Tag: environmentalism

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Rebel in Eden?

environmentalism, hysteria, authoritarianism, Robert Bidinotto, individualism

The title of Robert Bidinotto’s bracing new collection, Rebel in Eden: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism, may occasion objection to the word “environmentalism.”

Of course, if “environmentalism” pertained only to how best to reduce pollution and litter and so forth, who would have need to combat it? Freedom-​minded individualists, for example, would debate means, not ends.

But that’s not the kind of thing that the environmentalists themselves — or “radical environmentalists,” to distinguish them from people who manage cleanup crews — focus on.

Radical environmentalists regard humanity as a blight on the face of the earth; they regard nature as an end itself (an “intrinsic value”) that should be left alone regardless of the cost to that mere interloper, man. In their view, plants and animals have “rights,” men and women do not; mining is “raping” the earth — all documented here. 

These are issues that Bidinotto has been reporting on and analyzing since at least the early 1980s, in places like the On Principle and Intellectual Activist newsletters and Reader’s Digest. So this collection has been in the making for some forty years.

Some of the don’t‑miss essays: “Death by Environmentalism,” “The Great Pesticide Panic,” “Animal Rights: A New Species of Egalitarianism,” “Global Warming and the New Totalitarianism,” “California, Thank Environmentalism for Your Wildfires,” “Environmentalism or Individualism?” I might list the whole table of contents.

Take a look. Bidinotto, by the way, has also contributed a piece “On Courage” to our sister website, StoptheCCP​.org.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Flush The White House

water pipes, ecology, Joe Biden, dishwasher, toilets

The people who gave America the double- and triple-​flush toilet have set their sights on our automatic dishwashers.

Well, that’s not quite right. It was Congress that gave us the regulations that turned our toilets into a nightmare of clogging and extra time with plungers and flush levers. I wrote about this nightmare for years, advising readers to “Flush Congress.”

Now it isn’t Congress directly, but “the White House” — and the Department of Energy in particular, according to a story in The Epoch Times. “The Administration is using all the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” states Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

She’s talking about new efficiency standards for power and water usage which the DOE insists will “cut energy use by 27 percent and water use by 34 percent in new conventional household dishwashers.”

But anyone who has endured the toilets that came out in the 1990s knows that these putatively well-​intentioned schemes burst the pipes, so to speak, making a mess and a mockery of any concept of efficiency. The Biden is enthusiastically pushing the piety that intentions matter most in regulation — the If We Mandate It, It Shall Be philosophy. Yet,The Epoch Times contrasts the current administration with the previous: “Trump criticized the push to raise efficiency standards, arguing that they made some appliances work less effectively and so were counterproductive” … and then mentions the multiple flushes of toilets that I cannot help but remember.

Trump’s surely right; The Biden’s surely wrong. And the ultimate result will be to raise the costs of appliances, thus hitting the poor hardest. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom too much government

Are We Graduating from Plastic?

plastic, environmentalism, California, law, prohibitions, bans,

In The Graduate (1967), the young man played by Dustin Hoffman gets advice from an elder. “Just one word: plastics.” “Exactly how do you mean, sir?” “There’s a great future in plastics.”

When the world bans all plastic in 2021, that will be the end of that market opportunity. Other components of civilization will be discontinued in 2022.

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. After all, there’s always the black market.

A plastic-​bag ban is underway in New York City. Four states and five territories have already banned disposable plastic bags, as have countries around the world. New Yorkers are reportedly two-​to-​one in favor. A friend who lives there confirms this widespread resignation.

“I’m not happy about what it [plastic] does to the environment,” says one New Yorker. “But … what it does to my environment if I don’t have them is a nightmare.”

“This is a good thing because it’s helping the environment,” says another.

The problem of trash disposal has been solved. We use garbage cans, pickups, landfills. It’s a problem that must be continuously re-​solved. Like many other problems … such as how to carry groceries.

We adopted plastic bags because they are much more convenient than paper. Convenience, efficiency, effectiveness: many man-​made components of civilization serve these goals.

Reduction to absurdity can persuade only if the listener rejects the absurd. In 1967, the idea of banning plastic bags and plastic straws seemed, to most, absurd. Today, maybe two thirds of New Yorkers lament the inconvenience but add whaddyagonnado … when you gotta protect the environment?

That this measure will not protect much of anything, but merely allow activists to think well of themselves is, itself, absurd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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plastic, environmentalism, California, law, prohibitions, bans,

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Nixed Ski Trek App Flap

Tread Share, regulations, Colorado, environmentalism,

In Colorado, like other states, the people’s ingenuity often surprises. And in the Rocky Mountain State, like elsewhere, governments are known to worry about what free people do — and, unsurprisingly, often get in the way.

