Jay Leno’s Cars and Other Massively Overblown Environmental Scandals

4 The Glacial Ice Imported By Dubai

Here’s a story seemingly designed to enrage you. A company calling itself Arctic Ice launched a venture in which they harvest ice from glaciers in Greenland and then transport it to Dubai, so bars can use it for ice cubes in cocktails. Glacial ice is the purest ice in the world, boasts the company. But it’s not as pure as plain H2O made through reverse osmosis, which Dubai manufactures from seawater every second, and which easily turns to ice in a freezer, so this is clearly not about purity but about novelty. 

The project sounds extremely irresponsible, especially if the loss of glacial ice is going to raise sea levels and drown us all. 

But here’s where we need to talk about scale. After two years of operation, the company shipped 20 tons of ice to Dubai. That might sound like a lot, in that “a ton” is a proverbial large amount. But did you know how much glacial ice Greenland loses every year to melting? 280 billion tons. This shipment, which travels on vessels that were doing those routes anyway, so transport isn’t an issue, uses up the same amount of ice that melts in Greenland every 0.002 seconds. 

So, we probably shouldn’t begrudge Greenland making some money off this infinitesimal bit of ice. Especially if that specific bit of ice was just going to melt anyway. 

3 The Trees Knocked Down for a Climate Summit

Later this year is COP 30, one of those U.N. summits they hold every year to discuss climate issues. COP 21 in Paris was the really famous one because that led to the 2015 Paris agreement. This one is in Brazil, and to clear the way to the host city of Belém, Brazil built a four-lane highway right through the rain forest. This meant cutting down the trees that used to stand there, and cutting down the rain forest isn’t usually the goal of a climate summit. 

People have objections to this highway because people have objections to all highways, often for good reason. But if you’re specifically worried about the loss of rain forest here, this is another story where we need to talk about scale. The eight-mile highway translates to a loss of around 50 acres of rain forest, during a project that takes a year. Meanwhile, 10,000 acres of the Amazon are lost every single day. 

We’re using the reliable lower estimate here; other sources say 200,000 acres are lost every day. This one little strip shaved off to make a highway is too small to factor into the calculation of daily loss, much less annual loss. Oh, and it turns out they aren’t really building the highway for the climate summit after all. They’re building it ahead of the summit, sure, but Belém is a city of a million people and has been looking to build this road for the past decade.

2 All The Resources That Go Into Making Meat

There’s a very basic argument that explains why eating meat uses more resources than being a vegetarian. You can either eat plants, or you can feed plants every day to an animal for years and then eat the animal. Cut out the middle man and just eat the plants yourself, and that’s a whole lot more food just for you, food that was never burned up into pig energy or squirted out into years of poop.

That’s largely true (if not totally true, due to livestock eating some foods we can’t eat). It’s especially true with cows, those big lumbering beasts. It can take as much as 10 pounds of cow feed to get one pound of beef. 

But let’s now shift our gaze to chickens. If you feed chickens two pounds of food, they build that into slightly more than a pound of meat. Looking just at that, eating chicken isn’t so bad at all. The savings to the world from switching from beef to chicken is more than from switching from chicken to veganism. 

And how did we manage to get nugget production so efficient? Well, it’s by keeping the birds virtually stationary in a cage during their whole lives, so they don’t uselessly expend energy through movement.

Yeah, it seems vegetarians have a few reasons for their choices other than feed-conversion ratios. But, as a counterpoint, barbecue chicken wraps taste great, and you’ll have more luck tempting beef eaters with those than with chickpeas. You might end up tempting some vegetarians with them, too. 

1 Jay Leno’s Classic Cars

California has a law that says you need to get your car inspected every so often to make sure it’s not burping out too many smog-forming compounds. When the law began, there was an exception for cars made before 1976, because there were so few of them and those cars are so hard to repair to modern standards. Thirty years later, people are lobbying for an update to the law, which doesn’t quite push the cutoff ahead by 30 years but does push it to 1990. All the news stories about this update mention one man as a fan: car guy Jay Leno.

This exception is annoying because we don’t like it when some people don’t play by the same rules as the rest of us. But exceptions are funny things. Sometimes, they’re bad, but other times, they’re fine. 

If we have a law against murder (a good idea, according to many), we don’t want to exempt anyone from that. If you kill someone, that’s bad, and that dead person will take zero consolation in knowing that the law is otherwise often enforced. But if we want to keep the level of pollution under a certain level, and we’re succeeding at that, letting a few cars emit more gas that dissipates after a while still keeps us under that limit. And with this law, we really are talking about just a few cars. Less than 1 percent of cars in California fall under this exception. 

The phrase “1 percent” likely angers you more than it convinces you, because it just highlights how exclusive this exception is. But what it really shows off is how little difference the exception makes to air quality. That’s particularly true because people aren’t commuting every day in these 35-year-old cars. Many are in collections and get trotted out on the road just once in a blue moon. The real difference that the exception makes is that with it, classic cars can go on existing in California and we can whistle at them from time to time, and without it, some of them can’t. 

Supporters of the law prefer the first option. You might disagree, but you might also see a certain benefit to discovering what doesn’t matter and stopping caring about that, so you can care about other stuff instead. Plus, it means you get to now say stuff like, “I’m not against cool cars,” or, “I’m not against cool drinks,” or, “I’m not really focusing on your chicken wings.” 

This’ll make people like you more and will make them much more readily listen to you. 

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