Is California Insane?

We are all familiar with the stories of the California governor ignoring his own Covid-19 rules to dine at an exclusive upscale restaurant with friends and supporters and of the LA County Supervisor who dined outdoors at her favorite restaurant hours after voting to ban such activity as too dangerous but before the ban took effect. They go out and party, then lock down the people who elected them.

 

That’s just simple hypocrisy. That happens across the nation, although California does seem to have a talent for electing some real nutcases to various levels of government. 

 

We almost expect that kind of hypocrisy from any politician, most of whom are elected on the basis of their charm, good looks or name recognition rather than their ethics and intelligence. But that’s not why California stands out. Here are just two of many examples.

 

The Glock Company manufactures and sells guns. On their site they list the GLOCK 19, a 9 mm Luger. It’s a handgun with a magazine capacity of 15 to 33 rounds. It’s not unlike side arms carried by police. The site carries a warning, only one warning, and it has nothing to do with gun safety. It reads: “This Product can expose you to chemicals including lead [in the bullets?], which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other productive harm.” 

The sun can also cause skin cancer. Will they soon require that all doors that lead outside carry a similar warning? The danger of catching cancer from a gun falls far behind other, more immediate dangers.

 

Last August an estimated 3.3 million in California were “Facing [the] Largest Power Outages In Its History … Amid Record Heatwave.” On October 23 the news came:  “Due to extreme fire risk the utility is shutting off 466,000 customers between Sunday and Tuesday.” Then on December 5 the news read: “As parts of California rev up for another round of potentially fire-fueling gusty winds, Pacific Gas and Electric is warning 130,000 customers across 15 counties that they could lose power starting early Monday morning.”

 

Disregard the fact that many experts believe California added to the wildfire problem with poor forestry management. Just think about those stories in light of this headline from last September, “California Governor Signs Order Banning Sales Of New Gasoline Cars By 2035.” 

Picture hundreds of thousands of citizens stuck at home on a regular basis without electricity to charge their cars (or their phones). It’s just one more good idea – unless you can see the unintended consequences. California citizens can sit at home in the dark and applaud their governor for saving the planet. 

 

The antics of California would be funny if they weren’t completely crazy, and if the rest of the country weren’t slowly drifting in the same direction.

Flashback – Plastic Straws

I originally called this one "How Much We Take On Faith." At the time it was clear that many information sources are not reliable, a notion reconfirmed by many experiences since then. Politicians, advocates and pundits confidently make assertions to support their agendas. We can never tell what is true, what is pure fantasy, or how much is just so much hot air. 

 

Plastic straw mandates are examples of many symbolic acts. Using bad data or no data, authorities try to fool us, and probably themselves, into believing that they are really making a difference. They want to appear caring about all the right things, then garner enough support to pass laws and regulations forcing everyone to comply.

 

Here is the piece from 2018.

[The other day I got into a discussion with a colleague about plastic, which led to a comment about the amount of plastic in the ocean and what a problem it is. My response that only about 1% of the ocean plastic comes from the United States was met with stares of disbelief. Instead of arguing the point with someone who firmly believed the opposite, I offered to send references. The next day I emailed an explanation of the situation from a number of reputable sources.

From National Geographic in a story about the large accumulation of waste in the Pacific: "Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today."

My next stop was a Bloomberg article with a sub headline of: “Skipping straws may be hip. But there are much better ways to fight pollution.” They first point out that the original estimate, the one activists and news media cite with confidence, that Americans use 500 million straws per day is based on highly dubious data that came from a small survey by a nine-year-old for a grade school science project. Then it was spread without any attempt to verify it by those who wanted to emphasize the problem. "Similarly, two Australian scientists estimate that there are up to 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines. Yet even if all those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they'd account for about .03 percent of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated to enter the oceans in a given year.” So what we have been told about straws being the problem is a gross exaggeration.

