Lousy Olympic Analysis of Olypmic eco-friendliness

[EcoNrgized]

:crazy:

I've just read the news article and posting by Gideon Polya on Green Blog about Olympic Gold Medal Tally Green-ness.

It's quite long and numbery (when you read it, you'll see why I had to make up this adjective) and while I appreciated the focus to try to shame the Olympic efforts for not trying to be more humane or eco-friendly, I was stunned by the lack of responsibility presented by someone who is more educated and should know better.

Without commenting on possible motives, there are way too many biases in this posting that make the top outliers seem overly eco-unfriendly and the bottom outliers seem overly eco-friendly.

1st,

India - winner of 0 gold medals, and China - winner of the most gold medals: Both are emerging as the worst possible environmental enemies but this fact is masked by the gold medals/capita which makes India seem overly concerned about humanity and the environment and China seem overly incompetent with respects to its ability to win gold medals. India did not send a capable Olympic team simply because it has neither the resources, interest, nor the cohesion to assemble an effective Olympic team. On the other hand China is simply too populous to rate high on any of the scores except for raw medal standings despite the huge amount of effort it spends on producing Olympic athletes.

2nd,

Jamaica - top gold medal per capita winner, and Indonesia near the bottom of the pile for the same.

These two countries have very little basis for comparison except that both are primarily recipients of exploitation by others mentioned in this posting. Jamaica's high per capita gold medal rating is certainly not due to resources spent on producing gold medalists. Instead it is due to the ability of the country's natural environment to create good sprinters. A high per capita of naturally good sprinters (many top sprinters for other countries are Jamaicans) should naturally produce a high per capita gold medal ranking. The country's CO2 excess is also a product of exploitation by others and when combine with such a high per capita gold medal number, the country is unfairly made out to be extraordinarily high on the profligacy list.

On the other hand, the aforementioned exploitation so oppresses the Indonesian people that despite the countries abundance of natural wealth, very little of it ever trickles down to allow the population to seriously contend for Olympic gold. So, Indonesia's appearance at the bottom of the article's profligacy rating is hardly worth mentioning despite its poor environmental record (again most of its CO2 excess is incurred by countries that are currently subjecting it to crushing exploitation).

In summary its good to remember that 1 divide by any number greater than 1 is always less than 1, and any number divided by any other sufficiently larger number is always almost 0. When we try to defend or promote a more eco-friendly world we must be careful and responsible so that opponents won't be able to flog us with our own numbers or words. The devil is in the details and when we're making detailed analyses, we must not forget the details.

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[mountainhiker]

:crazy:

I've just read the news article and posting by Gideon Polya on Green Blog about Olympic Gold Medal Tally Green-ness.

EcoNrgized, Your eloquence in responded to that "interesting" post was outstanding. I felt the question should have been modified "However we must ask the question: how GREEN were the efforts of the successful Gold Medal-winning countries and is there any relationship?" And the answer is ZERO. :thoughtful:

[Dr Gideon Polya]

EcoNrgized, Your eloquence in responded to that "interesting" post was outstanding. I felt the question should have been modified "However we must ask the question: how GREEN were the efforts of the successful Gold Medal-winning countries and is there any relationship?" And the answer is ZERO. :thoughtful:

These are glib and facile responses to a careful analysis and a serious problem dramatized by genocidal, climate criminal, war criminal, racist White Australia reportedly spending $100 million on each Gold medal while over 400,000 under-5 year old Occupied Iraqi and Occupied Afghan infants die each year (90% avoidably and due to US, UK NATO and Australian war crimes) ** in the US-, UK- and Australian-occupied Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories (the latest UN Population Division data)..

To repeat, for any sensible analysis it is necessary to first "normalize" the Gold Medal Tally on a per capita basis (unless you believe, like the racist Bush-ites, Zionists and neo-Bush-its that some people are worth more than others).

Then, to estimate the CO2 pollution-related national investment you could multiply the Gold/person by the CO2 pollution/person to get a GoldxCO2 pollution measure..

Clearly there are more sophisticated ways of doing such an analysis (however, for example, actual data on dollars spent on Gold is only readily available to me for Australia and China) and both high Gold/low CO2 and lowGold/high CO2 combinations could yield the same value.

