Liberty Alone

I still don’t understand.

Even more so since I went to Tescos the other day and noticed that their bags are biodegradable. So that’s the problem of them lasting zillions of years gone (I still say that’s not a problem if you incinerate or landfill anyway - its irresponsible disposal which is the problem - just as it is for orange peel, or tin cans, or glass bottles. Going to ban them too?)

It just seems to be received wisdom that plastic bags are bad. Surely we should be questioning the status quo and received wisdom, and with plastic bag bans, it just does not hold up as far as I can tell.

At least according to the government advisors.

This is what frustrates me about so much of the environmental movement. So little thought, just bandwagon jumping and anti-progress neo-puritan rhetoric. This does not help solve the problems we have, if anything it makes them worse.

Thankfully there are considered people in environmentalism, I just wish people would listen to them more.

This makes me think that could be the case.

How often do you stop in the supermarket when you haven’t planned to? I know I do fairly often, especially on my way home from work. In that case I don’t have my reusable bags with me (I don’t use those horrible supermarket ones either, although I do have a nice Tesco one with a sheep on it, but that’s because its cute) and if there’s too much to fit in the small bag I take to work then I use the plastic bags.

Now imagine plastic bags are banned.
What am I to do? I will have to buy a bag (or two, or three) if I want to go shopping on the spur of the moment. Of course, supermarkets will love this, more money for them. These bags however surely use more resources to make? The impact on the environment to make one of these bags will be higher, the reduction in impact will come from the reuse.

So, not only would banning plastic bags result in greater expense to consumers (and be a government backed handout to supermarkets) it would also increase the environmental damage caused by those of us who reuse bags most of the time and the impact of anyone who doesn’t care about paying the extra charge each time they go shopping.

Add in the fact that plastic bags make great bin liners which would otherwise have to be made and then bought, banning plastic bags could increase environmental impact (as well as the impact on our pockets).

Wit and Wisdom has a pretty good post on Prince Charles and his ‘War on Climate Change’.

Whilst I disagree with a small part of the post, the main thrust is how I think we should approach environmental challenges (and combined with the party’s Green Taxes it makes even more sense).

The main thrust is that we shouldn’t be promoting hair shirts, but we should be promoting the advantages.
So, conserve energy and we save money. Use less oil and we save money and resources. Recycle and we save money and resources.

I’d add that we should be paying people to sort out their rubbish for recycling. That way we can tell if something is worth recycling (ie do its benefits outweigh its costs) and the only way to do this calculation is through the price mechanism.

For more subjective things, like seasonal produce being more interesting - that is not for the government to say, it is purely subjective, but non-governmental organisations can promote that if they wish. Not everyone will agree, but you can promote the idea and probably convert more people to the cause.

Somewhere, probably in the Guardian or Comment is Free or as a press release from one of the puritanical environmental groups, there will be an article about how Valentine’s Day is not only a commercial aberration but it is also destroying the world. The CO2 emissions from growing and transporting all those flowers around the world will be criticised, the waste of all those cards which are sent. The romantic holidays which are taken when people could just stay at home.

I’m not sure whether there will be calls to ban Valentine’s day, or to tax roses, but I’m sure we’ll all be told to don our hair shirts.

(also consider this a reminder if you’d forgotten!)

Which is worse for the evironment?

Which do you think takes a bigger toll on the environment, owning a dog, or owning an SUV? My bet would be on the dog. I’m thinking of all of the resources that go into dog food.

I agree, it probably is the dog.

The comments point out that a dog has many positive side effects, people enjoy having dogs. What they miss is that the SUV also has many of the same positive side effects, people like their SUVs and sports cars.

The argument that a dog extends human life - from a strict look at the environmental impact alone works against the dog. Increased life span leads to increased emissions. This is not the point though, we are primarily concerned with human well being (most people are, outside a few misanthropic hardcore greens).

This highlights two things, firstly, as we already know, a lot of environmentalism is romanticism and anti-technological puritanism.
Secondly, and more importantly for policy makers, everything involves a trade off. The externality which is some forms of pollution occurs because there are no property rights associated with some things (and I find it difficult to see how to assign them). If property rights could be assigned or a substitute (Pigouvian taxation usually) then people will make value judgments on these trade offs. Many will accept the ownership of an SUV even with the higher costs. Others will move to more fuel efficient vehicles. Some will give up keeping pets, others will keep them even with higher costs of food.

The liberal must accept these value judgments. They may not be the same as yours, but it is not the place of another to interfere in the value judgments of others.

From the Environmental Audit Committee

Biofuels are not green, they lead to pollution and environmental damage across the board. It is possible that this may improve, but right now they are a bad idea.

That’s not counting the human costs of increased food prices, something which is already causing lots of concern and shortages in Mexico (thanks to politicians trying to get the votes of American farmers).

Of course, the National Farmers Union is all for biofuels. Then again they would be, its good for their members, who wouldn’t engage in a bit of rent seeking? And the subsidies on offer, how wonderful.
Never mind the poor or environmental damage (and the green movement never seems to be that concerned about the poor either).

Slashdot points us at the guy who invented the Super Soaker water gun and his latest technological progress - 60% efficient solar energy.

Of course, this could be a dead end, but it could be a breakthrough. It is however another example of how technology is helping us tackle environmental problems.
Cheap solar energy would also solve the political and economic problems associated with oil and gas too.

Technological progress also seems to be outpacing political solutions to these problems and seem to be working better (no idiotic biofuel mandates for starters).

An office of my acquaintance had a bit of a problem this morning. Nobody could log in to their computers.

The cause, it turned out was some idiot who taken with great zeal to save the planet switched everything off, including many things which they didn’t know what they were. This included the server rack.

So, for the sakes of saving a few kWh, the entire office was unable to do any work for two hours.

I think the benefit of the energy saved might be well overshadowed by the expense of those 40 odd lost man hours.

Energy saving is often a good thing, but there are other costs involved, just as there are in all actions. Sometimes environmental benefit may be sufficient to justify action (switching off a desktop PC for example has little effect on work time), others are not so clear cut (electric vehicles or more efficient petrol only?) and others are down right ridiculous (food rationing, mandatory organic production, and this case).

One of the big problems of much of the environmental movement is they fail to take into account costs and benefits - anything ‘good’ for the environment is deemed to be a good thing no matter what the costs. Of course, its not all environmentalists who take this view*, but it seems to prevail in the media and on the ground.

* advocates of an at-cost carbon tax or cap-and-trade are taking benefits and costs into account.

There is a very regrettable trend to blame everything on global warming. This usually pays scant regard to science and has the added problem of making people skeptical of the real dangers of global warming.

Recently, global warming has been blamed for changes in the Arctic, however, it looks like this may not be the case, as The Register reports.

Basically, the global ecosystem is incredibly complex, we don’t understand large parts of it. Global warming does and will have some very real effects, but it is not the only possible, or even probable, cause.