A Science report on marine pollution verifies exactly what I was saying with a table on their site,  Table 1 titled: “Waste estimates for 2010 for the top 20 countries ranked by mass of mismanaged plastic waste (in units of millions of metric tons per year).” The US is listed at the bottom of the table with a contribution of .09% – less than one percent. That same information is repeated in pie charts on other sites.

So all this fuss about banning straws is bogus. It is a feel-good exercise that grows because so few people take the time to do the research. Ocean pollution is a problem, but the advocates and politicians are misinformed and are passing along that poor information to the rest of us – and we are buying it.

This and many other trends and movements have become their own religions. They depend on blind faith. The preachers stand up and confidently make ignorant and absurd allegations about chemicals, food safety, pollution, economics and a host of other subjects. The general population takes it on faith, chanting “amen” in all the right places. This leads to poor policies and results in those responsible for poor policies being reelected on the basis of making their followers feel good about themselves, about how pure they are, about how caring they are. It’s much more about ego and self esteem than science or actually saving the planet.

In reality these policies deliver little or no benefit and may have unknown side effects or unforeseen consequences. They are at best a waste of time. Critical thinking is the answer, but no one wants to deal with facts or reality.] Feeling good is more important.

Facemasks and Climate Change

According to many, facemasks have become political. There is a little indication that the difference of opinion between wearing and not wearing a face covering divides along party lines, but the real similarity to politics is that most people have made up their minds and will try to badger the other side into compliance. Some suggest a federal mandate.

Today doctors state that wearing a facemask is the right thing to do, but going back only a few months expert opinion was the opposite.

Here is an explanation I read last week on the fivethirtyeight site. “The data that existed on mask effectiveness largely dealt with medical respirators and surgical masks. It wasn’t clear how protective a cloth mask would be.” 

Initially the experts thought “wearing masks might lead people to feel more safe than they actually were – and make choices that increased their risk of contracting or transmitting COVID-19.” The change in stance came “not because the evidence has significantly improved,” but because a sentiment spread that to wear one expressed caring about other people. The switch on mask wearing was based not on science but on a shift of the assumption about the perceived psychological effect – overconfidence vs. awareness. “Behavioral norms also matter, regardless of how much evidence backs them up.”

But once the behavioral norms machine starts moving, everything else including common courtesy and tolerance toward differing opinions go by the way side.” Most service workers where I shop wear a mask. Some don’t, but they practice social distancing; in my state/county it’s still a personal choice. A niece working in retail reports that wearing her mask all day at work gets extremely uncomfortable, but if she takes it off, customers will pull down their own masks to yell in her face how inconsiderate she is.

From the above article: “a public health and disease expert who is worried that mask effectiveness is being over-hyped, has also found himself threatened and harassed” by email and on social media for merely expressing doubt about “how effective DIY cloth masks are.” 

This passionate and aggressive defense of opinion and unwillingness to consider alternative ideas came to mind as I read the next article in Wired.

A potential solution to slowing and possibly solving climate change could be on the horizon. A couple of companies are teaming with the Department of Energy to develop an idea that has been around for a while, but was formerly too cost prohibitive, tristructural isotropic (Triso) fuel. It is made by sealing small particles of a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen inside a protective shell. The fuel can be used to power small nuclear reactors. “Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof,” as the particle can withstand temperatures far above the limit beyond which the reactor will automatically shut down.

Nuclear is by far the best solution to carbon-free power generation. It is more efficient and has a much smaller ecological footprint than wind and solar. And, Forbes reminds us, “Study after study in top scientific journals find that nuclear power plants are far and away the safest way to make reliable electricity.” And with the danger of meltdown eliminated, “rather than needing to have miles of open space around a reactor, future plants running on triso fuel could be situated close to their users.” NASA is considering it for nuclear powered spacecraft. 

