Cory's Hell Bent for Leather

Over on the mothership, young master Doctorow is laying some serious science into some folks complaining about the ecological footprint of these solar-panel-sporting leather bags.

Unless you're involved in some kind of deep green historical reenactment club where you mine your own ores using organic shovels, any manufactured commercial artifact (including and especially the PC you're reading this on) will have a gigantic and evil carbon footprint.

If the ruling classes are going to go out this xmas and blow $400 on shoulder bags, I'd rather have them spend their dough on a bag that reduces the amount of coal we burn to run our cellphones than on some inert piece of Prada (not least because the more money there is spent on solar bags and clothes, the larger the market will be and the cheaper and more widely dispersed they will be).

Objecting to a "green" product because it is a *product* is pure doctrinaire absurdity. All the people reading this blog are digging coal with their spacebars, and living a lifestyle that is dozens of orders of magnitude more environmentally damanging that the majority of the world's population.

That guy should write for a living!

Handsome leather solar bags [Boing Boing]

[#1 posted by Anonymous , November 27, 2007 11:47 AM]

Ha ha! Well said. Ah, sweet hypocrisy.

[#2 posted by Halloween Jack , November 27, 2007 12:33 PM]

Your "carbon cockprint" line wasn't too shabby, either, Joel. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the "leather is murder" folk in that thread are all trustafarians.

[#3 posted by ianm , November 27, 2007 9:21 PM]

For the record, Joel Johnson of your BB Gadgets gave a scathing pan to a similar product, on many of the same grounds (cost, materials, hype, image) only marketed to different audiences:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/10/19/poptech-notes-sheila.html

Why the zealous defense of a product when its $412 rather than when its targeted, nominally at least, to help those who don't have the luxury of easy access to electricity?

Although the products are not identical, ultimately Joel's original criticism stands for both:

"I think it is safe to say...An inexpensive, durable solar-powered light would be fantastically useful in many scenarios...[but]The Portable Light smacks of remedial design as pet project, an expensive solution in search of a problem."