I recently watched Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth and I thought it was very intersesting. After the film had finshed, it made me think about whether polluting the atmosphere and wasting energy could be classed as a bad behaviour. Obviously,it isn't a good behaviour but is it a form of bad behaviour or just a very bad habit?In my opinion I think it's very difficult to answer this question because of the varying degrees in which people waste energy and pollute the Earth. For example, I feel that on the whole in the UK people don't purposely waste energy by doing things like leaving lights on or leaving electrical appliences on stand by instead of switching them off, it's simply a habit that can be avoided with consideration. However, there are people who consciously pollute the atmosphere by for example, fly tipping and littering. In this case I would say that this is a bad behaviour, possibly one of the reasons for this is because doing things like littering and fly tipping are criminal offences and carry punishments.
I think that if you asked a group of people if they thought that drug dealing was worse than wasting energy they would say yes. I don't think that the majority of people consider wasting energy to be a crime and therefore they don't think it is as serious as for example, drug dealing. Many of the the other behaviours discussed in lectures were classed as criminal offences and I think that this is partly why they were chosen to be discussed. To me it seems that ignorance and laziness are the main reasons why people pollute the Earth with intent. Watching the devastating effects of global warming around the world made me realise the extent at which pollution is costing the planet. In many cases, this effect isn't felt so much by the people who pollute but those who are too poor to pollute, for example, those who can't afford to waste electricity becasue they can't afford the electricity in the first place. It is this harsh reality that makes me consider concious acts of pollution to be a bad behaviour, please leave some comments on your views on this as I am especially interested as this topic wasn't featured in our lectures.
I have included below some links to websites about global warming and a link to a clip from An Inconvenient Truth.
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