This could be a dream come true with houses, factories and refueling stations for electric cars powered by meltdown-proof, non-polluting reactors. But in the blink of an eye, opponents will dub it the nightmare of the future with dire warnings of radiation poisoning and other terrifying predictions, accusing proponents of putting profit above caring for others. Can we count on the American public to consider the science before flying into a panic?

Will “behavior norms” quickly develop and, like the Germans who thought it was smart to phase out their nuclear power program in favor of dependency on coal and Russian oil and gas, will Americans likely reject it, harassing defenders and voting out politicians. Based on other behavioral evidence, that’s my fear. 

Flashback - Getting What We Pay For

[Back at the end of 2012, I wrote a piece I called “Green Schools - A Questionable Investment.” It was just one example of how key words can get people charging off on a mission without first figuring out if it makes economic sense. It happens in government and in personal lives. We hear words like “green” or “natural” or “sustainable” and many more, and we automatically read it as positive. Emotional decision making takes over and the damage results, sometimes minor expenses, sometimes a major waste. Here is the story.]

This rather long USA Today article is worth reading. It tells of a review of green schools, those that were built to meet standards set by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), an organization that promotes and certifies green construction not only for schools but for other commercial and government buildings. Green construction is promoted by school boards and by governments at  all levels. “[T]housands of commercial developers have won state and local tax breaks, grants, expedited permitting and waivers from development laws for LEED-certified buildings. More than 200 states, federal agencies and municipalities require LEED certification for public buildings.”

School districts that paid higher construction costs for LEED-certified buildings in return for promised energy savings and better student performance found that they fell short in both categories.  They were told up front that the improved environment would lead to both future utility savings and better learning and teacher success, but “a USA TODAY review of school-test records, LEED-certification documents and research reports shows little correlation between 'green schools' and student performance or energy use.”  Often they made the investment but did not get near the expected return.

This is another strong case for critical thinking, asking for evidence over promises; that behavior is lacking in America today. We have developed a kind of fairytale mentality that everything will be grand because our intentions are noble and our hearts are in the right place. People are lured by feel-good words that entice them into making instant value judgments without evidence, words like green, sustainable, all-natural, justice and fairness, holistic, anti-oxidants, probiotics, diversity, and others.  They hear the word and automatically expect better outcomes. It causes them to show an irrational preference for such things as natural/organic foods, dietary supplements, bottled water, complimentary medicine, and now, construction techniques that promise much, but  fail to deliver.  Even when faced with strong evidence of this failure, hype wins out over reality.

Many years ago a scheme to sell more of a product (or service) was to label it in bold letters as “New and Improved.”  Eventually consumers realized that changes were often minor as was any improvement in performance. Now the approach is the same but the words have changed. A critical thinking America must begin to demand more than just promises. Otherwise we will continue to be duped, wasting time, energy and money for little or nothing in return.

[By seeing enough examples like this I have personally become sensitive to these words. They set off alarms in my brain telling me to be careful and check the details before committing. But all these years later the packaging and advertising stays the same.] 

Environmentally Friendly?

Most people don’t know where most of our products come from – what raw materials are used, how they are manufactured, etc.   That makes it very hard to judge what is and is not environmentally friendly.

A few years ago some analysis revealed that a holistic assessment of ethanol’s environmental footprint from planting and harvesting through the point of burning it as a fuel in automobiles might be worse than the same consideration for gasoline. The farming, refining and transportation end of the businesses are also relevant. And as it burns it releases the same CO₂ into the atmosphere at almost the same levels on a per-mile basis.

The same is true of many other products. That’s why I wasn’t surprised by the news that plastic grocery bags could be better for the environment than organic cotton ones.

That news came last spring from a study conducted by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (DEPA). They measured the environmental impact of the standard plastic bag against “the organic lifecycle of seven common materials used for shopping bags…along 16 different environmental parameters, including climate impact, ozone impact, human and environmental toxicity and water use.”

