Since it’s basically a way of protecting property rights, environmental protection is a legitimate function of government.
That’s the easy part. It gets a lot harder when calculating costs and benefits.
Everyone surely agrees that a chemical company shouldn’t be able to dump toxic waste in a town’s reservoir because the costs would out-weigh the benefits. And presumably everyone also would concur that banning private automobiles would be crazy because this would be another example of costs being greater than benefits.
But there’s a lot of stuff in between those extreme examples where agreement is elusive.
And I’ll admit my bias. I don’t trust the modern environmental movement, particularly the climate alarmists. There are just too many cases where green advocates act like their real goal is statism.
Moreover, the hypocrisy of some environmental dilettantes is downright staggering.
And they also seem to be waging a regulatory war on modern life.
I’m giving all this background to create context for an article I want to discuss.
John Tierney, a columnist for the New York Times. has a piece that debunks recycling. He starts by looking back 20 years.
As you sort everything into the right bins, you probably assume that recycling is helping your community and protecting the environment. But is it? Are you in fact wasting your time? In 1996, …I presented plenty of evidence that recycling was costly and ineffectual, but its defenders said that…the modern recycling movement had really just begun just a few years earlier, they predicted it would flourish as the industry matured and the public learned how to recycle properly.
So what’s happened over the years? Has recycling become more feasible and rational?
Not exactly. From a cost-benefit perspective, it’s a scam. It simply doesn’t make sense.
…when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all. Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. …the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. …The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. …“Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected…”
Tierney specifically addresses the issue of greenhouse gasses.
…well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits. …Here’s some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. …if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
A traditional argument for mandated recycling is that landfill space is vanishing.
But that’s always been bunk.
One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills. But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland… Though most cities shun landfills, they have been welcomed in rural communities that reap large economic benefits (and have plenty of greenery to buffer residents from the sights and smells).
Moreover, incinerators are another practical option.
Modern incinerators, while politically unpopular in the United States, release so few pollutants that they’ve been widely accepted in the eco-conscious countries of Northern Europe and Japan for generating clean energy.
The bottom line is that recycling is an expensive feel-good gesture by guilt-ridden rich people.
In New York City, the net cost of recycling a ton of trash is now $300 more than it would cost to bury the trash instead. That adds up to millions of extra dollars per year — about half the budget of the parks department — that New Yorkers are spending for the privilege of recycling. That money could buy far more valuable benefits, including more significant reductions in greenhouse emissions. …why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether rich people should feel guilty about their resource consumption.
But I definitely get agitated when they try to atone for their guilt by foisting costly and ineffective policies on other people.
P.S. That’s why I consider myself to be pro-environment while also being a skeptic of environmentalists. Simply stated, too many of these people are nuts.
- Environmentalists assert that you’re racist if you oppose their agenda.
- Some environmentalists don’t believe in bathing,
- How about the environmentalists who sterilize themselves to avoid carbon-producing children,
- Or consider the environmentalists who produce/use hand-cranked vibrators to reduce their carbon footprint.
- There are also environmentalist who claim that climate change causes AIDS.
- And environmentalists put together a ranking implying that Cuba is better than the United States.
- The environmentalists who choose death to lower their carbon footprints.
P.P.S. Some environmental policies lead to disgusting examples of government thuggery (some of which, fortunately, are not successful).
[…] For what it’s worth, I’ve always though recycling was overrated. […]
[…] page. If you prefer YouTube, the folks at CEPOS in Denmark saw the same speech (I only oppose wasteful forms of recycling) and they posted it […]
[…] page. If you prefer YouTube, the folks at CEPOS in Denmark saw the same speech (I only oppose wasteful forms of recycling) and they posted it […]
When I lived in Ohio back in the 1980s there was a scare that we were running out of landfill space. Environmentalists howled about how we needed more recycling etc. But what did it mean to “run out of landfill space”? Did it mean that every square inch of the state was now covered in trash? Of course not. It meant that the space that had been bought for landfill space and prepared for that purpose was close to its planned capacity. The solution was simple: the government and private trash companies bought a little more land to create new landfills, went through the process of preparing the sites so that toxic wastes wouldn’t leak into groundwater and all that, and the problem was solved. In fact they overdid it, and Ohio ended up selling landfill space to other states. We were importing trash as a profit-making venture.
My ex-wife was big on recycling. She would save up all of our newspapers and once or twice a year take them to a recycling center. She used to pile them up in our living room. I regularly complained that these piles of newspapers in the living room were ugly and annoying, but she insisted that we had to do our part to help the environment. Once she came back after dropping off a year’s worth at the recycling center and told me that the amount they paid had gone down: they’d given her only $2. I pointed out that she surely spent more than $2 on the gas to drive there and back.
In a free market, if we were running out of natural resources it would stand to reason that the cost of extracting new resources from the ground would be going up and up, as it could harder and harder to find new deposits and the ones that were easy to extract were used up. Meanwhile the quantity of material available for recycling would be going up, and so the cost should be coming down. At some point the cost of extracting new raw materials would be more than the cost of recycling. People would have a direct economic incentive to recycle. You wouldn’t need guilt and social pressure or government subsidies. We clearly have not reached that point, even with government subsidies. Ergo, most forms of recycling are a waste of time, money, and effort.
Excellent
Mr Mitchell, sorry for off topic but in the wake of the UCC Shooting, I was struck by the realization that gun-ban Australia and gun-filled Switzerland both have far less frequent mass shootings than the USA. If I recall, Australia’s last major one was in 1996 and Switzerland’s in 2001.
Hence some factor other than ‘gun culture’ or ‘number of guns’ must be at play, driving up the shooting rate in the USA. It’s a clear and straightforward comparison.
(In the spirit of snark I ventured it’s actually the fault of Democrat policies… http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/09/gun-crime-soaring-in-these-democrat-run-cities/ )
What I found more interesting than the article itself were some of the commenters. Many of whom were adamant that cost should not be considered since after all we should not be dumping into a landfill even if it costs us more to recycle, a lot more. They seem to miss that ‘allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses’ chant which means the money they are wasting could be used for real environmental investment.
Humanity’s still strong innate collectivist instinct (from primordial zero growth and zero innovation times — when it was actually a useful instinct) is desperately seeking an outlet. With “red” collectivism on the decline, “green” is the new primary vector for this collectivist tendency.
Slower growth is the biggest consequence facing humanity. Remember, a one percent reduction in global growth compounds to 250% in a century. With implied slowdowns in all technology and progress that this growth must inevitably encapsulate.
Had our ancestors’ growth been a mere quarter more than it actually was since the Renaissance, we would now be one hundred fifty years ahead, in a world without cancer (to name a few benefits) and who knows what other fantastical things none of us can even imagine. Conversely, had growth been a quarter less, we would still be one hundred years behind, starting the first world war, and dying from tuberculosis, malaria and the flu.
That is what is at stake in slower or faster growth. It is by far the greatest threat or boon.
[…] Reposted from International Liberty […]
Damn good Mitchell ! H
Hartford Campbell BA Speech Communications -UGA JD WOODROW WILSON LAW SCHOOL
Realtor since 1987 – Palmer House Properties Independent Insurance Agent since 1984
770-633-3429 cell ; 1-888-219-4943 efax
Hartford Campbell Sr. / T C REALTY LLC 781 Iris Ter Decatur, Ga 30033
>