However the analysis shows huge disparities best illustrated by (A) climate criminal Australia, one of the world's worst CO2 polluters and biggest investors in Gold medals with a score of 14.1 ; ( China with a world average Gold medals per capita and CO2 polution per capita yielding an average GoldxCO2 value of 0.159 (100 times lower than Australia's value) and © India which has a CO2/person 4 times lower than the world average and whose investment in Gold Medal glory was evidently commendably minimal yielding a score of 0.0010 (about 10,000 times lower than Australia's).

If people have a better means of quantitating the Green-ness of the Medal Tally I invite them to apply it to the several hundred countries involved and publish the results.

My preliminary method is quite useful - scientists are usually very impressed by 100-fold and 10,000-fold differences in parameters such as those described here.

** I am a thanatologist with a 4 decade biological sciences career. UN and UNESCAP data indicate that the "annual death rate" is 0.6% for under-5 year old infants in both the Tibetan Autonomous Region and China as a whole; 6.2% for under-5 year old infants in US-, UK-, NATO and Australia-occupied Afghanistan (about 10 times higher and due to due to US, UK NATO and Australian war crimes) ; and 10.2% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2 (for which war crime Japanese were tried and hanged).

One of the reasons these war criminal countries (US, UK NATO and Australia) get away with this mass murder is because of racism, lying and obfuscation by the racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring mainstream media of the Western Murdochracies.

[EcoNrgized]

These are glib and facile responses to a careful analysis and a serious problem dramatized by genocidal, climate criminal, war criminal, racist White Australia reportedly spending $100 million on each Gold medal while over 400,000 under-5 year old Occupied Iraqi and Occupied Afghan infants die each year (90% avoidably and due to US, UK NATO and Australian war crimes) ** in the US-, UK- and Australian-occupied Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories (the latest UN Population Division data)..

To repeat, for any sensible analysis it is necessary to first "normalize" the Gold Medal Tally on a per capita basis (unless you believe, like the racist Bush-ites, Zionists and neo-Bush-its that some people are worth more than others).

Then, to estimate the CO2 pollution-related national investment you could multiply the Gold/person by the CO2 pollution/person to get a GoldxCO2 pollution measure..

Clearly there are more sophisticated ways of doing such an analysis (however, for example, actual data on dollars spent on Gold is only readily available to me for Australia and China) and both high Gold/low CO2 and lowGold/high CO2 combinations could yield the same value.

However the analysis shows huge disparities best illustrated by (A) climate criminal Australia, one of the world's worst CO2 polluters and biggest investors in Gold medals with a score of 14.1 ; ( China with a world average Gold medals per capita and CO2 polution per capita yielding an average GoldxCO2 value of 0.159 (100 times lower than Australia's value) and © India which has a CO2/person 4 times lower than the world average and whose investment in Gold Medal glory was evidently commendably minimal yielding a score of 0.0010 (about 10,000 times lower than Australia's).

If people have a better means of quantitating the Green-ness of the Medal Tally I invite them to apply it to the several hundred countries involved and publish the results.

My preliminary method is quite useful - scientists are usually very impressed by 100-fold and 10,000-fold differences in parameters such as those described here.

** I am a thanatologist with a 4 decade biological sciences career. UN and UNESCAP data indicate that the "annual death rate" is 0.6% for under-5 year old infants in both the Tibetan Autonomous Region and China as a whole; 6.2% for under-5 year old infants in US-, UK-, NATO and Australia-occupied Afghanistan (about 10 times higher and due to due to US, UK NATO and Australian war crimes) ; and 10.2% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2 (for which war crime Japanese were tried and hanged).

One of the reasons these war criminal countries (US, UK NATO and Australia) get away with this mass murder is because of racism, lying and obfuscation by the racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring mainstream media of the Western Murdochracies.

Chill dude, your bias is showing… I admire your tenacity for humanitarianism but we are on an environmental blog, yah? Your article make no sense environmentally. Are you attributing the ability to win gold medals to a propensity for committing atrocities, the propensity to waste money, the propensity to choke the atmosphere with CO2 gas, or your propensity to fill blogs with hot air?

