The Dehumanizing Pretentions and Inanities of Earth Hour

Environmentalists, in a gesture to spur governments to enact ever more restrictive environmental laws, called on the world to turn off all lights and electrical appliances at 8:30 p.m. local time on Saturday, March 27th. The environmentalists claim that the reduced demand for electricity would cause a significant reduction in greenhouse gases and, thusly, benefit Mother Earth. Many government buildings around the world, from the Mother of all Parliaments in London to the State University in Moscow, went dark, as did offices of major corporations such as Coca Cola on this side of the Pond.

In the 1960’s the term “radical chic” was applied to well-to-do socialites who became enamored with the Black Power movement. These tough-guy and tough-gal wannabes held cocktail parties in upper class New York apartments in order to rub shoulders with thugs advocating the overthrow of legally constituted government. Their dabbling in anti-Americanism was very much like children taking their first roller coaster ride—they got a nice thrill without much concern that there was really any risk involved. The same can be said of those who accede to the demands of the Earth Hour advocates. One can be “earth chic” by turning off the lights for an hour without much concern that the lights will come back on at the flick of a switch later in the evening.

As masters of public relations Earth Hour promoters were careful not to go too far in their demands. For example, they did not advise that governments turn off traffic lights or that hospitals shut off life supporting medical equipment. Nice of them, wouldn’t you say? But what about other uses of electricity? Just where do the Earth Hour advocates draw the line and what is their criterion for doing so?

From a practical point of view, it is hard to believe that electricity generating companies would be able to reduce their output knowing that the lowered demand would last for only one hour. A more likely scenario is that tasks that can be performed at just about any time, such as running the electric clothes dryer, will be bunched into the time frames before or after Earth Hour, causing spikes in peak power demand that would require more not less electric power production.

But let’s play along and say that demand for the one hour of electricity is lost forever along with demand for electricity. We turn out the lights, sit in the dark, and, in effect, lose one hour of our collective lives. What exactly has been accomplished? OK, that may be a little too hard to comprehend, so let’s lengthen the Earth Hour to an entire Earth Day, whereby we turn off all non-essential power usage (however that is defined) for an entire twenty-four hours. Shops close. Restaurants close. Sporting events are cancelled. Cultural centers, museums, grocery stores, laundromats, factories…all close. Surely, electric power production may be reduced by some significant amount, along with a concomitant reduction in greenhouse gases. But this perhaps significant reduction in greenhouse gases has come at the cost of loss of production. And it is production that generates the purchasing power to command consumption. Without sufficient production the lights just may not come on again at the flick of the switch.

Why Man is Different

The philosophical assumption behind Earth Hour is that energy use harms Mother Earth. If this is so, why are traffic lights and life supporting medical devices exempt? If man is harming Mother Earth, he must be stopped! But man is different from other species in his rationality, his free will, and his inherent recognition that by cooperating with other men he can improve his lot above mere existence in a rude, cold, and terrifying state of nature. It is man’s nature to cooperate under the division of labor that has given him all the comforts of modern life that the Earth Hour advocates decry as harmful. They are not. When combined with protection of private property and economic calculation under a money-price system, man reorders nature’s physical properties to produce goods on a sustainable basis.

It is a gross misunderstanding of Nature to claim that it contains only so much quantity of resources and that once employed these resources are lost forever. Nature’s resources are limitless. The physical properties of nature may change, but, as Einstein proved, matter and energy cannot be destroyed. Man’s ability to exploit nature is limited only by his level of technological development and degree of social cooperation.

It is man’s ingenuity that allows him to exploit the hidden utility in what everyone once believed to be useless natural objects. Most of what we today call resources were useless and even hindrances until man processed them in some manner. Oil, uranium, trees, even water are useless until man alters them in some way to make them useful. We have no use for oil that seeps from the ground, uranium that is embedded in rock, standing trees (aside from the few that provide shade over man’s abodes), or water that flows in rivers or stands in lakes. But we do have use for petroleum products of all kinds, uranium to power nuclear reactors, a multitude of wood products, and hydroelectric power and potable tap water. But all of these resources require productive enterprise to make them useful, and that is what the Earth Hour advocates claim is harmful.

The consequence of Earth Hour or a more expansive Earth Day would be to reduce men to the status of the animals, consuming nothing because we produce nothing. But without the ability to engage in capitalistic productive enterprise not even traffic lights and life saving medical devices would be available and not one man in a million currently alive would survive. Neither vote seeking governments nor pandering corporations seeking protection from environmental extremists should succumb to its inhumane pretentions and inanities. So, turn on the lights and enjoy what man has accomplished. Your Mother Earth would be proud of you.

