Whenever I read a story that says the climate can be changed if you just stop flying and eating meat, I want to book a jaunt to England to have a hamburger. And then I remember that England can’t quite get the hang of hamburgers, so I would have to fly to Brazil to see if they can do it better. Honestly, it makes you want to take a long cruise and throw room-service hamburgers off the deck just to irritate the scolds.
A recent Associated Press story said that people regularly underestimate the carbon impact of some things and overestimate it for others. By some odd unpredictable twist, the easy things that make you feel better about yourself are overestimated. Recycling, long a signal of the virtuous person who believes that chucking the tired, exhausted pulp of an egg carton into the green bin somehow saves a 100-year-old redwood, is regarded as a good climate-change mitigator. But no. Buying “more efficient” appliances was also overrated, perhaps because they break more often. I’ve been through three refrigerators in 20 years. My parents had a 1962 Frigidaire that was built like a bank vault. You could stick meat in that thing and leave it on Bikini Atoll during an A-bomb test and it would still work, and the meat wouldn’t make a Geiger counter utter a single tick. Modern fridges have all sorts of energy ratings and special stickers, but two years after purchase the compressor expires from the arduous task of keeping your milk above room temperature. The carbon impact of modern appliances is high because of the trucks needed to take the old one away and bring the new one in.
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