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Manifesto for Alternative Environmentalism
Thursday, August 5th, 2004I wrote one for the A Better Earth website.
27 Responses to “Manifesto for Alternative Environmentalism”
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very good article Radley. I have believed in privatizing such endeavors for a long time. You make a compelling case for it.
Isn’t that an excerpt from the John Stossell book? Sounds familiar. Mighty familiar.
You make a completely unsubstantiated claim that governments are the worst polluters. With a flick of the wrist you assert that even though its the hardest to get government to meet environmental regulations, that therefore they are the worst polluters.
It’s a bit like claiming that it’s hard to train elephants to shit in a litter box, therefore elephants are the primary producers of shit.
Huh?
dvision, w.r.t gov’t pollution, would you care to prove the opposite?
Can you demonstrate that government owned enterprises are cleaner than privately owned ones?
Can you revise history enough to make ex-soviet bloc countries ‘clean’ in retrospect?
Can you comment on the numerous nuclear reactors rotting on the bottoms of oceans, reactors, which are the property of various Navies?
As one who can see both sides of the fence, I would say a more cogent issue is what does nuclear reactors rotting on the bottom of oceans have to do with the efficacy of environmental regulations or national parks? Regarding proving the opposite, if neither side can prove its contention, I would have to conclude that I simply don’t know who is right.
As a semi Devil’s Advocate, I would also question whether the (perceived) greater likelihood for fires to occur on public lands is perhaps the result of many more large forests being publicly owned than privately owned, as well as maybe the result of public lands more often being managed to mimick the natural processes that support wildlife habitat, of which fire is one of those processes. As one who loves nature, I would hate for all forests to be managed by timber companies as such tree farms tend to be mono-cultures that do not support biodiversity. While I take Balko’s point that “private organizations have had lots of success in preserving species through positive incentives,” such efforts would only likely work for a limited number of species, i.e., those for whom there exist “positive incentives.” If one holds all species sacred and considers human induced extinction a tragedy, one would be reluctant to put one’s faith solely in such voluntary efforts. (That statistic about the ESA only saving 8 or 1400 species makes it sound like 1392 species have gone extinct, but does it really mean only 8 are off the list and most of the others are still around even if still endangered?)
That said, I agree with Balko on many points. But he needs to successfully address the issues I raised before I would extend my generally libertarian leanings into a libertarian puritanism on environmental issues.
Public hospitals: A recent study I heard about on All Things Considered said that in general, you should choose the public hospital over the private one. The problem is that the private ones tend to charge more for less service.
Environment: The largest polluter in the U.S. is the U.S. military which is almost completely exempt from pollution laws. That needs to change. They should be included unless there is a demonstrable reason why a particular item must be exempted. Yes, I would happily put my tax money where my mouth is to clean up the crap.
Secondly, we need more nuke power like those god-danged French got. Yes, please put it in my backyard; I’m not worried at all so long as proper procedures are followed and a well-tested design is used (why not license a French one?).
Thirdly, all business, including government business, is first and foremost dumb. They spend zillions of dollars fixing Windows viruses… but then leave all the lights and computers on all night long, wasting money as well as putting their data at risk. Let me be more clear: even though there is a demonstrable profit motive to not waste electricity, they still allow employees to keep their machines — and sometimes all the lights — on all night just to save 120 seconds in the morning. It’s mindbogglingly ridiculous.
Rant: I guess I’m just waiting for all the baby boomers to die off. Their sense of entitlement, largess, and waste is only surpassed by their hubris.
Grumbly,
-l
Everyday I am reminded of two things:
1. nuclear power should not be in my back yard, please. gotta love the cooling towers I see everyday that haven’t been working since 1979.
2. people need nuclear reactors to take them up 2 flights of stairs, to open their doors, to communicate with others 50 feet away, and to sit in conditioned 72 degree air when it’s 75 degrees outside.
Second stab at making my point.
[The US] Government doesn’t manufacture tin cans or make corn oil. They don’t do a whole lot of types of activities which are big pollution generators–unless you count the global warming caused from all the hot air expelled on Capitol Hill. My point is that the private manufacturing industry dwarfs nearly all other sources of pollution in the United States, so Radley’s point is a bit misguided.
