This was in my RSS feed: Stephen Budiansky does some of the math and finds that, giving how efficient it is to move things by truck and by rail, the energy costs associated with shipping lettuce from California to New York are trivial relative to the energy costs associated with storing that lettuce in a New York refrigerator (my apologies to whoever first linked it; I owe you a hat tip). As I argued a couple of years ago, “local” isn’t necessarily virtuous because the energy intensity of cultivation is probably higher. The tomatoes we grow in our backyard, for example, are probably a lot more energy-intensive than commercially-cultivated tomatoes in Florida. They taste better, but there are reasons why we can’t get good tomatoes in the grocery store. It isn’t because of free markets. Budiansky’s article will make an excellent supplement for economics courses, and the author adds more evidence that a lot of environmental gestures are best understood as exercises in religious piety.
Austrian and libertarian economists have produced a voluminous body of resources on environmental issues, like Roy Cordato’s “An Austrian Theory of Environmental Economics.” Here’s my “Environmental and Resource Economics” lecture from last year’s Mises U. For a paper I was revising earlier this summer, I re-read Murray Rothbard’s classic article “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.” Some of my favorite recent contributions are Michael Munger’s EconLib essay on recycling as well as his discussion of recycling on EconTalk.
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Also, over the summer Howie Baetjer mentioned Sudha Shenoy’s comment on the “hundred mile suit,” which was a project in which students made a suit sourced entirely from within 100 miles of their location:
“What did they shear the sheep with?”
I just went through the Rothbard article on air pollution above, trying to find a reference to something I’ve seen rumored several times: That air pollution was being prosecuted as trespass prior to govt stepping in and stopping the suits, in the name of “progress”.
I have seen reference recently to apple orchard cases in England where that was the case, but I wanted an American example.
Does anyone have a pointer at the tip of their mind? Google has not been my friend, likely because I don’t seem to be using quite the right search terms.
http://mondediplo.com/2000/07/15asbestos
asbestos is exemplary case of state and business collaboration in pollution.
@Curt: check out some of Walter Block’s papers on his website. PERC has an article on government-mandated DDT spraying. Also, Steve Horwitz sent me a link to one of Pierre Desrochers’ papers on food miles. More of his stuff is here.
Probably most “facts” that people believe they know about environmentalism and conservation are bogus. I was chatting with an educated man the other day (BSc and MBA) giving him a rundown of the simple facts about garbage and recycling as presented in Penn and Teller’s “Bullsh_t” show and he was astounded to hear how totally useless and wasteful every kind of recycling is, except for aluminum. If you’ve been propagandized and you completely turn off your faculties of logic, mathematics and natural skepticism (what’s in it for me, what’s in it for them) then I suppose that recycling waste paper sounds completely sensible. “Save the Trees!” (LOL, nearly all paper comes from tree farms, who ever says “Save the Corn”?)
Likewise, “buy local” sounds sensible, if you’re thinking at the level of a three year old.
If you really apply yourself and approach all of these public issues with intelligence and skepticism you can get to the bottom of nearly every problem. But it’s much easier if you remember these simple facts … If it makes sense to do something, people will do it spontaneously and freely, without coercion. If the government does something, it’s because either it makes no sense to do this thing therefore nobody would ever do it (or should do it) or else they do something that makes sense, only because government has made it impossible or impractical for anyone to do it on their own. Recycling paper and plastic is an example of government doing something that makes sense. Educating children is in the second category (and it’s done extremely badly by government because this is the natural way that monopolies work).
Sorry, meant to type “Recycling paper and plastic is an example of government doing something that doesn’t make sense.”
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