got tonkaed wrote:I guess something that has always kind of confused me to some extent is the way which people seem to really fight against the endgame of climate policy.
To me on a simple level, it seems like making businesses more efficient and homes more eco-friendly probably just ends up saving people money in the long run. It also seems philosophically better to be like, we took steps to try and make things better for our descendants rather than eh screw 'em.
Certainly it is a lot more complicated than that and you deal with bureaucracy and big government. It just seems like people from the get go dislike the idea of positively impacting climate change, which seems odd.
Unfortunately, just like any other problem in the world, there is nothing that the politicians can't twist into a game to line their pockets.
Let's take my pet peeve, paper recycling.
The politicians have sold the idea that recycling our paper is essential to saving the environment. In fact it is not. Trees grow. They are plants, no less than tomatoes or cucumbers, and with proper encouragement we could farm trees in any quantity needed. Furthermore, it doesn't have to be trees. There are many plants -- flax and papyrus and hemp to name just a few -- that produce fiber that can be used in paper products to supplement the wood pulp.
Now, there
is a deforestation problem in the world, but it has nothing to do with paper production. The great forests that are being mowed down in places like Brazil or Indonesia are not being mowed down to make paper or wood products. They're being mowed down because the people in those countries are breeding like locusts and demanding more agricultural land.
Most of the great paper-exporting countries -- China, Canada, the U.S., South Korea, Sweden, Germany -- have responsible replanting practices. The only one of the deforesting countries that cracks the Top 10 is Brazil, and it's seventh or something. Germany, with forest lands that wouldn't make a decent-sized county in Canada, is the world's third-largest paper producer. That's mostly based on responsible replanting practices, and also on significant recycling, and also to some degree on some alternate paper crops like hemp. Sweden has one-quarter of one percent of the world's forests, but it exports 10% of the world's paper.
So, deforestation and paper production are almost completely unrelated, but most people don't bother to educate themselves that much. The politicians and their stooges in the media plant a simple idea in their lazy brains -- paper = cutting down trees = deforestation -- and leave it at that. Probably half of all the people dutifully putting their coffee cup in the recycling bin think they are helping to fight deforestation.
Meanwhile, what are the real consequences of paper recycling? We've already established that it doesn't save any forests. However, now instead of one garbage truck going down my street every week, there are two, one to pick up garbage and the other to pick up recycling. At the very least that's twice as much diesel being burned and going chug, chug, chug into our atmosphere. The trucks don't just burn fuel when they're moving. There's a lot of emissions created in manufacturing the steel in those trucks and the rubber they ride on. There's extra wear and tear on the roads and there's extra land paved over to park those trucks at night.
Supply of recycled paper is forever greater than demand, so some of that paper has to be shopped around, rebundled, and sometimes hauled for hundreds of miles before it finds a mill that will take it. That's more diesel going chug, chug, chug into our atmosphere.
The unsold paper sits in bales behind the mills until they can find a buyer. It rots, putting methane into the atmosphere. If it was thrown into the dump that methane would be mostly trapped underground and be the fossil fuel for some distant-future descendants of ours, but instead it just floats into the atmosphere freely from open bales behind the mill, and contributes to the greenhouse effect.
One of the largest paper recycling mills in Ontario is not five miles from my house. In twenty years I've seen it go bankrupt and be bought by a new owner four times. If it happened once, you could say "bad management" but four times in twenty years is a symptom showing a systemic underlying problem. The natural demand for recycled paper is low and the natural supply is high. If we had a free market, the supply would decline until the price rose to a level at which people could make money on it, but because the supply is inflated not through market forces but through political fiat, the price drops to the point where everybody in the business is barely scraping by.
Paper recycling is a big hassle for everyone. When we all had one garbage can in the kitchen it could be hidden discretely in a corner. Now that we all have three or four garbage cans for the different classes of garbage they almost demand a room to themselves. The only people that benefit are the politicians who require bribes and kickbacks before handing out the municipal garbage-hauling contracts, and then get their picture taken for the newspaper standing beside the shiny new garbage truck.
So, unfortunately there is a lot of pork-barreling involved in the environmental world. The politicians have taught us to be cynical. The climate change deniers are wrong, but I'm sympathetic to their feelings.