Secondly, even though pissant is probably pushing it a bit, he has a valid point. Businesses and people in general (and particularly in the US) are extremely inefficient when it comes to the resources at their disposal. When a resource is cheap there is little incentive to conserve it–cheap energy has allowed our energy usage to far surpass other countries’; do you think that it has markedly improved our standard of living?
Do you need that 200+ HP sedan or 4500lb mammoth of an SUV? What about streetlamps? Ever think how much energy those collectively blast into space each night?
My favorite BIG DUMB of modern society is urban automobile transportation; for all of those who care; try multiplying the population of your home city by 150 sq/ft and then divide by 27,878,400 and you have the number of square miles of parking lot required to park all the cars in one spot! Then you can multiply by 5 to figure out how many parking spaces there probably are in the city. And if you’re feeling an extra sense of depression due to inefficiency, you can be comforted by the knowledge that most of those cars sit unused for 23 hours a day, doing nothing more than taking up space.
How exactly do we divide up the seas Radley?
Perhaps construct giant Plexiglas barriers to prevent one country’s pollution from infecting another’s fish?
And, hey, while we’re at it let’s just build ‘em all the way out of the stratosphere so air-born pollutants don’t cross borders either.
We could create little habitats and then buy and sell rights to polluting them.
Sorry, Earth isn’t perfect. It’s got commons. And, devoid of legal restrictions, all it takes is one crazy/greedy to ruin all of the commons.
dvision:
“Do you need that 200+ HP sedan or 4500lb mammoth of an SUV?”
Need for what? Need to survive? Of course not. Need to be happy? Of course not. Need to be as happy as you would be without one or the other? Apparently all the people who buy one or the other think so. In fact, they think they’d be happier with one of those items than they would be without it AND the money it costs. If you think they’re wrong, if you think you know what’s good for them better than they do, well now that’s why folks of your way of thinking often get called “elitist.” And so what if cars do nothing most of the time, as long as they do what we want when we want them to! Is your home useless when you’re not there? And when you say businesses are inefficient, compared to what? Compared to what YOU think they SHOULD be? So what? They’re not in business to impress YOU. They’re efficient enough to make it worth doing what they’re doing instead of doing something else. Ever taken Econ 101?
As for your first point, both you and Joker have traded isolated anecdotes, and so we’re all back to where we started, not having any comprehensive evidence to back either assertion. And of course as I pointed out previously, it’s a pointless point anyway. That the government does pollute plenty (whether or not it’s more than private business) certainly helps demonstrate that governmental shit stinks as good as other’s (no surprise here), but relating the level of government created pollution to the issue of environmental protection is akin to saying that because governments kill more people than private citizens do (ie, in war), governments should therefore not try to enforce laws against murder or manslaughter. The one simply has nothing to do with the other. As far as I can tell, anyway…
The gov’t simply OWNS too much land to ever test Radly’s point about private ownership. Out here in the West it’s VILE how much real estate is National Forest, BLM, Army Corps of Engineers, Blah Blah Blah.(and knowing an urban congressional district with more people than my whole state can elect a statist to keep it that way.)
At least half of this land needs to be sold right now. Just think of the potential tax burden lifted by the influx of cash….we could “save” social security!
give it back in reparations to former slaves and solve two issues at once.
/sarcasm
Funny how all these people complain about wasting resources when they all are using computers, driving cars and shopping at supermarkets. Never would they consider not using computers, riding a bike or growing their own food. Certainly that would save resources but would be a big hassle to say the least.
Free to consume…free not to consume. You can live off the land like people do in Africa or way back in the Old West but I doubt you would be willing to give up your car, cell phone, the internet, MP3 player, supermarkets, etc.
The only problem with Radley’s article is he doesn’t offer enough evidence for his points. Got to put that in there Radley. You cannot write a convincing article with out some numbers and references. If that was in there that article would become a great resource for those of us who are actually educated about these issues and not brain washed by evil fascists organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and Al Gore Inc. who feel that the common good is more important than individual liberty.
