initiatives usually lack. I took the bus when the stop was by my house and my office was also near a stop.
The Strib ran an article the other day about how global travel was increasing global warming and suggesting we shouldn’t do that, in order to save the planet and (possibly) forestall cultural appropriation. It stayed on their main page about :15 minutes, but here’s the link.
http://www.startribune.com/global-travel-may-be-good-for-the-soul-but-it-s-bad-for-the-planet/481968281/
All you need to understand about liberals is that they want to use the power of government to force YOU to do the virtuous things they believe in, while continuing on their hypocritical path with the excuse that they do not have to do it until you do, and besides, they are better than you.
I was a Sierra Club member back when conservation of wild spaces was their focus. I dropped that membership when the definition of “conservation of nature” switched to promoting abortions and birth control in 3rd world countries.
Based on my experience, conservatives are more interested in actions that produce results than their liberal counterparts.
I remember being a part of the Green Mountain Club in Vermont that runs the Long Trail and Appalachian Trail through Vermont. We once had a discussion at one of our meetings about fixing some erosion issues on a part of the Long Trail in northern Vermont and those of us who were doing the maintenance remarked we were taking some chain saws up there to clear out a section of trees that had fallen across the trail and to use the resultant lumber as water bars to direct the water away from the trail. It was standard procedure and we didn’t think twice about it.
Naturally, some of the long haired hippie types in the room got indignant. Using gas power tools on the Trail was unnatural and that as environmentalists we couldn’t possibly introduce things like that into the environment. After about 5 minutes of bloviating, I remarked, “Excellent that you feel so strongly about using natural methods! So you’ll hike the 8 miles in and help us chop up the wood with axes? It’ll only take us a solid 2 weeks to do the work rather than a weekend.” The silence was deafening. The next weekend we were up there with chain saws working to conserve the natural environment as usual, while the hippie types were somewhere in downtown Burlington complaining about us raping Mother Nature, I suppose.
I was a Sierra Club member back when conservation of wild spaces was their focus….
Same story for me with The Nature Conservancy.
Great story, btw.
One of my favorite excuses from a gloBULL warming zealot who was also my neighbor, was uttered after he was done giving me some pretty nasty comments about my brother’s diesel pick up. I pointed out that he had two cars and both he and his wife both drove to work without car pooling. His response was, “Well, I can’t do it alone”.
jdm, the problem we had was finite resources. The GMC could hire only a couple of full-time crews for the work during the summer, and they were pretty much dedicated to the heavily traveled sections of the Long Trail (the Long Trail runs the length of Vermont and predates the Appalachian Trail, which follows the Long Trail through the southern 2/3 of Vermont). All the Long Trail side trails, and the Long Trail north of Stowe are necessarily maintained by volunteers. And those volunteers have lives and jobs, so we needed to get the job done in our “spare” time. We didn’t have time to be idealists, we had work that had to be done, and far more work than volunteers (naturally). And all I have to say is that the lefty hippie detritus that filled up the meetings in Vermont seem to want to talk more than they wanted to do. The only reason we’d been discussing the use of chainsaws was that we were telling the leadership that, while it was painful to pull one of the crews off the section we maintained to do higher priority work on a more heavily traveled section that had had weather damage, it probably wouldn’t result in that section of the Trail closing. It just wouldn’t get the improvements it really needed, but that we could bandaid the situation with a few of us who maintained sections near that one working together.
And don’t get me started on the pantywaists in the Forest Service. Those lousy bastards put a pristine alpine area at risk when we had to replace Taft Lodge on Mt. Mansfield rather than be flexible on environmental regs. They wouldn’t let us put a temporary gas sling line in to move the logs up the vertical 2500′ to the lodge on the grounds that gas engines weren’t allowed in the forest. (Tell me that when less than 2 miles away there was a road right through the forest up to the antenna array on the top of the mountain that also serviced all the tourists who didn’t want to make the hike up the mountain but wanted to get the view anyway.) We had to have the National Guard helicopter those logs into the Forest and then winch them down from the landing zone by hand. Any accident would have taken decades to recover from in a fragile alpine area, rather than the temporary and easy to recover from damage that a sling line might have had. Not to mention that it would have been a helluvalot cheaper.
Environmentalists tend to be idiot absolutist zealots when it comes to actually protecting the environment and assessing relative risk. It’s a big reason why I say I’m a conservationalist these days.