Private Property and the Seeming Problems of Resource Scarcity

My letter below to National Geographic Magazine illustrates how important is economic insight to the proper understanding of seeming intractable problems.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

National Geographic Magazine
711 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Dear Sirs:
A neighbor kindly gave me some back copies of your magazine. I found several of the articles to be of interest to me as an economist. Yes, as an economist. Your magazine seems to be very concerned with the depletion of natural resources. I refer to recent articles about over fishing of tuna (June 2009), the scramble by governments to claim sovereignty over the arctic in order to secure oil fields (May 2009), and the water shortage problems of Australia (April 2009), just to name a few.

All of these problems can be understood and solved through an understanding and application of proper economic theory, namely those of the Austrian School. All of these problems you so clearly and entertainingly outline are the result of and exacerbated by the lack of property rights.

A key concept is the theory of the “tragedy of the commons”, which explains that all valuable resources held in common will be plundered to extinction. Since all have an equal claim, all must grab as much as possible. But private property is not plundered; instead its owners capitalize it in order to secure the most value over the longest period of time.

For example, it may be a challenge technically, but the over fishing of the world’s oceans, of which the depletion of tuna is just one symptom, will be solved only when private property rights are secured over the fishes or their habitats. But how does one secure these rights? The Austrian School of Economics explains how private property becomes so. No, it is not through a grant by a king or government, but rather by homesteading. John Locke explained the concept over three centuries ago—that when man mixes his labor with formerly unexploited physical resources of the earth, he thereby secures them as his private property.

The world’s governments could avoid all potential conflicts if they recognized the right of anyone or any company to secure private property in arctic resources by the simple act of exploiting them. It matters not whether the oil is obtained by a Russian, an American, or an international company. All of us benefit from the new resource so secured for the world market. It may require billions of dollars to exploit the oil and bring it to market, and there is no guarantee of success for those engaged in wildcat drilling. But if they are, they alone should be the beneficiaries of their vision, dedication, and treasure put at risk.

As for the seemingly intractable problem of parched Australia, the government has taken almost total control of this valuable resource with predictable results. Your article repeatedly explained how farmers and businessmen were robbed of their livelihoods by governmental decisions to greatly reduce their water allocation. Government takeover of a resource does not remove it from the risk of plunder through the aforementioned “tragedy of the commons”. Quite the contrary. Instead of the private market ensuring that water goes to its most urgent need, government allocates it politically, making near life and death decisions based upon…what?

Without a free market in water, Australians will be plagued by seeming water shortages forever. Let us make clear that water is a scarce resource everywhere. It may be more abundant in some areas of the earth, but it still must be “brought to market” via piping and purification. Without a free market in water, Australians will continue to suffer the socialist dilemma explained by Ludwig von Mises in his century old masterpiece Socialism. Without economic calculation, the entrepreneur does not know which resource to secure or which avenue of enterprise to pursue. Although the government of Australia may “sell” the water, it has no way to know whether its price is too high or too low. So, of course, it keeps the price low and allocates its to the interest group that cries out the loudest at the moment. It cannot do otherwise.

Your interesting article explained very clearly that farmers do not know what crop to plant under the conditions of government control of water. In fact, they do not know whether they should plant a crop at all. The risks of farming will become more readily understood when water becomes a commodity controlled by the free market alone. Think of water as just one more variable that entrepreneurs must secure in order to plan for an uncertain future. The Australian economy must adapt as best it can to its scarce water availability, and it will approach equilibrium of supply and demand only under a free market.

Patrick Barron
20 McMullan Farm Lane
West Chester, PA 19382
Phone: 610-793-3605
Email: PatrickBarron@msn.com
www.patrickbarron.blogspot.com

Mother Earth Is Not a Person

Ask 100 people if the earth needs to be protected and you will get 100 "of course" answers. Well, make that 99 "of course" answers, if I am one of the hundred so asked. Now, before you cancel your subscription to The Bulletin for publishing an essay by a barbarian, let me explain my position.