Amac, do you really believe that politicians would use that newly found source of tax revenue to “save” Social Security? I highly doubt it. The tax burden would not be lifted from anyone. If the government sold a piece of land to me and collected taxes for it that doesn’t mean they are going to lower your taxes.
there are larger forces at work in our biosphere than can be properly understood, let alone tabulated and costed by some silly economist. and quit the back-slapping, we’re a virus with shoes.
you want to be able to better make your case, or invest in fish futures? invest in funding ecologists to understand how this world does in fact work in relation to everything else.
the only reason businesses or anyone should care about resource efficiency is twofold:
1. the people finally realize that resources are indeed finite. if people like their current standard of living, they’d better understand its implications as to the long haul for humanity and even their own lives.
2. businesses should realize that resources wasted is money burned at the power plant or tree farm.
carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, per say. but, there is an anthropogenic imbalance in our atmosphere due to the industrial revolution and our current way of living. nobody really knows what it is going to do to our climate, but the implications can be frightening, especially if you like the way things are already on this planet. some researchers are finding we can sequester carbon back out of our atmosphere through intense organic agriculture. put the carbon back into the soil, where it belongs. our current ag practices are horrendous, note the dead zone in the gulf.
these situations are all complex, and cannot simply be dissected and categorized. every cost is an external/tangential cost.
hey fangsign, that’s very cute what you just did. pick out the hypocrisy of those trying to make and keep their world a better place for everyone. you wanna cookie?
understanding the true cost of our actions leads people to question their consumption. this means all those externalities not fully costed by economists. once you understand the full costs of your actions, then you can make more knowledgeable decisions in how, what and why you consume, depending on your personal beliefs, etc. I think that would be a great marketing technique.
but lumping all consumption as one is quite, well, simplistic and amateurish (is this a word? well, I say it is). i would say it’s quite immature, really. you’re not understanding why anyone would really question their consumption.
pissant,
I’m all for attaching a cost (call it a tax or a fine) to activities that cause harm that is so spread out (including to those who participate in the activities themselves) that it cannot be addressed in more typical criminal or civil proceddings.
But let’s leave your apocalyptic speculation out of the equation because there’s no way of knowing how the use of a resource today might harm someone in the future. In case you haven’t noticed, resources by themselves are useless, it’s technology that makes them useful, and technology is constantly advancing. Meaning with time we can do more with the same or less amount of resources, and that a resource that is vital today could become unneeded in the future. Plus, most (if not all) resources have been coming down in price over the years (yes, even oil, despite its current spike), which means there’s little fear of running out anytime soon (or not so soon). Technology also plays a role in this as industry becomes more and more efficient at both exploitation of a given resource and its extraction.
Of course, since you seem to be rejecting the value of economics in favor of abstract apocalyptic fear, I doubt anything I say will sink in. The anti-intellectualism of those who would dismiss people who actually study these issues as “silly” is one of the reasons I abandoned the left. I suspect such apocalyptic fears among environmental lefts have a similar psychological basis as the same type of fears in fundamentalist Christians.
Commons exist, and persist independent of notions of “ownership”. Abetterearth reads like a ham-fisted attempt to make the environment serve a political cause. Was this endeavour entered into honestly? It sure seems like the authors here are using environmental issues to press home their case for de-regulation, rather than looking for genuine alternative solutions to tricky environmental problems.
What about waste? You can not tell me that un-regulated waste management systems are less damaging to the environment than regulated ones. There is no value in preserving waste or treating any more than the minimum requires, the cheaper it’s disposed of the more money is made. How is de-regulation of waste management going to help anything?
dvision -
“[The US] Government doesn’t manufacture tin cans or make corn oil.”
That’s true, but I don’t beleve he was necessarily referring to the US government specifically, just government, in general.
The Soviet government did indeed manufacture an awful lot, considering that they owned all of it.
Good article, Radley.
The bit on endangered species being better helped by private organizations reminds me of something Rush said a while back (paraphrasing):
“You want to save an endangered species? Put it on the menu.”
fyodor,
you misunderstand what I am saying, my bad. I’m in favor of all metrics that help people understand the repercussions of their actions and decisions. I am ranting against the conventional economists because they leave so much OUT of their equations. if it takes breaking down resource costs and environmental implications into dollar figures for some people to comprehend, then I am all for it.
