Unfortunately greater environmental awareness doesn’t seem to have increased support for sane policies like this one jot. Just in the last few days McCain announced his proposal for a gas tax holiday. Lest you think that this is only a proposal that caters to the trucks and guns crowd consider the fact that no democratic candidates would dare to propose an increased gas tax for fear of the public backlash. It doesn’t seem to matter that such a tax could be made revenue neutral and could even favor the poor people since people respond viscerally to expensive gasoline.

Instead of responding rationally to the global warming issue people, especially those claiming to be environmentally conscious, instead lash out at conspicuous consumption. It is somehow considered a moral hazard to buy a gas guzzling car, take plane flights, run an air conditioner or engage in other activities that have a salient link the emissions. This of course ignores the fact that the money people save as a result of these various conservation measures goes into buying other products which themselves likely have a large carbon footprint. All the tips about how to save electricity/gas or reuse items instead of throwing them out are particularly silly. After all if I save gas that reduces the price for other consumers who may then use more. Of course these factors are likely not 1-1 but it illustrates the point that urging people to avoid activities that seem wasteful is not only a waste of utility (moral guilt doesn’t discriminate between the people for whom running their air conditioning isn’t a big deal and those who get great utility from it) but it isn’t a very effective way of accomplishing the goal.

Unfortunately this attitude that environmentalism is really about eliminating consumer excess seems to be on the lips of every environmental activist I meet lately. They remark about how we will look back on our wasteful product packaging and huge trucks as gross and wasteful. Well hopefully we will look back on them as being inefficient in terms of carbon but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t expect the future to eventually provide cheaper energy, more disposable cruft, more gadgets and less need for conspicuous recycling (automated sorting) while making a smaller environmental impact. Even if this isn’t possible surely we ought to aim to improve our standard of living while saving the environment.

I don’t know where this idea that environmentalism is some sort of personal virtue of frugality came from but it’s not only a bunch of bunk but it’s hurting the environment. Not only does this attitude alienate many people who might get on board with a more pragmatic engineering/economic approach to the environment but it also competes with real solutions. People are willing to make a limited amount of sacrifices and if you tell them that they are being good people for enduring daily inconveniences like turning off their AC or buying a car they don’t like as much they won’t be as eager to ‘sacrifice’ again by voting up the gas tax.

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

I think this is spot on. As I’ve been saying for a long time the tendency to view global warming into a personal moral issue is a monumental mistake. For starters by moralizing the environment we immediately alienate a great many people who might have joined an attempt to solve an economic and engineering problem. Surely global warming is an issue that has moral consequences (like any other) but by associating it with the idea that we have a moral duty to live more simply and repudiate consumerism you not only ensure that people with other moral views aren’t inclined to join up but you also create a sort of righteous indignation that interferes with compromise and creates animosity. I mean if global warming had been presented as a pragmatic concern I doubt we would have seen the same extent to denial and resistance to what is ultimately an extremely technical scientific conclusion. However, because global warming was used as part of a sermon to lecture the public about their evil consumerist ways it inspired a strong bitter backlash.

It now appears we are almost past the hurdle of global warming skepticism but nevertheless the moral attitude toward the environment continues to create problems. For instance consider this selection of posts for blog action day. Following the usual formula for personal moral advice these posts tell people what simple sacrifices they could make to use less energy, recycle more and otherwise be more environmentally friendly. What could be wrong with this?

Well everything. For starters by making the issue into one of personal morality we’ve implicitly adopted the idea that environmental solutions must be sacrifices because we don’t give moral credit for things that we want to do anyway. In our personal lives this tends to result in nothing worse than wasted effort but by encouraging this idea we create an environment where the best solutions (those that require the least sacrifice) aren’t properly favored. Also, just as we tend to unreasonably view Mother Teresa as a better person than Bill Gates so too does moralizing environmental choices skew our praise toward useless sacrifice. There is no good reason whatsoever to try and minimize the total volume of waste you produce but because we have moralized environmentalism we end up stupidly glorifying people who carry their trash around with them. Even individual choices to conserve energy aren’t very useful as they lower the price of oil based fuels for others.

