- Image via Wikipedia
I wrote a post a week or so ago about Community Recycling programs, and what a waste of resources they are. Really, it was just a commentary on someone else’s work, with some of my own opinion thrown in. A few comments were proffered; some agreeing whole-heartedly, others disagreeing with various aspects of my comments or the original article. One twitter friend of mine argued that “ROI metric on recycling was wrong, as $ and environment aren’t commensurate” (I don’t recall saying they were, but I suppose it was implied), and, it wasn’t landfill space that we should be worrying about at all. Rather, he opined, it is the scarcity of “natural resources” that should concern us: “once they’re gone, they’re gone.” This notion, that we’re depleting our natural resources, seems to be popular amongst folks who have concern for our Earth and the marvelous bounty of materials that we humans extract from it. My view is that this an ill-informed and narrow-minded perspective, perpetuated in no small way by progressives who have for years dominated the media. Because of the Internet, the liberal slant on these views now has a balance, but the ideas are firmly planted and continue to flourish.
The idea of natural resources is an interesting one, if you think about it. What is a “natural resource”? Most people would argue that it is something that is extracted from, or harvested off of the Earth – and, it is. If you were to ask them to name a natural resource, a lot of folks would say “oil” or “copper” or any number of other commonly-used elements. If you were to ask the same question to folks in the 18th century, you undoubtedly would have gotten a different set of responses, like ‘trees’ and ‘sheeps’ wool.’ Why? They may have known of petroleum, because it seeped from the ground naturally in some places. To them, though, it was probably a messy inconvenience. Trees were harvested to make lumber for houses; sheeps’ wool for clothing. Those things were useful to them.
Cover of The Ultimate Resource 2
That idea -usefulness- is the key to identification of, and subsequent consumption of resources. We still use timber and wool today, and in the case of trees, we still use a lot of them to build houses. We use them for a lot of other purposes, too. If you were to have asked someone in the 18th century whether they thought we’d ever run out of trees, they may have replied “why, yes – I suppose if we keep cutting them down to make lumber, we’ll eventually run out. They don’t grow back fast enough naturally to keep up with the demand.” Forestry companies, whose business it was to harvest trees for all the wood that people desired, figured this out too. So, they started planting trees, and developing intelligent harvesting schemes so there would always be enough mature trees for what we need. Today, there are over 730 million acres of timber in the United States.
Whether 730 million acres of timber is “enough” for all of our future needs depends on what we decide to use timber for in the future. Because of our ingenuity, and concerns about the supply of timber, we find substitute materials to accomplish many of the things for which we once used timber. The same could be said for many of the resources we employ in the conduct of human commerce today. We still use wool to make clothes, but many other materials are used: even recycled soda bottles can be made into material for clothing. Some ingenious person figured out a way to do that – whatever their motivation was isn’t as important as the fact that they did it.
Clothing made from soda bottles – who’da thunk it? It’s that ingenuity factor that Julian Simon expounded on in his writings. Simon was an economist and business professor who wrote a lot of material related to resources and the environment. In his book The Ultimate Resource: People, Materials, and Environment, Simon posits the argument that the supply of resources on Earth, especially energy, is infinite (Note: these three quotations are taken from separate places in the book. They are arranged thus to illustrate a point):
…a mind-boggling vision of resources: the more we use, the better off we become – and there’s no practical limit to improving our lot forever. Indeed, throughout history, new tools and new knowledge have made resources easier and easier to obtain. Our growing ability to create new resources has more than made up for temporary setbacks due to local resource exhaustion, pollution, population growth, and so on.
More people, and increased income, cause resources to become more scarce in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to search for solutions. Many fail in the search, at cost to themselves. But in a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. That is, prices eventually become lower than before the increased scarcity occurred. It is all-important to recognize that discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to an increase in scarcity – a rise in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is a good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. This point is important: Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a Malthusian race; rather, each influences the other.
“This is my long-run forecast in brief: the material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”
You’d have to read more of Simon’s well-reasoned argument to understand completely why he, and others, believe these things are true. Some have read Simon’s work, and set out to prove him wrong. One such skeptic, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish environmentalist, did just that, and came to a different conclusion than he set out to prove. In The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, Lomborg examined what he called “The Litany”, a set of assertions that drives environmental policy-making around the world. He studied policy-making that is influenced by four major themes (from Wikipedia):
- Human prosperity from an economic and demographic point of view
- Human prosperity from an ecological point of view
- Pollution as a threat to human prosperity
- Future threats to human prosperity
Cover via Amazon
Lomborg concludes his book by once again reviewing the Litany, and noting that the real state of the world is much better than the Litany claims. According to Lomborg, this poses a problem, as it focuses public attention on relatively unimportant issues, while ignoring the important ones. Or in the worst case, it forces the global community to adopt inappropriate policies which have adverse effects on humanity. This wastes resources that could be put to much better use in aiding poor countries overcoming their poverty (and thus solving their deforestation, water, hunger and pollution problems) or fighting diseases like AIDS. Also, he states that investing in technologies to produce renewable energy would be a good use for our money. Lomborg thus urges us to look at what he calls the true problems of the world, since solving those will also solve the Litany.
Lomborg’s main argument is that vast majority of environmental problems such as pollution, water shortages, deforestation, and species loss as well as population growth, hunger, and AIDS, are area-specific and highly correlated with poverty. Therefore, the problem is essentially a matter of logistics and can be largely solved by economic and social development. Concerning problems that are more pressing at the global level, such as the depletion of fossil fuels and global warming, his argument is that these problems are often overstated and the recommended policies (Litany) are often inappropriate if assessed against alternative policies. (my emphasis)
It is one thing to assert that you can’t make the argument that community recycling programs are a waste of resources because it doesn’t take into account the fact that our natural resources are being “depleted.’ But, if the basis of that assertion is a sophistry promulgated by liberal do-gooders, perpetuated by the sycophant lamestream media, and pounded ceaselessly into the heads of our schoolchildren, well then – it is altogether another thing to prove it. It’s true you can’t equate dollars and the environment. But many of the issues related to the use of resources that environmentalists find troubling today will be solved by ingenious people. Economically well-developed nations have fewer serious environmental problems than do underdeveloped ones.
A lot of the people whose ingenuity will solve resource-related problems will be motivated by profit, and that’s okay. If our progressive overlords can refrain from shackling these creative problem-solvers with short-sighted regulations and punitive tax schemes, we’ll overcome many of these “perceived” shortages of our natural resources.
