Flip It: Why We Should Wear Potato Sack Shirts, Fight Carbon-Trading, Eat Pesticides and Never Recycle

Even though it's not a game and the repercussions of it aren't fun, let's start a new game on Happy Hour and here on The Cody Word called "The Food Shortage Blame Game". (Is Chuck Woolery avail?)

I've been doing a lot of thinking about all this "Going green" by buying "Green guitars", or "Green luxury bags" and we've all been hearing/seeing all the hype and outsized consensus about how channeling all this time, energy and money into these types of things is supposed to do good for the world's citizens and the planet at large.

What if conventional wisdom is just dead wrong about all of it?! Flip it, man. What if all these resources that we're channeling into these concepts that we think make the planet and its people healthier and cleaner are doing exactly opposite of their intent? Come on, that wouldn't really shock you would it? I mean, how often is conventional wisdom and the mainstream actually RIGHT? Not often, which is exactly why we should think about Flipping It.

It's just been in the last handful of years that these concepts that people have determined are "green" have become mainstream. And what's happened to prices of food and all other commodities during these last handful of years as we buy further and further into these "green" concepts. It certainly seems that the result of all these policies and social movements around the developed world's consumption habits hasn't been very helpful to the poor in Africa that we're supposedly trying to help with much of this "green" movement.

Are bamboo guitars actually GOOD for the environment? No, we're still depleting the world's resources with our consumer culture, including consuming guitars. Further, while the bamboo might grow back more quickly than oak, it's not as if bamboo doesn't have some downside to it. It's an aggressive plant, man, for one thing! And $800 designer "green" bags? Gimme a break - you're not doing anything good for the planet buying something like that. Get a potato sack bag if you want a "green" purse.

You realize it's sorta the same logic that these "green" marketing scammers use that the "carbon-trading" marketing scammers use. "Buy this and even though you're destroying the world, you're paying someone to do a little bit less world-destruction to get you this product." That's not exactly what I call "green".

I'm already convinced that recycling -- yes, all this paper, aluminum, glass RECYCLING -- is more damaging to our environment than any other hairbrained mafia scam the government and its cronies have come up with the last couple decades. You can't tell me all the manpower and logistics that go into "recycling" garbage wouldn't be better served re-using and re-training us to consume less packaging and waste. And you can't tell me that the 20-plus garbage/recycling trucks that rumble along my brick street in Soho EVERY NIGHT aren't putting more bad gases into the atmosphere and wasting more resources than if we just conserved better and buried the junk we waste. Who directly benefits from all this "recycling"? They who run the garbage business in this country. Ever watched the Sopranos...Tony and his boys in the garbage business used to chuckle at the outsized margins in their recycling scams. Yes, recycling is totally a scam and its bad for the environment. And, no, I'm not just trying to be coy in Flipping It.

And then there's the organic movement.

It's widely cited that the market share of organic foods in this world is about 2 or 3%. I just Googled "organic food market share" without the quotes and randomly clicked on several of the links/research reports from the results. One report talked about 25% market share for organic fruits and vegetables, while another talked about organic food market share ranges from 0% (especially for pork,it says) in some places in Europe to about 15% in Austria (one of my favorite cities in Europe is Salzburg, btw).

Regardless of whether it's 3% or 5% of the food that we eat on this planet is organic or not, we all know that organic is a secularly growing industry within the slightly-cyclical food industry. And the yields from organic crops vs. non-organic crops? They're not as high, that's why the stuff is more expensive. So we're constricting the supply per square unit on this planet just as we're running into a possible food shortage.

Okay, so here's where this line of Flipping It logic leaves us then, if I'm not mistaken. To help the environment, the poor and even Africa, we all should cut consumption of expensive new goods, wear potato sack shirts, fight carbon-trading, NEVER EVER recycle, and eat foods full of chemicals and pesticides.

Makes about as much sense to me as most any social/governmental movements, doesn't it? I mean, they've convinced us already of the idea that stealing from the working man to "save" the investment banker is somehow good for the working man.

Here's hoping there are winners in this game, because feeding the world isn't really a game at all.

More on this with Environmental Capital Partner (and former NHL star) Michael Richter tonight on Happy Hour, btw.