According to the DEPA spokesperson, “The results showed that plastic bags made out of ‘LDPE plastic’, like the ones found in grocery stores, have by far the lowest impact on the environment. The biggest environmental impact was assigned to the organic cotton bag; it has to be used at least 149 times to offset its climate impact, compared to 43 times for a regular paper bag.” Note that people often buy the “organic” cotton believing they are doing the environment a favor.

At the end of the report, they recommended that any bag should be reused as many times as possible, for example, using the plastic grocery bags to line small trash cans. Note that if they were reused even once, would they be almost 300 times environmentally friendlier than an organic cotton bag? 

But it doesn’t end there!  Remember those reports earlier this month about the researchers at the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, the main airport in Finland, finding that the place most filled with germs and bacteria was not the toilet seats but the trays used in the pre-flight screening process? They were teeming with disease-causing viruses. The same can be true of reusable cloth grocery bags and shoppers don’t realize that danger or guard against it.

As the Chicago Tribune reports: “Most shoppers -- 97%, in fact -- reported that they do not regularly, if ever, wash the bags.” About 75% report that they do not use separate bags for meats and for vegetables, while almost one-third use the same bags for other non-food items.

When they tested a sample of the bags (84) for bacteria, they found some contamination in all but one.  The full report can be found at Assessment of the Potential for Cross Contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags.

"It is estimated that there are about 76,000,000 cases of foodborne illness in the United States every year. Most of these illnesses originate in the home from improper cooking or handling of foods. Reusable bags, if not properly washed between uses, create the potential for cross-contamination of foods.” And if they must be washed between uses, that further adds to their environmental impact by water use, and it shortens their life.

  

So while some cities and states are moving to ban the bags, they are not considering all the diverse factors that go into the problem. It’s pretty typical of legislators to pass laws that address a surface problem to make them and their constituents feel good, while ignoring many details that might lead to an opposite conclusion.

Food For Thought

Here are just a few items I have been wondering about.

A common excuse for bad behavior in politics and business is that someone else did it first or the other party started it. Doesn’t that ever strike you as the kind of response you would expect from a couple of third graders arguing on the playground? ("Did not!" – "Did too!" "He started it!") Don’t we deserve better from our leaders? Unfortunately in many cases, before the leaders can say it, their advocates on social media have already started looking for comparisons. Does the liking it and sharing it make us all more like third graders?

Has anyone ever seen something go viral that actually teaches people something or makes them think about an idea? I suppose the “stupid people tricks” might hint at teaching people not to try it at home (or anywhere else), but most of us don’t have to see someone else figuratively “crash and burn” to know what is dangerous. Those videos are obviously for entertainment value rather than instruction. Thinking is not something people do for fun, so we stick with the cute pets, fluffy wildlife, heartwarming stories and YouTubers selling us items we don’t need.

And speaking of entertainment value and oddities going viral – isn’t it interesting that the fad of encountering aliens from outer space, common in the 1950s, vivid descriptions of little green men with large eyes and foreheads, has disappeared? There are so many cell phones with cameras and so many people taking pictures of almost everything they see that if those space aliens were really among us, we would have been exposed to a boatload of selfies by now. I guess the search for intelligent life in the universe goes on – whoops, did I leave out the word “elsewhere”?

I have never thrown a plastic straw into the ocean and never intend to do so, so why can’t I use one? I have accidently dropped a plastic bottle and been thankful it was not made of glass. Once again, it’s not the plastic; it’s the behavior.

Finally, the fuss about the price of gas around the holidays seems to be mostly manufactured by the news media. It happened for Independence Day; expect to see it again for Labor Day. “The price of gas is 60 cents higher than a year ago, what are people going to do? Will anyone be able to afford to get away?”

The average mileage for a car/light truck in the US this year is about 25 mpg. A 60-cent-per-gallon increase adds $2.40 to a 100-mile trip. A 400-mile round trip for the weekend comes to less than ten extra dollars – less than two beers at any major league ballpark in the country or slightly more than a single movie ticket. Remember, that’s based on average mileage, so half the driving public is even less affected. But when they ignore the details and just target people’s emotional gut reaction, it sure makes a good story.