If people just wanted to waste their time like this that would be one thing but the real problem arises because the public only has a limited willingness to sacrifice for the environment. After all if I sort my recycling and turn the thermostat down at night why should I have to pay a tax on gas too. It’s bad enough that turning the environment into a personal moral issue uses up people’s willingness to sacrifice on inefficient solutions rather than the needed national fixes but it even creates antipathy for useful economic fixes. So long as it’s an engineering/economic problem the idea of trading emission credits seems perfectly reasonable but the moment you start viewing CO2 emissions as a moral harm the idea that you can purchase indulgences starts to rub people the wrong way. In fact I’ve seen more than a few environmentalists objecting to carbon credits on this basis.

Unfortunately I don’t have the slightest clue what we can do to unmoralize the environment at this state.

Apparently this is part of a new American Public Media project called Consumed which plans to:

Is our consumer society sustainable? American Public Media takes on that question in a new special series, Consumed. We’ll follow consumerism from its origins to its dominance over the world’s economy and, arguably, its culture. And we’ll examine how, and if, it might be adapted to reduce its destructive consequence while keeping store shelves stocked.

Apparently they, along with groups like the Zero Waste Alliance, are advocating achieving “Zero Waste”¹. But for the love of god why? The answer Tess gives is distinctly unsatisfying.

Garbage critics say we’re going to run out of places to put it, and that even if we had enough space, all we’re doing is encouraging consumption. Others argue the landfill issue has been greatly improved because of technology — it’s not the old city dump anymore.

Now it may be that we have an infrastructure problem and need to spend more money building new, deeper landfills. I don’t know. But we sure as hell aren’t running out of literal space to bury trash. Tess quotes the EPA as saying we generated 245.7 million tons of municipal waste in 2005. Now it seems reasonable to suppose that after compactification this waste will have at least the density of water. That means the total amount of trash created in one year fits inside 0.26 cubic miles. Now admittedly filling a square pit that deep with trash probably poses some technical challenges but given the huge empty spaces in the american west we hardly are running out of literal space to store our waste. We aren’t even running out of literal space to store our waste without significant environmental impact. Hell all the shit we make came from somewhere so it could never be more than a problem of recompactification and containment.

In other words the trash issue is a purely economic problem. It might start to cost more to build landfills but that’s it. We just need appropriate regulations to make sure trash is disposed of in a safe fashion and we can sit back and let the price of garbage disposal take care of the problem for us. There is absolutely no reason at all to turn this into a moral crusade and the idea of the Zero Waste Alliance that this is a way to save money is absurd. Of course some increase in the amount of recycling is probably money saving but to the extent it’s economically efficient it will be incentivized by garbage fees. The fact that companies aren’t doing this for profit is strong evidence that it would cost more money than it would save. Garbage collection does not have large externalities.

So what explains the fuss? It’s yet another example of the substitution of our emotional reactions to what seems like waste for our rational judgment about consequences. This is why I hate the word sustainability so much. This word invites us to make these errors by conflating our emotional idea of leaving things the same as they were when we started and it’s supposed definition in terms of being able to continue behaving as we are now. Even the definition itself is problematic because no particular state of affairs is sustainable or unsustainable only rules for future behavior. Thus talking about whether our consumerism is unsustainable tricks people into thinking “why yes if we keep creating trash at an (exponentially) increasing rate we will run out of places to put it so it’s unsustainable and we better stop.” The problem is that this isn’t even a plausible model for our societies future behavior. The right question to ask is, “If we continue to price garbage disposal at or above the cost of creating creating landfills we will be able to continue.” The answer here is a resounding yes.

This sort of thing is why I despise most of the environmental movement (though there are many reasonable people who are part of it). There are very real environmental concerns that we need to deal with like global warming but they are economic and engineering challenges not moral judgments about our waste or consumer culture. Not only do stupid pseudo-environmental worries like this one do great harm by distracting from real issues like global warming they also help cement the idea in many people’s minds that environmentalism is just that stupid moralizing concern about wasting shit. Part of the reason so much of the right is still hostile to global warming is because the environmental movement managed to push most environmental questions out of the practical realm and into a moral one. Maybe in the past that was necessary to get results on important issues. I don’t know but this sort of shit with trash and sustainability is just garbage.

I expect this sort of thing from the BBC. I’m disappointed to see it on NPR’s marketplace of all things.