Yesterday, I was watching right wing pundit Glenn Beck on Fox News, and he was criticizing former U.S. Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore for eating hamburgers. To Gore's credit, he's looking more svelte these days, and I'm no longer convinced that he's in fact a bloated corpse reanimated by liberals to serve as a talking head. He must be eating less. Unfortunately, however, the fact remains that his current hamburger gorging ways are a threat to the environment, Beck maintained. After all, raising the cows that make all of those double cheeseburgers possible has an astronomical ecological footprint. In countries like Argentina, for example, methane emissions from cows account for over a 1/4 of total greenhouse gas emissions, a major contributor to global warming. So, unsurprisingly, Beck was using Gore's carnivorous habits to paint Gore as a money-grubbing hypocrite that is exploiting the green movement for profit, like Levi selling $80 eco-friendly jeans, and he accused Gore of not truly caring about the environment. This is a common tactic, to call environmentalists hypocrites for compromising (and radicals and fanatics if they're uncompromising). Of course, it's usually true, but honestly, hypocrisy is an innate condition of humanity. We're all hypocrites; at least Gore is trying, right?

Looking something like Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, I was hunched over my glorious throne, a cold white porcelain toilet/sculpture, meditating ruefully on my own hypocrisy, when a eureka moment happened: "How much energy is this toilet using?" I wondered. The facts, it turns out, were disturbing:

The toilet uses more water daily than any other appliance or plumbing fixture in the American household, costing Americans citizens over $1 billion a year, roughly $3.30 per person per year or $0.002 per flush. Toilets are responsible for .75% of national energy use and 11 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Just heating a toilet's water uses, on average, the same amount of energy as a light bulb.

Now, how could these seemingly inconsequential facts be disturbing? It shows just how futile individual efforts are at making a positive impact on the environment. We could all unhinge our toilets tomorrow and build outhouses with beautiful arabesque tiles in our backyards and it wouldn't make a difference. After all, the average median household income in America is $50,000. If using a toilet costs the average American citizen $3.30 per year, and most of us are teetering on the brink of debt and the edge of home foreclosure, how much environmental damage is the rest of our $49,996.70 buying per year? How much environmental damage do our credit cards subsidize?

Our efforts as individuals can be summed up with stale phrases: we're rearranging the deck chairs on The Titanic, we're just closing the window blinds, etc. Stale solutions, like flushing your toilet less, or taking the occasional walk instead of driving, do nothing but make you feel a false sense of empowerment. For example, the 11 millions tons of greenhouse gas emissions toilets are responsible for only accounts for 0.002% of America's total greenhouse gas emissions, which is, I believe, 7 billion tons per year. Suddenly, individual actions like eating or not eating a single hamburger seem meaningless. Sure, if we all became vegans tomorrow, it would have a noticeably positive impact on the environment. However, it's silly to make meat-eating an environmental issue. We shouldn't have to give up a traditional staple of the human diet to try to offset the environmentally harmful effects of transportation, industry, and superfluous commerce. No, becoming a veganism or vegetarianism should be considered an ethical issue, which is what it was until the 20th century. Beck's argument was what logicians call a red herring.

Truthfully, the greenhouse gas emissions problem is so immense, so pervasive in our daily lives, that we would have to collectively change the current structure of society to make a significant impact, beyond the ramifications of Cap and Trade (see: emissions trading) and other compromised measures. The scientific consensus is that global warming is real, and that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for it. Grave environmental catastrophes, worse than the 2005 New Orleans flood, will happen if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked. Reducing emissions would require us to scale down and maximize the efficiency of society. Basically, we would have to make do with less and use public transportation. No one likes to hear that, but sometimes life isn't fair. One of the first things we learn as toddlers is that we can't always get what we want.