I read in the Feb. 4 Maroon that there is a new initiative under way to teach “environmental consciousness” to the student body.
The question of saving the environment is, of course, a concern that transcends political parties, ideologies and even religions. Everyone wants a better, cleaner environment and a world with less pollutants. In the spirit of giving, though, I think there’s an important counterpoint that could be easy to miss and overlook.
Frankly, the economy, when running well on its, own, is responsible, clean and environmentally conscious. It’s easy to overlook the obvious gains made by the market in cleaning up the environment simply by controlling for waste and spillage.
Environmental issues often devolve into the question of individual spills and the horror stories, but if we’re serious about the issue, it’s really a question of energy and energy use that should drive the debate, not the anecdotes.
Energy production and energy consumption should be the underlying issues for environmentalists. There are certainly effective reforms and cost-conscious things that can be done to promote the dual goals of environmentalism and economic efficiency. Of the two, the latter drives the former: efficiency should be the path through which reasonable environmental policy comes about.
Inefficient “green” technology should be ignored and effective energy solutions should be pursued. When one hears that solar and biodiesel is expensive and that wind farms aren’t reliable and feasible, they seem like minor technological issues to eventually sort out. The truth is that they are economically wasteful, they are wildly inefficient solutions.
Money is a substitute measurement for energy. Solar costs more because the energy needed to produce it costs more. When we hear that green energy isn’t cost-competitive, we mentally balance an abstraction like our desire to be “green,” and say it outweighs the money involved, which is often paid by someone else.
People want to shut down coal-fired power plants, but at what cost? Is it worth wasting resources on considerably less-efficient technologies? You and I are paying for that energy. The money involved is energy-wasteful. We are doing a disservice to the environment to promote and pursue policies which wastes resources.
Recycling, for example, is wasteful; it consumes more energy than it saves. Only aluminum is cost-efficient for recycling purposes. It’s easy to overlook the transportation, sorting and processing costs that go into recycling. For products like paper, it’s much wiser to have the private sector grow its own trees instead of recycling paper for a net energy loss. There’s no way to recycle ink, so it’s buried in 55 gallon drums within the earth. That’s not a sane alternative to commercial paper, which is plentiful, and the vast majority comes from trees harvested by the paper companies.
Rates of forestation in the country have increased in the past century.
Employment functions in a similar way. People working jobs that are inefficient or unproductive are wasteful to the energy used and involved, and they don’t contribute to the overall efficiency of the market. Most groups promote “awareness” on environmental issues, but what does that do to really save and conserve resources? We’d be wiser to find efficient and economical jobs and work that can be done and sold within the market that benefit all in a win-win environment and saves resources.
Our goal should be efficiency and economical decisions. Scholarships to promote well-meaning projects sound wise, until one considers that it could be an artificial subsidy floating an idea that otherwise wasn’t financially wise. It is, almost by definition, inefficient and wasteful.
Human beings are sometimes seen as the problem. Everything is natural to naturalists, except natural humans. Yet humans crave order and promote well-running environments. Those who own farms tend to them. It is our destructive economic policies that punish the small farmer that pushes the industry into corporate farming. People who own large real estate keep it for its aesthetics, because they simply like it natural. Humans, and more of them, are integral parts of the solution to improving the environment.
More people will produce more things in a more efficient way. People are not the problem, but inefficiencies and waste are, and if we want to get a realistic solution that can work today, we’d all be wise to find things that we can do to contribute to the economy, control waste, and be effective global citizens within it. Money is a substitute for energy, and energy is what we ought to use wisely, efficiently and effectively.
Ben Wetmore is a Loyola law student.
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