{"id":16698,"date":"2012-08-30T11:05:20","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T16:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16698"},"modified":"2012-08-30T11:06:25","modified_gmt":"2012-08-30T16:06:25","slug":"exaggerating-your-points-to-make-them-seem-more-important-than-they-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/30\/exaggerating-your-points-to-make-them-seem-more-important-than-they-are\/","title":{"rendered":"Exaggerating your points to make them seem more important than they are"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.climate-resistance.org\/2012\/08\/it%E2%80%99s-a-fct-we%E2%80%99re-fcked.html?utm_source=feedburner&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climate-resistance%2FwCKX+%28Climate+Resistance%29&#038;utm_content=Netvibes\" target=\"_blank\">Geoff Chambers<\/a> does a bit of Google searching to track down a few of the claims made in Stephen Emmot&#8217;s critically acclaimed one-man show &#8220;Ten Billion&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The reviews were full of superlatives. <em>The Times<\/em>\u2019 critic calls it \u201cutterly gripping, terrifyingly lucid\u201d; <em>Time Out<\/em>: \u201cmonumentally sobering\u201d; Billington in the <em>Guardian<\/em>: \u201cone of the most disturbing evenings I have ever spent in a theatre\u201d; the <em>Financial Times<\/em>: \u201cone of the most disturbing shows I have seen on a stage\u201d; the <em>Mail on Sunday<\/em> \u201ccertainly the most scary show in London\u201d. Almost all of them cite Emmott\u2019s conclusion: \u201cWe\u2019re f*cked\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some of the key \u201cfacts\u201d (or \u201cf*cts\u201d) cited by Emmott and picked up by critics. (It is of course impossible to check whether the critics have quoted Emmott correctly, since no record of what he says exists):<\/p>\n<p>1) A google search uses as much electricity as boiling a kettle.<\/p>\n<p>2) It takes 3,000 litres of water to make a hamburger, (that\u2019s 10 trillion litres of water annually to sustain the UK\u2019s burger industry).<\/p>\n<p>3) It takes 27,000 litres of water to make a bar of chocolate<\/p>\n<p>4) Animal species are currently going extinct at a rate 1,000 times their natural level.<\/p>\n<p>5) Bangladesh will be under water by the end of the century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>TL;DR for those who don&#8217;t feel up to reading the whole thing: 1) false, by a factor of 100. 2) true-ish, but massively misleading. 3) false, or Emmott eats humongous chocolate bars. 4) false, even though Wikipedia thinks it&#8217;s true. 5) false, the land area of Bangladesh has actually <em>grown<\/em> over the last 50 years thanks to land reclamation projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Geoff Chambers does a bit of Google searching to track down a few of the claims made in Stephen Emmot&#8217;s critically acclaimed one-man show &#8220;Ten Billion&#8221;: The reviews were full of superlatives. The Times\u2019 critic calls it \u201cutterly gripping, terrifyingly lucid\u201d; Time Out: \u201cmonumentally sobering\u201d; Billington in the Guardian: \u201cone of the most disturbing evenings [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,65,74,28],"tags":[706,422,39,381],"class_list":["post-16698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","category-food","category-media","tag-bangladesh","tag-extinction","tag-junkscience","tag-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4lk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16698"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16700,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16698\/revisions\/16700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}