A popular new ride-​sharing app, called TreadShare, hit the market last month, designed to alleviate traffic on I‑70, the route from Denver to popular skiing destinations. The app makes the trip to the mountain slopes far cheaper than Uber of Lyft — not to mention easier on the environment.

So, of course, the State of Colorado has superciliously suppressed this innovation. Over safety worries, allegedly.

“The idea behind the app is for carpoolers to share the cost of gas and mileage, incentivizing the drivers to bring additional passengers and the passengers to get a cheap ride up to the mountains,” writes Taylor Sienkiewicz in Summit Daily. “Shortly following the launch, TreadShare received a ‘cease and desist’ letter from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. This caused TreadShare to shut down operations and another similar app, Gondola, not to launch.”

Not receiving an apparently required $111,250 annual license, nor proof the company performs background checks on all drivers, the state government has “helpfully” squelched these two ride-​sharing services.

What about safety? The Colorado State Patrol, whose job is ostensibly to maximize highway traffic safety, might wish to work with the app-​makers to provide any useful security features.

But preventing organized carpooling through pricey up-​front licensing requirements and ridiculous red tape doesn’t seem like promoting safety, but more like typical high-​handed government regulatory overreach.

Thankfully, citizen activists have formed a group and are petitioning the legislature to join the rest of the Centennial State in the modern world. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tread Share, regulations, Colorado, environmentalism,

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Common Sense folly general freedom ideological culture nannyism too much government

I Prefer Plastic

Paper or Plastic, collage, photomontage, Paul Jacob, James Gill, illustration, politics

When I go to the supermarket, and get asked “paper or plastic?” — about which bag the checker should wrap my purchases in — I almost always say “plastic.” They are lighter than paper bags, are easily re-​usable for a wide variety of home purposes, and resist water — thus less apt to self-​destruct on the trip from store to car, car to kitchen.

Of course, anything plastic and mega-​popular makes a perfect target for environmentalist critics. Hundreds of cities, particularly on the West Coast — but throughout the world — now outlaw plastic bags or restrict their use.

We are encouraged to buy and re-​use cloth shopping bags — which in my experience get stinky pretty quickly.

On many issues (say, pollution) my heart is with the environmentalists. But on the bag issue, I’m skeptical. Thankfully, Katherine Mangu-​Ward has a great piece at Reason, showing that the scientific case against the plastic bag is weak — weaker than a paper bag holding wet veggies, an exploded Coke, and frozen meat.

Plastic bags are not the litter problem they’ve been cracked up to be, she says, citing one study figuring that “all plastic bags, of which plastic retail bags are only a subset, are just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide.”

And, as for harm to wildlife, she quotes a Greenpeace biologist to good effect: “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags.… On a global basis plastic bags aren’t an issue.”

What is at issue is their utility, reusability, and … our freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Paper or Plastic, collage, photomontage, Paul Jacob, James Gill, illustration, politics

 

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Unsustainable Pseudo-​thinking

One of the fashionable thought-​killing words offered by the cliché-​recycling movement is “sustainable.”

In the common tongue, as spoken by many, many environmentalists, this term implies that we will run out of all our stuff pretty soon unless everybody on the planet (except maybe Al Gore) is put on a strict low-​consumption regimen.

The environmental movement has adopted the color “green,” but “drab-​gray” is what comes to mind when I’m told that we must treat economic goods as existing in a fixed quantity, only to be skimpily apportioned (by regulators), never massively expanded (by profit-​seeking producers, as they’ve done whenever free to do so).

In fact, as economist and Cafe Hayek blogger Don Boudreaux argues in his article “Unsustainable Platitudes,” market actors tend to swiftly counteract shortages that occur in a market context. When supply of a good slumps for whatever reasons, prices for it rise. Rising prices yield predictable effects. That is, they

  • nudge customers to economize; and
  • entice profit-​seeking producers and vendors to create more of the good, or
  • provide good-​enough (or better) substitutes for it,
  • or both.

This is Economics 101, teachable in one lesson.

The Wall Street Journal saw fit to quote Boudreaux, provoking the ire of enviro-​cliché aficionado Joshua Holman. He contacted Boudreaux to accuse him of “[emitting] word pollution … to block the work of the many activists struggling to save our planet from overuse, exploitation and destruction.” In reply, Boudreaux suggests that reality “cannot be grasped, and it certainly cannot be improved, with slogans.”

Slogans do have their place. They’re just not a sustainable substitute for reasoning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly too much government

Owls to Spare?

Since 1990, the federal government has placed a stranglehold on the forest industry in Oregon and Washington and California in order to save a species of bird, Strix occidentalis caurina, better known as the Northern spotted owl.