All environmental advocacy proceeds from the logical error of elevating nature from the status of property which may be privately owned to the status of persons to be protected by governmental law. Environmental laws are not necessary for the protection of privately owned property. Owners do not destroy their own property. You do not need a law to force you not to push your car off a cliff, burn down your own house, or poison your own water supply. But there are laws to protect your car, your house, and your water supply from others who may inflict such damage. These laws are not designed, per se, for the protection of these physical things - they are designed to protect you from the predation of others, because without privately owned property you will perish.

Thusly, others who may pour noxious poisons into the ground commit no crime as long as the poisons remain on their property. But when the poisons leach into the ground water and enters the water supply of another, that person has been harmed because his property has been harmed. Then the person so harmed may seek redress for this "tort" or harm. Notice that under this common sense rule, it is not enough to claim that something has harmed nature itself. The harm must accrue to privately owned property or to another person's body.

The chief advantage to regarding environmental predation as a tort which has been committed against another person rather than regarding nature itself as such a person is that courts will require objective evidence of real harm rather than that arbitrarily set environmental standards have been violated. All environmental advocacy today over global warming attempts to set some new arbitrary standard that must be attained without ever proving that anyone has been harmed by an act of another. Environmentalism has become nothing more than political advocacy for a straw man (or woman) - Mother Earth - whose demands can never be satisfied. As soon as the environmentalists lobby successfully for one new standard, such as permissible smokestack emissions from power plants, they demand that the standard be tightened even more.

This is the case in Pennsylvania over permissible levels of arsenic emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pa. utilities have met the stringent (and arbitrarily set, by the way) federal standard, but now the environmentalists want to reduce allowable arsenic emissions by a factor of ten without one shred of evidence that even one person anywhere has been harmed by the trace arsenic levels currently allowed into the atmosphere. Three hundred Pa. coal-fired power plants are out of compliance with this new proposed rule. Whether they can achieve compliance at all or, if so, at what cost, is unknown at this time. But either way Pennsylvanians will find their standard of living threatened by higher utility costs, which the state utility commission must allow the utilities to recover, or brown outs and black outs California-style.

Mother Earth has become a person, actually a ward of the state. The state decides when its ward has been harmed, according to standards set by those who do not own her. Since every human action can be regarded as causing her some harm, no matter how insignificant, there is no objective standard for ever determining that she is safe from man's very existence in her presence. The "carbon footprint" that supposedly every living person creates can be regarded as a harm to her. Thus, the environmental movement is inhumane in the sense that by its internal logic it must be opposed to the existence of people. This mindset has even permeated our popular culture. In the daily comic strip "Sally Forth," Sally and her husband are thinking about having a second child. Naturally they are concerned about the financial implications. Then a fellow office worker, to whom Sally has confided her worries, says that she also has to be aware of the child's potentially harmful carbon footprint. On the same day as this "Sally Forth" strip appeared, another strip had a similar message. The teenage boy of "Zits" is learning to drive, and both he and his mother are concerned about the teenager's potential carbon footprint. Although both comic strips' creators may have intended this as a joke, one cannot help but find the idea that man should not be allowed to drive or possibly even exist as appalling and not a little frightening. The last century experienced fascist and communist regimes that attempted to make the world better by exterminating those it deemed as undesirable.

The answer to this made-up problem is capitalism and freedom. Capitalism rightly regards natural objects as things to be privately owned by man. When left to freely acquire property and dispose of it for his own benefit, man will protect such property and apply it to useful purposes. He will not destroy it; he will take every effort to protect it. But when nature is not privately owned, it is neglected and plundered. Making Mother Earth a person under the protection of government leads to poor public policy, because government ownership is not the same as private ownership. The largest environmental disaster site in the United States is the federally owned former nuclear facility in Hanford, Wash. Each year government neglect is evident for all to see as the publicly owned western forests in the U.S. burn out of control. Ask any German about how well the communist government of the former East Germany protected the environment. U.S. government employees were as negligent in their stewardship of Hanford and our western forests as their East German communist counterparts were in polluting half the German nation. U.S. government employees succumb to the demands of politicians, who are not owners, to ignore the environmental consequences of building nuclear weapons just as they are to the demands of environmentalists, who are not owners either, that the Forest Service not build rudimentary roads into wilderness areas for fire fighting purposes.

Our environmental laws are unnecessary and counterproductive, stifling our industries while neglecting our commonly held resources. Our western lands should be auctioned off to private ownership. The Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished so that private industries can negotiate acceptable levels of pollution with those who may be affected by it. Pollution is a local issue. Mother Earth is not a person. Private ownership and freedom are the answer to failed attempts at collectivism and coercion, as in all other societal controversies.