SocraticGadfly: Flush the plush and flush GangGreen enviros

December 01, 2014

Flush the plush and flush GangGreen enviros

Help the environment -- flush the plush!
The plush that I want you to flush are the stuffed small toy "charismatic megafauna" animals that Gang Green environmental groups use in general to stimulate your smiles, your tears and eventually your wallet.

For the uninformed, Gang Green type environmental groups are the ones that are as concerned with "access" to national Democratic politicians as they are to results, as they themselves established with the start of Bill Clinton's first term.

Back to the plushes that need to be flushed, though.

First, they're made in China or places even worse for labor law. Did kids make them? Workers on 12-hour shifts? Why aren't they being made in America?

Part of labor-environmentalist tangles are due to organized labor buying into lies of big business, but part of it is environmentalists' self-inflicted wounds.

And, if you ask the Gang Green folks where these things are made, and under what conditions, they may just give you nothing but the back of their hand. I had exactly that experience with Sierra Club over a backpack a number of years ago.

Meanwhile, if your wallet does follow your smile and your tears, you'll next get bombarded with boatloads of snail mail. I presume it's made from mainly recycled paper, but it often doesn't explicitly say so, and it still takes money to recycle paper, as well as energy.

(The only nonprofit worse than the Gang Green folks on this is the ACLU. I stopped supporting them years ago, and since ACLU has now officially adopted the Glenn Greenwald stance on Citizens United, not only would I not recommend them to other people, I'd actually recommend current ACLU  donors to stop giving them money.)

Anyway, back to the plushes.

They're almost surely made out of petroleum-based plastics. Very environmentally unfriendly.

It takes a lot of naval diesel fuel to ship those plushes from China. Very environmentally unfriendly.

Chinese factories are less energy-efficient and more environmentally unfriendly than US ones.

Real environmentalists know this.

The Gang Green ones prey on more casual environmentalists.

Don't be like this.

Flush the plush. You'll actually help the environment as much as a token donation to a Gang Green group.

1 comment:

Simon said...

Sad but true. There are do-gooders in all movements.