The program has not been successful, experts tell us, with spotted owls declining 40 percent over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, the common striped barred owl, Strix varia, has horned in on the spotted owl territory. It’s a more aggressive bird.

What to do?owls

Why, call the barred owl an “invasive species” and shoot the interlopers, of course!

The slaughter, approved over a year ago, is now going forward, at the cost of a million dollars per year.

Though the government and reporters like to call the two species of owl “distant cousins,” they apparently interbreed, and their offspring — called “sparred owls” — look just like spotted owls. You might think that this is a problem that takes care of itself, but no. On with the slaughter!

Meanwhile, as Teresa Platts of the Property and Environment Research Center notes, vast sectors of national forest remain unlogged and unmanaged, while wildfire suppression continues … which leads, of course, to mega-​fires. Coming soon.

The ways of animal flourishing, in the wild, are not the ways of the governments that aim to protect the wild. Both are cruel, but at least one can understand the processes of nature.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

“Good” Civilization-​Destroying Intentions

Should we surrender our industrially fueled civilization the better to fuel fantasies of appeasing Gaia, goddess of the Earth?

The New York Times urges the Obama administration to block a much-​needed oil pipeline from Canada as a gesture toward deflecting the purported threat of anthropogenic global warming.

“In itself, the Keystone pipeline will not push the world into a climate apocalypse,” admits the editorial. “But it will continue to fuel our appetite for oil and add to the carbon load in the atmosphere. There is no need to accept it.” The oil drops add up. “At the very least, saying no to the Keystone XL will slow down plans to triple tar sands production from just under two million barrels a day now to six million barrels a day by 2030.”

That’s what we want, right? Less and less of the fuel we need to go places and do things?

But if government is justified in blocking the Keystone pipeline on such a basis, isn’t it also warranted in stopping existing oil production?

What offends the “greens” is every form of “raping of the earth” for mere human survival and comfort — including to protect ourselves against weather that has always been variable, often extremely so. By their logic, the only moral way to defend against the elements is to surrender to them. No more building houses, wearing coats, adding gas to heater tanks and car tanks. Shut everything down.

I can’t say I’m persuaded.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Philosophic Anti-​Fanaticism

Popular French philosopher Pascal Bruckner is in hot water with fellow left-​leaning French intellectuals.

Bruckner doesn’t hate humanity and doesn’t want to unplug all the life-​promoting conveniences of industrial civilization. He intimates as much in a controversial new book entitled The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, available only in French for now, but soon in English translation as well.

The book assails ludicrous and nihilistic environmentalist pronouncements of the Left. As the title suggests, the author believes that these are based more in religious fervor than in carefully reasoned science. He stipulates that he does not object to ecology as such but rather to the “greenwashing” notions that the “planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay.”

After all, what is the “carbon footprint that we all leave behind us [but] the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?” A baleful implication of such views is that peoples in developing countries should forget about improving their economic and technological circumstances. The earth has suffered enough, n’est-ce pas?

Bruckner’s observations underscore how radical environmentalism is largely a convenient hook for anti-​capitalism. Long before anybody fretted about our chronic exhaling of carbon dioxide, certain anti-​capitalists urged the extinguishing of industrial civilization and a return to the blissful Tupperware-​free, iPhone-​free, hunting-​and-​gathering way of life.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Liberals Against Fracking

Fracking — not just for Battlestar Galactica nerds any longer.

Colloquial for “hydraulic fracturing,” fracking is a process of forcing water deep into oil shale to bring up natural gas. Combined with horizontal drilling (that is, and I’m not making any of this up, drilling somewhat sideways to avoid topside damage), fracking promises to be the next big breakthrough in energy development.

Just so long as government doesn’t mess it up.

Well, there’s debate about this. Gasland, a recent documentary, cited numerous examples of contaminated well water. And yet, last week Judge Nancy Freudenthal reversed federal government regulations against fracking, dismissing Gasland-promoted harms as “speculative.”

Anti-​factual? Anti-science?

Not according to science writer Ronald Bailey, who has argued that fracking itself is harmless. Things can go wrong in any industrial process, and in cases where substantial damage has occurred because of negligence or incompetence, major judgments against energy companies have been awarded to their victims.

Just as things are supposed to go, in a free society.

But folks leaning to the left prefer the “precautionary principle,” at least when it comes to business. “[T]he new reality,” according to a Washington Examiner editorial, is that “those who are now seeking to stop history — or at least the development of new energy technologies — are liberals, led by President Obama.”

Had the Examiner used “progressive” instead of “liberals,” the irony of today’s Progressives being against progress might have unearthed one of this age’s sadder political truths. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.