http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/22/ethanol-recycling-climate-change-expensive-illusions/
Ethanol, Recycling, Climate Change and Other Expensive Illusions
by John Hayward 22 Oct 2015
The Left is always trying to claim the mantle of unimpeachable
scientific authority for its causes, especially those with an academic
veneer, such as environmentalism.
It should matter a great deal if their preferred policies are effective,
and while we argue about the possibilities of a subject such as climate
change, the effectiveness of programs which have been in place for many
years should be analyzed dispassionately.
Instead, demonstrably ineffective, inefficient, and even
counter-productive policies, such as biofuels and recycling, persist
because they “seem right” or “feel good.” The growing movement to ban
plastic bags and replace them with reusable grocery bags operates under
the same nonsensical rules of engagement.
John Tierney recently wrote a lengthy analysis of recycling for the New
York Times, as a follow-up to a 20-year old piece in which he first
presented evidence that “recycling was costly and ineffectual.” The
modern recycling regime was still fairly new in 1996, so Tierney gamely
waited twenty years before assembling a larger stack of results and
passing judgment on the process. He found nothing to change his conclusions:
Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically
more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to
send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted
because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The
slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel
plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry
veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in
a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”
While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of
recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent
neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San
Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same
fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.
The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond
recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted
plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits
decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the
planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to
confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste
Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United
States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than
expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”
When the CEO of the largest recycling company openly speculates that his
expensive service isn’t actually delivering the sought-after
environmental value, it seems like rather big news. We are always told
to distrust arguments from interest – in other words, we’re supposed to
instinctively distrust anything positive an oil company says about oil
consumption, no matter how much rock-solid data the company can muster.
Isn’t it noteworthy that a company would advance such a profound
argument against interest?
As Tierney goes on to demonstrate, the environmental benefit from most
recycling is absurdly small, providing the example of an air passenger
who would have to recycle 40,000 plastic bottles in order to offset the
carbon emissions from a single round-trip flight from New York to
London. (There must be over a thousand people a day flying that
particular route, which adds up to a lot of plastic bottles.)
Also, the very act of preparing and recycling trash has a significant
environmental impact, which is simply ignored by environmental
evangelists, the same way they completely ignore the carbon emissions
necessary to charge electric cars. Clearly, this curious religion
believes that energy and emissions are sanctified based on the
intentions, and inherent nobility, of the consumer.
Conversely, the evils that recycling is supposed to prevent are largely
imaginary, conjurations of emotion and perception rather than cold
reason. Tierney zeroes in on the alleged menace of landfills, which in
reality consume very little acreage, and have minimal environmental
impact with modern technology… but they look, and more importantly
sound, icky. An incredible amount of wealth and productivity in America
is lost on madcap efforts to avoid things that sound icky.
Biofuel, on the other hand, is a classic example of argument from
corporate interest, pushed by the sort of well-connected special
interests that politicians constantly rail against… but they are never
portrayed that way in politicized media. Biofuels are incredibly
expensive, inefficient, and sometimes downright harmful, and virtually
no one would be interested in them, if the government did not force a
“market” into existence with regulations.
The perennial example is ethanol, which Erik Telford inveighs against at
The Federalist this week. No national politician, of either party, wants
to incur the wrath of Iowa by speaking out against ethanol. It will be
interesting to see if this is the one political sacred cow that even
Donald Trump refuses to tip.
Of course, ethanol subsidies are welcomed by those who receive them, but
Telford argues that 2016 presidential candidates “should not focus
solely on the benefits this corporate welfare program has had on Iowa
farmers, because it has had devastating effects for many outside of the
state”:
The “corn boom” RFS created has impacted over 5 million acres of
land once set aside for conservation. Landowners have filled in wetlands
and have sprayed billions of pounds of fertilizer to facilitate the
demand for corn to fulfill gas ethanol requirements. As a result, rivers
have been contaminated and the habitat of waterfowl and other wildlife
has been damaged.
Perhaps more importantly, RFS has not reduced carbon emissions—one
of the primary objectives of the policy. Scientists at the University of
Wisconsin found that the corn boom has released as much carbon dioxide
as 34 coal power plants in one year. It turns out ethanol is not
carbon-neutral, as promised, and it actually worsens gas mileage, making
cars less fuel-efficient and worse for the environment.
He goes on to discuss how ethanol is a less efficient fuel than
gasoline, so it hurts consumers at the pump with higher prices and
increased fuel consumption, tends to damage internal-combustion engines,
and raises the cost of food by consuming so much corn.
“While the RFS may be a boon to Iowa corn farmers, it’s essentially a
tax on the poor, who are suffering from higher prices because of it.
Plus, it’s a net negative for the environment,” Telford concludes.
But ethanol is immortal, not just because of Iowa presidential politics,
but because the idea of using “renewable” biological fuels – that is,
fuels that aren’t based on the biology of organisms that died millions
of years ago – sounds right and feels good. As with recycling, the
demonstrable effects are almost irrelevant next to the emotional
fulfillment and political correctness of these expensive illusions.
So it’s been going with plastic-bag bans, which are motivated entirely
by special-interest politics and junk-science boogeyman warnings about
the eco-menace of plastic… which pale to insignificance compared to the
very real health risks, cost, and inconvenience of reusable cloth bags.
The most recent development on this front came on Wednesday, when a
plastic-bag ban was defeated in the city of Oceanside, California. As
the San Diego Union-Tribune reports, a statewide ban is currently on
hold pending the outcome of a November 2016 ballot referendum.
One of the residents who spoke up against the plastic bag ban noted that
forcing families to employ reusable bags makes life difficult on “moms
who would have to remember to bring their own bags,” pleading “give
these mothers a break.”
But what does the cost, inconvenience, and illness from bags that aren’t
washed thoroughly enough matter, compared to the supreme
self-righteousness of the radical environmentalist? As with the carbon
footprint of recycling and electric cars, or the negative environmental
effects of ethanol, such considerations are simply waved aside.
Cost/benefit analysis is so much easier, if you simply ignore the costs!
That’s the dirty little secret (pardon the pun) of many expensive
illusions the American people are compelled to finance. It’s all about
hiding the cost and stressing the benefits. That is arguably the core
principle of all socialist politics, as vividly illustrated by our 2016
Democrat presidential candidates promising to conjure $20 trillion in
benefits out of thin air at their debate. Many seeming reasonable, or at
least tolerable, initiatives become absurd when the cost is considered,
as with environmental regulations that seek impractical levels of purity
at dramatically escalating cost.
Hiding the true cost of any service from consumers is fraud, which is a
form of compulsion. Giving them realistic cost information and allowing
them to make reasoned choices is the essence of freedom. In his
recycling article, Tierney mentions a proposal to levy a modest tax of
$15 per ton on landfill trash, just enough to offset environmental
costs, and allowing communities to make their own decisions about recycling.
The advocates of this idea suspect there would be much less recycling,
if people were given realistic cost/benefit information and free choice.
That’s why it will probably never happen, especially if the public can
be convinced to set an intangible “warm glow” moral value that
transcends practical value. And yet, our ruling class insists they are
masters of Science, and all who oppose them are unreasonable.
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