[serious] Charity thread

[Provost Harrison]

http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/Pages/default.aspx

Whereas I'm less concerned about human beings than fluffy wickle bunny rabbits.

Alas I'm more concerned about myself than other human beings and fluffy wickle bunny rabbits

[C0ckney]

the article drake linked to raises some very good points, in particular eating seasonal foods and being aware of how the food you buy is produced. however, anyone who is even remotely serious about buying local will have given some thought to most of the issues it talks about. to use that article as a premise for describing a preference for local food as retarded is, well, retarded.

[kittenOFchaos]

Standing order to Oxfam each month since I started working - think it is £30.

So, that should be a few thousand by now.

I've also occasionally bought a goat and I'm paying for a kid to get educated as well on top of the continuous sponser forms you need to sign up for as a teacher from pupils doing silly things - climbing Everest for example.

[Imran Siddiqui]

www.worldvision.org - an international Christian relief and development organization whose stated goal is "to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God."

www.alcu.org - to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States

And a few other charities I donate through every paycheck (one is for Aid to Africa, one is for world hunger, and the other is for womens' rights)

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

The Moony Church

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/15/obamas-earned-55-million-2009b/

God Bless ya Joe

[Drake Tungsten]

to use that article as a premise for describing a preference for local food as retarded is, well, retarded.

I'll bet I can go to my grocery store in NYC and buy produce from Chile than has a lower carbon footprint than your local produce trucked in from the English countryside. Even if we ignore the efficiency gains from allowing different regions to specialize in different food products, buying locally is pointless because its supposed environmental benefits don't actually exist. It's a stupid idea latched onto by stupid people.

edit: Food That Travels Well

[Kuciwalker]

www.alcu.org - to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States

[Drake Tungsten]

The ACLU lost me when they started caring more about the rights of non-Americans outside this country than they did about American civil liberties.

[Wernazuma III]

Even if we ignore the efficiency gains from allowing different regions to specialize in different food products, buying locally is pointless because its supposed environmental benefits don't actually exist. It's a stupid idea latched onto by stupid people.

edit: Food That Travels Well

I fully agree with the article, but if you read it well, it's not saying that "eat locally" is stupid in and by itself. It's just stupid to think of transportation and longer cooling chains as the only factor in calculating the energy/emission footprint.
Nonetheless, in many products, it is a major factor - that's why it could be determined in complete lifecycle analysis.
Your statement

I'll bet I can go to my grocery store in NYC and buy produce from Chile than has a lower carbon footprint than your local produce trucked in from the English countryside.

comes completely out of your arse unless you have any point to make about how the "clover-covered pastures" of Chile make their apples use less energy than British...

[Drake Tungsten]

I have a point about industrial agriculture and modern container shipping being more efficient than local farmers trucking their produce into the city.

[Wernazuma III]

And for your articles in the first post: Again, in the local food article I agree with it.

As for the Fair Trade article, it is flawed in a fundamental ways.
Fair Trade is not nearly big enough to have the effects on the world markets described in the article. It cannot inflate the market with a product. Plus, the reasoning would be right in a world that ensures rules of fair competition among producers anyway. What Fair Trade does at the moment is subventioning (through the "fair price") those who comply with higher standards of individual rights, worker rights, participation, fighting child labor, unhealthy working conditions, etc. The difference between the "fair price" and the price on the world market is (or should be) the price calculated for undue exploitation of working force. Fair trade, thus, strengthens people in societies where these rules are not applied. The article is laughable when it weakly tries to tackle this argument with "we have to fight these injusticies directly". If we were to completely boycott countries that don't protect workers and exclude them from the world market alltogether, would that count as direct action? The author apparently doesn't understand politics, economic pressure is essential to force anyone to change.

I agree that the concept should be abandoned wherever these standards are met.
We'd be in a mess if we would extend the concept to our developed countries. The "fair price-paradigm" is bad in a functioning economy that actually provides people with reasonable possibilities to allocate their energy.

[Drake Tungsten]

That's so full of stupidity that I don't even know where to begin.

[Wernazuma III]

I have a point about industrial agriculture and modern container shipping being more efficient than local farmers trucking their produce into the city.

Of course, imagining a beardy farmer on an old truck compared with a high-tech container ship makes me feel the same. Yet, goods shipped from oversea do have transportation from their farms to the ports and from the ports to final delivery too, you know that, right? More often than travelling by rails, they are being trucked. European motorways have become an ever-rolling endless line of trucks shipping goods between Portugal and Finland, Greece and Great Britain. Try to convince me that raising a cow in Italy, shipping them to a Dutch slaughterhouse, producing saussages from their meat in Italy again and selling them in Denmark produces less emissions than a production chain where everything is done professionally in Denmark.

[Wernazuma III]

That's so full of stupidity that I don't even know where to begin.

run out of words?

[Kuciwalker]

the price calculated for undue exploitation of working force

Those workers are begging to be 'exploited'. If you outlawed such 'exploitation' [i.e. mandate first-world wages for third-world laborers] there would be no reason to actually hire third-world laborers and they would be profoundly worse off.