Understanding and Using Perspective

Some people may find it confusing distinguishing between critical thinking and perspective.  Both employ a rational thinking process, but one has to do with accuracy and the other with the appropriate reaction.

For example, when we see a cartoon roadrunner hand an anvil to a cartoon coyote hesitating in midair after stepping off a cliff, we know it’s inaccurate.  Galileo showed that objects of different weights fall at the same speed.  The anvil makes no difference.  That’s critical thinking.  Knowing this we don’t immediately sit down to write an irate protest letter to the company demanding an apology for exposing our children to anti-science material and threaten to boycott their sponsors.  Perspective helps separate the trivial from the important.

But we get caught in slightly less silly perspective traps every day.

As another example, suppose people could wear a pair of lenses that allowed them to see normally, but also to see every germ crawling around them.  It would be a challenge for many people to walk by the kitchen counter or bathroom without stopping to mop something up or dab in a corner.  Such an invention would be a curse.  Those who today overuse hand sanitizers would be found dead in their houses, not from germs but from the inability to do anything else but clean!

But today we have the equivalent of those germ-glasses and don’t even realize it.  They come in the form of the news media and some environmental movements.  We think the condition of the country and the world are much worse than they really are because we see every day, sometimes far more often than that, stories about crises, epidemics and disasters.

Does anyone think that as long as there is a single shooting in the United States, only one natural disaster anywhere in the world, one person starving or one brutal conflict; that the news media won’t have reporters on the scene to tell us about the horrible tragedy? Of course not, their livelihood depends on stirring us up. Moreover they will draw it out for all it’s worth if it reinforces their political beliefs. 

Does anyone think that as long as there is a single speck of dust in the air that some organization would not tell us that we face a serious pollution problem, that we are exposing our children to a potentially toxic environment and that something must be done about it immediately?  Of course not, their livelihood depends on stirring us up.  Moreover they will show us pictures of the direst situations with the saddest looking children to elicit our moral and financial support. 

That feeling of being stirred up is the reaction that perspective should help us deal with. It causes us to stop to see what the situation really is. How widespread is the problem? How dangerous is the situation to us personally? Are those sharks really poised off our favorite beach waiting for a snack? Is that virus that affected 18 (or 318 or even 3018) people out of 330 million really an epidemic? Are the air and water not clean enough?  Is the chance of an accident or occurrence that is less likely than being struck by lightning worth protesting or demanding a new government program?

These are questions that are often never answered, but are important to our personal physical, mental and financial wellbeing, and also to the progress of America.  We need critical thinking to research the facts and perspective not to overreact.

Food Production Differences

Since I read this information about different methods of food production on a four-year-old posting, it should be fairly well known.  Unfortunately forces are at work, misrepresenting and politicizing what should be straightforward, honest information.  Let’s get back to the basics.

There are a number of ways to develop seeds used to grow our food:  Conventional breeding, mutagenesis and Genetic Engineering (GE).  

The first can be split into two categories.  Purists prefer heirloom vegetables.  “Most heirlooms come from seed that has been handed down for generations in a particular region or area, hand-selected by gardeners for a special trait.”  Usually they were developed over 50 years ago in the early days of commercial breeding.  They tend to have relatively stable characteristics from generation to generation.

Hybrid veggies on the other hand are the result of intentional cross-pollination of two different plant varieties to try to capture the best traits of each such as bigger size, earlier fruit bearing or better disease resistance.  Cross-pollination may also happen in nature without human intervention.  “The process of developing a hybrid typically requires many years.”  Unlike heirlooms, if you save the seeds from hybrids, the new plants will not retain the same advantageous traits as the original and may show other unexpected characteristics.

