On 2/28/07, Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Then you would care to share your results? But, my guess (yes, a guess, not a calculation) would be that someone staying local to their home and either seeing a FREE screening of the movie, or seeing it on television would result in lower GHG emissions compared to the GHG emissions of many people traveling to some central location, along with all the extra people needed traveling to such an event to make it possible.
But, would that central event cause more people, or a great percentage of the people who saw it, to adjust their behaviour with regards to greenhouse gasses. Just for the sake of argument, say that 10 people in a certain community see it in their own homes, and 80% of them modify their behaviour because of seeing it. 8 people lowering their emissions, with very little emissions to make them take this action. But if you have a great big party and 50 people come. Because of the social effects of seeing everyone else there, it makes a bigger impact on them than just watching it at home (peer pressure -- if they see it at home, they can decided to do something, but then back out because no one is holding them to do what they privately decided to do, but if their neighbors and friends are there, and they all promise in the excitement of the big event to all take public transportation two days a week instead of driving -- they can't as easily back out, because they told someone else they'd do it). But, in a bigger crowd, you also have a higher percentage of "non-believers" than in the self selected crowd that sees it in their own home. People who their brother or co-worker dragged to this event. So, this cancels out alot of the social pressure from seeing it as a group. Only half of the people modify their behavior. That's still 25 people -- three times as many. Did having the big even cause three times as much emissions as people seeing it in their houses? That's the cost/benefit equation that we're talking about here, it seems to me. It's way complicated to really calculate this, but I think that the peer pressure effect could cause a much higher incidence of modification of behaviour, compared to individual viewing and action, and therefore outweigh the higher emissions necessary to build to the scale where peer pressure occurs. Z
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