I do not mean attaching a “cost” to everything we do. I’m saying: identify the costs ($, CO2, whatever) so you can base your own actions off what is actually known.
the apocolyptic speculation is just that, speculation. that is all i am saying. as for extrapolating resource “harm” in the future: it’s simple. those in the future will have less resources to work with if we continue to use them the way we are. the majority of people think things can go on like they do indefinitely. as for the efficiency and technology “hopes”, I think they’re dreams, just like my purported apocolyptic speculation. I am interested in finding out whether or not we can go on like this and for how long. but I mean if our legacy is wastefulness, slothfulness, and avarice, then that’s what it is.
and quit accusing me of being lefty wefty, I wouldn’t be here on this lib rag if I thought the government should control everything we do. I value freedom as much as I value people not shitting in my pool.
>hey fangsign, that’s very cute what
>you just did. pick out the hypocrisy >of those trying to make and keep their >world a better place for everyone. you >wanna cookie?
You mean fascists? That’s exactly what fascism is—bunch of yentas going around claiming that social and economic issues must be resolved by a centralized government for the common good even if it means violating individual liberty.
And to back up what fyodor said, you cannot offer up any sound scientific theories (not hypothesis) that shows exactly how human consumption of resources will impact future generations. Computer models are not sound and neither are sci-fi movies about global warming.
The only thing you can offer up is that everything you do in your daily life uses some kind of natural resource–oil being the largest. You can choose not to consume, or you choose not to. When people say we shouldn’t do this or shouldn’t do that but still consume as many resources as everyone else then that’s pretty fishy and it should be questioned. They aren’t doing it to make the world a better place.
pissant,
“those in the future will have less resources to work with if we continue to use them the way we are.”
Well, those in the future will have less *reserves* of resources to work with (perhaps that’s what you meant, but I think it’s worth making clear) and that will be true if we continue to use them *at all*. The question is, so what? Will they need the resources as we do today? Maybe, maybe not. Will the resources be as plentiful as they are today? Maybe not, but quite possibly so, because technology will likely make their exploitation and extraction more efficient, in which case even smaller reserves could go just as far or further. Which of course brings me to your next point, that my foreseeing continued advanced technology is a “dream.” No, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to predict that technology will continue to advance has it has throughout human history rather than to think there is some possibility it will suddenly stop still! And when I say that advanced technology will make exploitation and extraction of resources more efficient, that is based on the fact that this has been going on all along. And of course new technologies make old ones obsolete all the time. This is no dream. I cannot speculate as to the exact nature of future changes and advances, but I’m on firm ground to predict in the absract that they will certainly happen.
“but I mean if our legacy is wastefulness, slothfulness, and avarice, then that’s what it is.”
Well who knows how future generations will view us. I’d guess they’ll think we’re less advanced than them but more advanced than those who came before us. Ultimately, you’re just making personal value judgments.
“and quit accusing me of being lefty wefty”
Uh, sorry. But what can I say, that’s what you’ve been sounding like.
wade,
I can see why you think the Abetterearth folk are rationalizing a pre-existing agenda, but please know that environmental leftists look the SAME WAY to those of us who see the foolishness of central planning and appreciate the value of property rights.
As for waste and regulation, let’s ask what the problem IS with waste. Is it just that you don’t like it? That’s your own problem. Is it that it is hazardous, poisonous? Hold those producing and storing the waste reponsible for harm their waste does to the rights (of self and property) of others. I’m of the school that believes this should ideally be done in a graduated manner, as opposed to up X is okay and then after X you’re suddenly evil. Of course, since you’ve already told us that no one can tell you that centralized regulation isn’t the best way to handle the waste, I may as well not even try…
fyodor,
Your comments are the epitomy of short-sightedness and sloth, despite your unverifiable faith in that which you cannot predict. It is a hallmark of little minds to have faith that things will come about without worry of who or what will bring them about or what is required to stimulate their creation.
dvision,
It’s always happened, and so I think it’s reasonable to think it will continue to happen. That’s faith?
As for your nastiness…whatever.