If you'd wipe the froth from your mouth and eyes you'd see how blind you are to the fact that relationships your trying to link are far fetched at best. If you want to investigate the relationships of gold medal wins you can't arbitrarily normalize to a generalized population, your normalization should be done on the Olympic population because only they could possibly win a medal. Not because they're worth more than anyone else but because they are the only ones competing and the rules say that only they can get the medal.

Following that through, your ratios should then include only the gold/team and CO2 incurred by that team through the course of the event from beginning to end to give your precious gold/CO2 pollution for the olympic event. By your own admission, you don't have the dollar figures to even begin to compute the CO2 that the money could afford for all involved so your arguement should end there.

How you made the leap to bigotry and atrocities and all other manners of evil and link them back to some environmental conscience would boggle even Einstein (wait, is he one of those racist Bush-ites, Zionists and neo-Bush-its? if so, my apologies). And by the way, you left out the rampant class discrimination, bordering on socialized racism, that is endemic to India... or didn't you hear about it?

Only heartless people wouldn't feel for the deaths of babies but are you saying that the death rate discrepancies are due to the olympics and the CO2 it generated?.. I mean, these are the only two factors that can be coherently linked in your article.

Point is, you’re letting your numbers clump the environmental innocents who just happen to win a few medals with the worst of the evil ones while the numbers themselves obfuscate some of the guilty ones who were simply unable to win some gold to make themselves stand out.

Leave the innocents out of it or at least exonerate them. Don’t let your bias show you to be passing over some of the guilty ones at the same time as you’re flogging the innocents. It’s bad for you and bad for the environmental movement at the same time.

[Dr Gideon Polya]

1. Gold Medals cost money ($100 million each for Australia's 14).

2. 16 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease - they can be saved by expenditure on health, education, food and related resources (9,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably each year, largely due to the warped policies of climate criminal, racist White Australia e.g. its $100 million each for Australia's 14 Beijing Gold medals; according top UNICEF, 327,000 Afghan under-5 year old infants die each year in US-, UK-, NATO- and Australia-occupied Afghanistan, largely because the racist, war criminal occupiers only permit a "total annual per capita medical expenditure" of $26 per person per year [according to WHO data] - the "annual death rate" of Occupied Afghan infants is 6.2% as compared to that of 10.2% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2 or 17% for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, 1941-1945).

3. CO2 pollution is directly related to GDP in our carbon-based energy world.

4. GDP is what people produce from investment (including Gold Medals).

5. The higher the CO2 pollution, the higher the GDP and - as a rough estimate - the higher the investment in Gold medals.

6. Disproportionately spending GDP on Gold Medals when 16 million people (9.5 million of them under-5 year old infants) are dying avoidably each year is obscene.

If anyone disagrees with propositions 1-7 please say so.

If anyone has a better measure than my admittedly crude Olympic Gold Medal Tally Green-ness Index then please apply it to several hundred countries and inform everyone of the results.

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.

Chill dude, your bias is showing… I admire your tenacity for humanitarianism but we are on an environmental blog, yah? Your article make no sense environmentally. Are you attributing the ability to win gold medals to a propensity for committing atrocities, the propensity to waste money, the propensity to choke the atmosphere with CO2 gas, or your propensity to fill blogs with hot air?

If you'd wipe the froth from your mouth and eyes you'd see how blind you are to the fact that relationships your trying to link are far fetched at best. If you want to investigate the relationships of gold medal wins you can't arbitrarily normalize to a generalized population, your normalization should be done on the Olympic population because only they could possibly win a medal. Not because they're worth more than anyone else but because they are the only ones competing and the rules say that only they can get the medal.

Following that through, your ratios should then include only the gold/team and CO2 incurred by that team through the course of the event from beginning to end to give your precious gold/CO2 pollution for the olympic event. By your own admission, you don't have the dollar figures to even begin to compute the CO2 that the money could afford for all involved so your arguement should end there.

How you made the leap to bigotry and atrocities and all other manners of evil and link them back to some environmental conscience would boggle even Einstein (wait, is he one of those racist Bush-ites, Zionists and neo-Bush-its? if so, my apologies). And by the way, you left out the rampant class discrimination, bordering on socialized racism, that is endemic to India... or didn't you hear about it?