Technically, all seeds have been modified over many thousands of years as early farmers collected seeds from the best plants in an attempt to improve flavors and yield.  (A quick Internet search shows pictures of how unappetizing these ancient crops really were.)

Genetically Engineered (GE) crops are well known due to a bad reputation invented and spread by non-scientists and fear-mongers, most of whom have an interest in promoting organic products or raising funds for their environmental projects.  These fears are further spread on social media by the uninformed and are totally unfounded.  

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states very clearly, based on hundreds of studies:  “Credible evidence has demonstrated that foods from the GE plant varieties marketed to date are as safe as comparable, non-GE foods.”  They explain that traditional cross-breeding also introduces a number of genes into a plant, and both are done for the same reasons. No person has ever been harmed by eating GE foods; there is no link to cancer.  They increase yields and lower pesticide applications, which is good for the environment.  Golden Rice, a GE crop, was developed to reduce blindness in Third-World children that don’t get enough vitamin A in their diets.

The other way to modify seeds is called mutagenesis, “wherein plants are subjected to radiation treatments or doused in toxic chemicals that randomly scrambles genes to produce new traits.”  They then plant the seeds to see what comes ups and keep trying until there seems to be a desirable improvement.  “Despite the fact that this process is much less precise than genetic modification…mutagenesis is unregulated and widely used.”  

Mutagenesis sounds much scarier and haphazard than GE, yet it receives little attention, has no one screaming for labels “so we know what we are eating,” has the potential for more unintended genetic changes and can be sold as organic!  Both are deemed safe for human and animal consumption.

So why the emphasis on and fear around GE crops? Despite having been proven false over and over, some continue to warn of dangers.  And we never see news reports that yet another study reaffirms the safety of GE crops.  Others, who have a direct stake in organics, call for GMO labeling supposedly calling for clarification, but really hoping the misinformed public will erroneously see them as warning labels and needlessly spend more money on organic food.  With a coordinated campaign and a few ardent followers, it’s easy to scare people into making foolish choices.

Some research suggests that the environment, year-to-year temperature changes and location, “has more impact on the plant’s genome than whether it was genetically modified or conventionally bred.” In reality, food safety should be based on the product itself rather than the method used to develop the variety.

But this is what happens when rumors abound, when advocates push an agenda until it achieves a “common knowledge” or urban myth status, and when Americans don’t exercise the critical thinking so crucial to survival in an increasingly complex society.  How do you modify your behavior when you realize that no one else is looking out for your best interests?

Bambi and The Unintended Consequences

NPR reported recently that the interest in the sport of hunting has been steadily declining.  The share of hunters in the adult population in the US dropped from 7.3% to 4.4% over the last 25 years and has been cut in half over the last fifty.

It’s just not as popular as it used to be.  Reasons likely include the amount of investment for a week or two of activity a year, the physical hardship of walking through the woods or sitting in a tree stand in all kinds of weather and the general reduction in interest in all outdoor activities.  NPR also points to a change in the culture.  Attitudes towards wildlife are changing, making other outdoor activities like bird watching, and hiking more popular.  Some people prefer to do their shooting with a camera instead of a gun.  (And more people can see and admire a photographic trophy on social media than a physical trophy mounted on the wall.)

“The shift is being welcomed by some who morally oppose the sport, but it's also leading to a crisis.”  It leads us to question whether those morally-opposed people are more interested in the positive feedback they get internally and from others for their compassionate, caring stance and perceived moral superiority than in the actual welfare of our “furry friends.”

The wildlife conservation systems in the US depend on “license fees and excise taxes on guns, ammunition and angling equipment [to] provide about 60 percent of the funding.”  State wildlife agencies are responsible for “restoring the populations of North American game animals, some of which were once hunted nearly to extinction.”  The American system that allowed this incredible conservation and restoration has been so effective that it is widely imitated in other parts of the world.

