Saturday, November 14, 2009

Pets versus clean energy

This article on the World Bank site details how the world spends more on pet food than on research and development of clean energy sources. The comments following the article are worth reading as well. Let's hope that, at least, the author is wrong in predicting that we will "get the energy we deserve

2 comments:

Vincent said...

For my part, I have no fear of getting the energy we deserve. If Gaia is trying to tell us something, I hope we heed, and don't cheat Fate.

But why pets, I wonder? Who started that notion? They could have compared with what the world spends on alcohol, weaponry, computer games, anything.

A more meaningful comparison would be to compare like with like, and restrict the comparison to expenditure on research and development in a given field.

Or is the whole thing a rule of thumb, to help imagine the scale of things - like using a football field or a golf-ball as a unit of measurement? Or just some journalistic quirk?

PatricktheRogue said...

I think that was one of the comments on the thread. Why compare pet food? It's random but striking. To compare it to, say, arms sales, would be unsurprising - everyone knows the world spends alot on arms. But pet food...i personally had never given it a thought and I certainly wouldn't have guessed that the US alone spends so many billions on it. So I think your "rule of thumb" notion is probably correct.