There’s a sucker born every minute

Transiting through SFO the other day, I noticed a number of kiosks where one can purchase carbon offsets for one’s flight.  To feel good if you are crossing the country costs @ $12.00, or 30x the actual going rate. To feel good for a Transpac flight might cost as much as $20. Somehow, I think Al Gore is lurking somewhere in the background. Of course, that nasty carbon will probably just blow right back across the Pacific from China in a couple of days.

There is a serious disconnect these days between reality and wishful thinking, and wishful thinking seems to be winning. While the City of San Francisco helps fund arugula salads for jail inmates, the counterculture has become the consumer culture with absolutely no sense of irony about itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in that city. If wearing one’s underwear on the outside is declared hip tomorrow, half the city would be doing so the next day.

The same advertising establishment that sold our parents on Marlboro and cool filtered Newports is now selling us free range chicken and electric cars. No one bothers to think that chickens on the free range would die in a day or so or how electricity to run those cars will be generated or how our infrastructure will deliver the Gigawatts necessary if everyone switched over. Let it just be, man…..Let’s go green. The thinking is simply elliptical.

Instead of clogging our arteries with McDonald’s, there is a whole range of alternate cholesterol alternatives now ranging from Cuban sandwiches to Japanese fast food to MSG free orange flavored beef. Hey, we’re eating more interesting food, but it’s hardly healthier.

In the case of the environment, we now have a class of con men similar to the priestly class in the 1400′s responsible for selling indulgences, forgiveness, and exemptions from penitence. Instead of the religious hucksterism of the “pardoners” as Chaucer wrote, we now have ATM style environmental conscience cleansing.

Modern society has in many ways lost “good” skepticism. We are more likely to believe climate hustlers and scare artists like David Fenton and his Alar scare or some kook from Hollywood than look at the facts for ourselves. As P.T. Barnum once said, “there’s a sucker born every minute”. Today, the suckers seem to be in the ascendance.