What is worst, the Royal Baby, or beer at the Rugby World Cup?
I mean, seriously. Please get yourself a (virtual!) Royal Baby Beer and look at all the news:
While I’m writing these lines, more and more people on social media are getting upset because the home pages of major mainstream media worldwide look more or less like this one of the Guardian:
that is because a new very rich, very privileged baby who’s quite unlikely to ever suffer personally from climate change or mass extinctions gets almost as much exposure as much coming human suffering worldwide, and a bleaker, impoverished planet.
While I understand the feeling, I dare strongly suggest people to not let themselves be distracted from other pairs of news to compare, like this one just a few lines below the “more royal babies, less biodiversity” area:
While species go extinct, the stuff of nightmares for rugby fans is “fears that bars and restaurants in host cities could run out of beer during the 2019 Rugby World Cup”, next September to November. Compare that with:
- the news, just one line below that, of more major cities facing severe water restrictions in the near future
- beer still being a water-intensive industry (seven gallons of water per gallon of beer?)
- climate change going to make beer more expensive worldwide, in Japan up to 3.5 USD more per half liter
Take home message?
Maybe all Royal Babies should stop being royal, maybe they shouldn’t. It doesn’t really matter, because there are just a handful of them every generation these days. Besides, if royal families are listed before major cities getting short of water in 2019 is may be the editors' fault, certainly not theirs. To change that, just boycott whatever product you see advertised inside those articles and move on.
In any case, never stop at the first two or three “news”, whatever they are. Always strive to have the widest picture of what is happening, and what is more urgent and more effective: let’s all start to:
- drink less of any water-intensive beverage
- pay more attention to really relevant news, and their connections
(Source of “royal baby beer” image is here)
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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