eatkind’s Recent Comments

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  Would be enlightening if someone were to do a full life-cycle analysis of the energy and resource use of the mobile wireless media, gaming and computing technologies vs the technologies they displace: print media, desktop and laptop PCs, TVs, radios, stereo systems, telephones, snail mail ... My bet is that mobile is and will continue to be a net resource and energy saver.

  On EEStor CEO says game-changing energy storage device coming by 2010 posted 3 months, 1 week ago 30 Responses

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  Destructive (and badly flawed) criticism

  I was appalled by the hatchet job the Economist did on the consumer-driven aspects of the ethical food movement. Yes, public policy changes would be nice (duh), but not only does consumer activism do good in its own right, it can help drive those public policy changes. In Europe, for example, years of shopping-cart voting for comparatively humanely produced eggs and pork have been credited with prompting a few national governments and finally the EU as a whole to ban the chronic crating of sows and the caging of hens.

  As others are pointing out here and elsewhere online, an inexcusable proportion of the The Economist's key criticisms don't stand up to scrutiny. One that I haven't seen debunked is that demand for Certified Fair Trade foods - in this case, coffee - somehow increases demand for their non-fair trade counterparts, thereby increasing production and lowering prices even more. Perhaps I'm missing something, but this is like arguing that demand for Priuses increases demand for Hummers or that demand for organic apples increases demand for all apples. There is coffee (and tea and chocolate and bananas etc.) and there is Certified Fair Trade coffee. When shoppers buy more Fair Trade products, demand for THOSE PRODUCTS increases, sending a signal that it's safe for more producers to switch to growing these commodities in this more socially and environmentally responsible way. Another signal is sent to producers of the non-Fair Trade commodities: demand is falling, produce less.

  Syd Baumel
  Publisher, Eatkind.netOn Maybe, maybe not posted 2 years, 10 months ago 51 Responses