Only heartless people wouldn't feel for the deaths of babies but are you saying that the death rate discrepancies are due to the olympics and the CO2 it generated?.. I mean, these are the only two factors that can be coherently linked in your article.

Point is, you’re letting your numbers clump the environmental innocents who just happen to win a few medals with the worst of the evil ones while the numbers themselves obfuscate some of the guilty ones who were simply unable to win some gold to make themselves stand out.

Leave the innocents out of it or at least exonerate them. Don’t let your bias show you to be passing over some of the guilty ones at the same time as you’re flogging the innocents. It’s bad for you and bad for the environmental movement at the same time.

[EcoNrgized]

1. Gold Medals cost money ($100 million each for Australia's 14).

Then again, what doesn't..?

2. 16 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease - they can be saved by expenditure on health, education, food and related resources (9,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably each year, largely due to the warped policies of climate criminal, racist White Australia e.g. its $100 million each for Australia's 14 Beijing Gold medals; according top UNICEF, 327,000 Afghan under-5 year old infants die each year in US-, UK-, NATO- and Australia-occupied Afghanistan, largely because the racist, war criminal occupiers only permit a "total annual per capita medical expenditure" of $26 per person per year [according to WHO data] - the "annual death rate" of Occupied Afghan infants is 6.2% as compared to that of 10.2% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2 or 17% for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, 1941-1945).

There ya go with the numbers again... Be more responsible or at least add more clarity. We're on the topic of the olympics and it's greeness (yeah, I put that there) so we can clearly say that people are not dying because of money spent on olympic goals (or golds, whichever you'd like)... those athletes and fans and country reps look pretty healthy to me. As for greeness, I'll give you that... the excess CO2 caused by such exertions is bound to have an impact on the nearby environmental conditions, even if only in the short term.

Secondly; no one with a mind would voluntarily spend $100M for a gold medal no matter how criminal or racist or warped their mind is, 'cause I'm sure if it were an auction they'd probably stop bidding after $1M each and instead go bribe the judges or competitors for far less!

Thirdly; I'm certain that you'd be hard-pressed to find any documentation or word of mouth proof that anyone has decreed that Afghanistan or Ethiopia or any other impoverished country may not spend more than $26 on medical care for any person in any year (maybe except if they're being tortured).

And lastly; you lose people when you put a number like 6.2% up against a number like 17%, whatever your reasoning. Most people will say "well 6.2% is clearly almost 3 better than 17%"

3. CO2 pollution is directly related to GDP in our carbon-based energy world.

Yeah, maybe, depends. Countries like Jamaica whose GDP is mostly dependent on tourism, and the fact that the tourists really don't travel much while they're there might dispute this claim... unless you count them indulging the tourists to over-consume carbon based fuels such as ethanol (they have 75% or higher overproof rum down there you know?) and plant and vegetable matter.

4. GDP is what people produce from investment (including Gold Medals).

Are the Gold medals the investment (gold can fund a lot of investments) or are they also a part of the GDP (gold is also a pretty valuable comodity)? Again, I think you'll find that the Jamaican runners didn't see much of the Jamaican GDP... heck, I don't even think most Jamaicans saw any of it either!

5. The higher the CO2 pollution, the higher the GDP and - as a rough estimate - the higher the investment in Gold medals.

:mad: Here you've gone and done it!

Your numbers, which is what we're disputing here, paint some countries as innocent just because they weren't able to win any gold, or enough gold to represent their populations size, and others as guilty just because they have a small population or highly focused talent. Clearly they all spent money on trying to win gold so you should be damning them all.

6. Disproportionately spending GDP on Gold Medals when 16 million people (9.5 million of them under-5 year old infants) are dying avoidably each year is obscene.

No argument here.

We're all here to try to even the odds. The more we can stop this crazy dependence on burning things and move back to decentralized energy production and self-sufficiency the more we'll be able to direct aid and care to those who need it most.

If anyone disagrees with propositions 1-7 please say so.

If anyone has a better measure than my admittedly crude Olympic Gold Medal Tally Green-ness Index then please apply it to several hundred countries and inform everyone of the results.

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.

:whistle: I've said my peace (pun intended) so no-one can accuse me of being silent.