Today the reduction of funding from hunting is causing states like Colorado, Wisconsin and Vermont to cut back on staffing and programs that protect the animals as they search for other sources of revenue.  People hiking through the woods with their cameras generally expect to be able to do so for free or for a modest park entry fee.  They also don’t expect to pay excise taxes on cameras, compasses, binoculars or sleeping bags to supplement those losses from hunting.  But as funding levels decline one fear is that the number of species on the threatened or endangered list could nearly double.

Although the NPR article focuses on funding aspects of the hunting decline, the loss of many other benefits of hunting are concerning.  The annual harvest of millions of deer is a good example.  Hunting actually benefits the deer population.

A joint  study by Alabama A&M and the University of Auburn Extension points out that “hunting helps maintain a healthy deer population. If the population were to go unmonitored, deer would be facing severe overpopulation, resulting in significant damage to the ecosystem, over-browsing of plants, malnutrition and an overall decline in the health and well-being of the animals.”

Do we care about the deer when we would rather have them starve to death or die of disease than be shot? Are we willing to absorb the financial burden of added crop damage – remembering that the farmers’ increased cost or the price effects of a decrease in supply are passed on to the consumer at the grocery store.  Deer are also not a friend to gardeners.  And deer collisions kill over 200 motorists a year and cost a total of around 10 billion dollars.

These are all things to consider before we brand hunters as heartless and pretend to care so much about deer (or other critters) based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

Note:  I’m not a hunter and have none in my family, but I did once hit deer with my car and have met many others who have had the same misfortune.

Consequences of Not Thinking Things Through

Sometimes we believe that we are backing a worthy cause or making a good decision, but it turns out (sometimes too late) not to be the case.  Two recent examples in the news are trophy hunting and tax deductibility.  Though they may seem totally unrelated, they share the common characteristic that we tend not to think them through.

They both tend to be political, which makes it all the more important that we fully understand what is going on so as not to be manipulated by the opposing forces.  In these cases I am taking a critical thinking approach rather than taking sides.

In the first case, many oppose trophy hunting as treating animals badly.  There was talk earlier this year of banning imports of trophy-hunted elephants and possibly other species for that reason.  A deeper look reveals a different story.

This article from CNN explains that the major threat facing elephants and other exotic wildlife is not the trophy hunters, but other factors such as loss of habitat, retaliatory killing by local farmers and poaching.  Poachers come at night to kill the elephants for their ivory.  Controlling poaching, reimbursing farmers for crop damage and preserving the savannah requires funding.  A major source of that funding is the license fees paid by the rich trophy hunters.  As long as the hunting is well regulated, the overall impact on wildlife can be positive.

It seems counterintuitive at first glance that shooting a few elephants or lions in a well-regulated way could benefit the larger group, but it’s true.  The writer of the CNN piece admits to being a conservationist and vegetarian who wishes for a different solution, but the revenue ensures positive outcomes for animals as a whole and jobs for local game wardens.  Other sources agree, including The University of Washington’s Conservation Magazine and the National Geographic.  Yet some want to brand these fat-cat hunters as evil men who hate animals and are destroying the planet.

The second example has to do with tax deductibility, which is the subject of a fuss in Washington over a new tax law.  Various proposals intend to double the standard deduction while eliminating different itemized deductions.  But are these deductions as valuable as their backers claim?  Here is a simplified explanation.

A deduction is the amount we subtract from our income before calculating taxes.  If we earn $50,000 and have $15,000 in deductions, we pay tax on only $35,000.  Using a 15% tax bracket, the actual savings is not $15,000, but 15% of that, or $2,250 – still nothing to sneeze at.

But don’t forget the standard deduction!  You must spend that $15,000 to get the benefit, but we can subtract $12,000 without doing anything, which would reduce our taxes by $1,800 (15% of 12,000).  In this example, the difference between having the deduction and not is only $450, or 3% of the total deduction.

