This is a theme that - hopefully - runs deep in the tributaries and streams of consciousness throughout this blog... There is a limited amount of time and money to address the simultaneous and related emergencies of mass extinction, deforestation, climate change, toxic releases, and waste management.
We will be judged, and should be, based on how our generation uses its limited resources as judiciously and economically as possible. I started my environmental-spiritual aspirations with the premise that children yet to be born, whom I will never meet, and who will never know me, would judge all of us based on how we spend our time and resources, and whether we left them a better place, or a bigger mess.
Back when I was 17, I was thinking about how to direct my own career, spend my own life, as if I was personally going to be judged based on my own actions. Not that it was a bad place to start, but even then I was aware that my "shiny conscience" wouldn't matter much to a child born 500 years from now. If it did, I should have devoted myself to a Buddhist monastery, rather than to our society's collective resource conservation.
Let me propose that we will be judged, by future children or by the Singularity (AI), based on math... how much more sustainable was one rule or regulation over the free market. Primum non nocere - first, do no harm.
The ego-driven environmentalist path is fraught with collateral damage, if we spend the resources of our economy only on local environmental improvements. Here's how that works...
1. Environmentalists in Vermont and California vote on extremely expensive electric vehicles, or plastic packaging bans, when the same amount of money could more frugally stem the low hanging fruit of plastic litter in Emerging Markets.
2. Environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace or Basel Action Network establish complicated international laws intended not to stop recyclers from recycling, not what can or should be most recycled, not the net pollution released into the environment, but upon the national identity (or race) of the people between whom the materials are traded.
In the first example, a very proud and rich Californian spends $80,000 for a Tesla which they drive for 3 miles every day, locking the precious resources in THEIR garage, or THEIR driveway, making a statement that THEIR environmental footprint is holier than anyone else's. Their theory might be that the 500-year-future kids will appreciate them. Who knows, maybe the spending will create the critical mass in the economy that will drive more sustainable vehicles... that's a potential and defensible outcome. But a better one would be to spend that $80,000 of electrified city buses, prioritizing buses by hours of utilization and ridership. A college professor driving 3 miles to work is not a great use of the 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kgs of cobalt, or 20 kg of manganese - or 138 lbs of lithium in the case of a Tesla.
A typical
EV battery has about 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kilograms of cobalt, and 20 kilograms of manganese, although this can often be much more depending on the battery size – a Tesla Model S' battery, for example, contains around 62.6 kg (138 pounds) of lithium - blog.evbox.com Electric car battery weight explained
Another case study in the first example is the plastic bag ban in Vermont. I advocated for a deposit on them, as well as on a plastic waste trading or offset program. Instead, the dollars Vermonters are spending - which could have cleaned up every street gutter in Cameroon if directed to three-dollar-per-day litter collectors - are spent on durable reusable plastic bags handed out everywhere. I still constantly reuse the "disposable single use" plastic bags I get in New Hampshire, which take far less space in my car. I have about ten of them in the bottom of my durable multi-use grocery bag. But between my wife and I we have far more multi-use grocery bags than we need or will use. The math and economics says that this is less about sustainability and more about Environmental Spiritual Materialism.
From CNN, Katie Hunt reported in 2023Consequences of plastic bags
Well-intentioned bans and limits on single-use plastics are in some cases having unintended consequences.
In New Jersey, 2022’s ban on single-use plastic and paper bags has meant grocery delivery services have switched to heavy-duty bags. Their customers complain of a glut of reusable, heavy-duty bags that they don’t know what do with.
In the United Kingdom, where I live, the average person now buys around three single-use carrier bags a year, down from 140 in 2014 – the year before a charge was levied on single-use bags. However, Greenpeace said UK supermarkets in 2019 sold 1.58 billion durable plastic bags — known here as “bags for life” – equivalent to 57 per household and more than a bag per week. And this was a 4.5% increase compared to 2018.
This suggests this model, whereby a heavier bag is offered to encourage reuse, is simply not working.
Now, I'm not being defeatist here. But when it comes to new regulations, we need to "measure twice, cut once", and recognize if the deciding vote is Spiritual Materialism, a claim of moral licensing or pursuit of shiny consciences.
But it can be worse. When a Spiritually Materialistic Environmentalist actually is pursuing MORAL AUTHORITY ("Ayatollah of e-Waste" or "Czar of Plastic Policy"), that's not just prioritizing your own conscience... that is spiritually greedy. In the second example, there's never a "measure twice, cut once"... the Authority depends upon NEVER MEASURING AT ALL. Instead, they grossly fabricate a number that serves only to fool people into giving them authority... which they monetize with their "certification" holy - or wholey - to prop up their organization's position as "savior" of "globalization".
In the second example, Basel Action Network and Greenpeace don't bother to even make the case against any recycling activity, unless it takes place between a "rich" (OECD) country and a "poor" (non-OECD) country. To sell this anti-globalist paradigm, the organizations crassly made up completely utterly fake statistics, e.g. that 80% of the e-waste in emerging market was recently dumped there from rich nations to externalize the cost of grinding them up. Or that 80% of waste generated was not repairable or reused. Or 80% of X is Y nonsense. It's like testifying in the Supreme Court Ruling of Loving V. Virginia - which legalized interracial marriage across the USA - that only 20% of same-race marriages are unhappy or violent, and 80% of interracial marriages end up in unhappy violent divorce. "What about the children? What's best for them?" my elderly anti-interracial marriage relatives asked... as if they imagine 80% of mixed race kids will suffer more than if the children are all evenly divided between single-race families. It's nonsense, but it justified spending limited taxpayer dollars on police and courts to arrest people for loving each other.
In the second case, the Environmental Spiritual Materialism is even worse than the California and Vermont example, because there is never even a case made that an African laptop repair person benefits from being cut off from repairing a wealthier person's laptop. Or that grinding up Europe's laptops to provide recycled content to brand new laptops is environmentally better than extending the life of the first laptop.
In each of these cases, the Environmental Belief system prioritizes the holiness of the rule at the expense of the environment, in an economically inefficient conscience-polishing exercise.
Fifteen years ago, the titles of these blogs circulated around "environmental malpractice", "collateral damage", "unintended consequences", and "own goals". Those were all proper criticism of the net effect of proposed recycling policies. But the root cause of those mistakes is mistaking our own "liability" for an effective measure of sustainability.
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