Well now, who in the whole wide world woulda ever thunk this? What, me? Naw…
It seems that a pair of lab-coated high foreheads at the U of T recently did what all bean counters do best — namely, spending a poopload of time and cash to come to a conclusion that’s already obvious to those of us who don’t have our skulls rammed up our politically correct butts — and now the High Priesthood of Kyotology is going to have to get themselves all worked up into a into yet another royal snitlather… again.
So just what did they do, you ask? Did they (shudder) deny the Great Truth of the Great Global Warming Slideshow of the Goracle? Uh, no, not quite. What they did do was to take a bunch of students and see how they acted after they were given a choice between buying some green goodness, like biodegradable laundry soap or organic yogurt (isn’t that one a little redundant?), and buying regular stuff like what normal people use.
The results are likely to put a little egg on the faces of the holier-than-thou crowd; it seems that the enviro-bedwetters are a bit of a weaselly bunch.
In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, University of Toronto researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong studied how students behaved after being given the option of purchasing environmentally friendly products, like organic yogourt or biodegradable laundry detergent, or conventional items.
They found students who chose green products were less likely to act altruistically afterwards than those who were simply exposed to green products.
The study, said Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing with the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, builds on research into the idea of “moral regulation” – that people either consciously or unconsciously balance bad deeds with good ones.
“What has been shown so far is that when we engage in actions that give us some kind of moral, warm glow – let’s call it that – that afterwards we are more likely to transgress,” Mazar said.
Wow. So… giving yourself a warm fuzzy means that you get to go out and misbehave afterwards? Damn, I’ve got some naughty catching up to do; I get warm fuzzies all the time (no really, I do; I’m actually not this cranky all the time).
Amongst other things, the study noticed that the one group — ahem, let’s be nice and call them “environmentally friendly shoppers,” shall we? </sarcasm> — were more likely to keep money for themselves, more likely to lie for their own gain and more likely to just help themselves to money that just plain wasn’t theirs (a nice way of saying “stealing”).
Of course Mazar was quick to lay on the caveats about how this “doesn’t mean that you should not buy environmental products,” shouldn’t be seen as a character judgment of environuts, etc, etc. Hey, come on; she works at the leftbot U of T, for crying out loud. She knows where her funding comes from.
What I don’t get is why this would surprise… well, anybody. Anybody with a working pair of ears and eyeballs can plainly see that greenies, like all closet or not Marxists, are generous to a fault… with other people’s money. The Goracle yowls from his pulpit that we should shiver in the dark as much as we can stand, and then some, while he hunkers in a mansion with the electric bill of a whole damned village. Suzuki wants you to put toxic light bulbs in your house so you can buy more beer (give some credit, it’s a better marketing idea than Al’s) but seems to need not one, but two houses; one of ’em a sprawling $2 million monster on a swanky island off the west coast.
Please try and name me just one screeching envirokook out there, who runs around telling us what bastards we are for raping momma planet, who isn’t getting filthy rich in the process. Go ahead, knock yourselves out; the comments are open.
And who the hell was that Englishman who said, “the odd thing about the socialists, they all live in the biggest house they can afford?” That one’s been bugging me all day…
6/24
Say what you want about 
I require a good guffaw. You likely could use one, too. Luckily for the both of us, I managed to find one.
Layton has one.