Now I don’t know many people who would go rushing to the store for a 3%-Off sale, but that’s not the way it’s presented.  When the state or local government wants to raise your taxes they explain how it won’t hurt you because “it’s all tax-deductible.”  When a charity wants your money they emphasize the tax-deductibility.  When a tax preparer charges $50 for software or over $100 for the personal touch, they don’t tell you that this money saved you only an incremental $450.  No, they stress the much larger number at the bottom of your return, remind you that their fee is also tax-deductible and then urge you to get your money today at their high interest rate.  (Note:  The CPA Practice Advisor says that you should expect to pay an average of $273 in the 2017 filing season if you want to itemize your deductions.)

Elected officials at all levels, charities, environmentalists, tax preparers, animal rights advocates, realtors and many others depend on the majority of us not to think too deeply.  Perhaps some of them aren’t thinking clearly themselves.  But when we just nod in blind agreement, allowing ourselves to be misled, we get poor outcomes and may never realize it.

Tradeoffs

Unfortunately the real world isn’t black and white or true and false.  There are shades of distinction.  Good evaluation always balances the risks and the benefits of any decision.  It is often too easy to overlook the risks or benefits when you are presented with arguments favoring one side or the other.  Some presentations come across so strongly and confidently that it’s difficult to even see that there are tradeoffs.  This is where critical thinking and appropriate questioning come in.

One blatant example was the controversy almost five years ago over pink slime, a derogatory term used to refer to and gather support against, a beef product that has been in our food supply for years with no ill effects.  Some TV chef decided it was yucky to reclaim meat waste, beef trimmings and other meat by-products, and add them to ground beef to lower the fat content.  The “crusade” began and, in response, grocery chains stopped ordering it.

There was nothing nutritionally wrong with it.  People’s jobs depended on the long-standing practice.  It reduced food waste.  As a result, we all had to pay more for ground beef just because someone dubbed it yucky and many others jumped on the bandwagon without a single thought or question – another social media triumph (?). 

It happened again to a lesser extent in Florida recently.  The residents of Miami Beach protested the aerial mosquito spraying.  The mayor insisted, “public health experts have assured him the amount of Naled [insecticide] used is harmless to humans and has proven effective” against mosquitos.  The public responded that they didn’t think the Zika threat was real.  They compared a safe, but probably scary spraying operation against an invisible, but real health threat and came down on the side of the mosquitos.

The same thing happens all the time on a variety of subjects.

Consider hydroelectric power – build a dam to capture the power of a river and provide low-cost electricity with no pollution.  Environmentalists block the project with lawsuits to protect a fish or mussel.  They don’t even have to prove danger to their fish; just raise the possibility and the developers or governments spend millions trying to prove there is no danger.  Meanwhile we all sit around in the dark.  But we are not in the dark because we still get electricity from the coal plant where other environmentalists are protesting against the CO₂ and particle emissions.  Still other protesters are busy condemning nuclear power, a safe, pollution-free option.  There is never any discussion about whether the benefits of a decision outweigh the risks (real or imagined).

Sitting around in the dark is not the big problem.  We can always light candles.  But you can’t light candles to keep the food fresh in the refrigerator, keep the house warm in the winter or keep the equipment running in the hospital emergency room.  When we have enough electricity, we take it so much for granted that we are not concerned that various groups with their different agendas keep trying to make it harder and harder to get.  At what point do we demand that they or the politicians look at trade offs and not just at one side of the story, usually the side with the most emotional impact.

Now look at all the other subjects where we are exposed only to the negative aspects:  climate change, income inequality, vaccination, the economy, air and water pollution, police interactions with the community, drug policy and the rest.  As citizens we fail to demand a balanced discussion, so get only the often-exaggerated negative warnings.  Many subjects quickly devolve into finger pointing and name-calling to silence opposition.  In some cases the cry is that all experts agree; in other cases the cry is that all the experts are wrong.  We waste time and energy with these non-critical, knee-jerk reactions.  We lose the benefits and go down the wrong road when we are only presented with and react to the risks.