Many otherwise sensible people unwittingly believe it is better for the environment for us to waste more rather than less natural resources.

For example, I once read that in India they recycle even a single thread from a piece of fabric, which sounds very conservationist, doesn’t it?

But imagine that an Australian public official were to be given the job of doing that: typically with a carpeted heated office, a desk, chair, computer, telephone, a kitchen to make a cup of tea in, a car, a salary of average weekly earnings, tax and super and so on.

You can see that the economic activity to produce all those conditions of employment would consume more natural resources than would be saved by recycling single threads from fabric, wouldn’t it?

This means that whether recycling something is worthwhile from an environmental point of view, depends on the living standard of the people doing the recycling. The higher their living standard, the more their recycling will waste rather than conserve natural resources.

Take another example. Suppose for the sake of argument that energy from a source environmentalists don’t like, such as petrol, costs $1 for a given unit of energy; and that energy from a source they do like, such as solar, costs $2 for the same amount of energy. Environmentalists want government to subsidise solar by paying the extra dollar. Then we will have ‘environmentally sustainable’ energy.

But that is to look only at what is seen, and to ignore what is not seen. The government doesn’t get the $1 from a moonbeam. It gets it by taking it from the surplus produced by people, such as farmers, miners, manufacturers, and photocopying office workers, who have to consume natural resources in order to make the dollar. In fact because of the $1 taken in tax, they have to engage in even more productive activity, and consume even more natural resources, just to stay in the same position.

For some reason, many people seem to have enormous difficulty grasping this simple concept.

Can anyone explain why?

Peter, in my experience over three decades of ‘greenieism’, most fellow environmentally-oriented people just don’t have an understanding of the economics or the true value, or lack thereof, of reducing, reusing and recycling, or other apparently environmentally beneficial activities or principles.

I’ve met lots of people who have got hung up on recycling every little thing that can be recycled, and left it at that, thinking that this is all they need to do to be a good environmentalist.

Lots of others have taken it one step further and reduced their electricity consumption by turning lights off religiously whenever they leave a room, and perhaps got on their bikes and reduced their car usage, and perhaps bought recycled goods such as paper and clothing and perhaps purchased a solar hot water system and put insulation in their roof to reduce the use of fans and air-conditioners, etc, etc

But just about none of these people, and I used to be very much involved with this ilk during the years that I was active in the North Queensland Conservation Council, gave the slightest hoot about our rapidly increasing population and economic system that is predicated on rapid continuous growth and hence the rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels and other non renewable or potentially renewable resources and the concomitant environmental alienation and massive threat to our future wellbeing!

This has always stood out to me as being the ultimate bizarre contradiction.

So I can understand why some people can’t appreciate the simple concept that you are talking about, given that most environmentally concerned people haven’t been concerned enough over the years about rapidly increasing consumption with no end in sight to have bothered to put even the slightest bit of effort into addressing it beyond their personal level!

Because Peter your argument is flawed. Energy is a huge sector and creates the majority of carbon emissions. Coal is the most highly polluting and carbon emitting form of energy.

Even if the $1 came from the wages of those in other emitting occupations (albeit smaller) the effect of reducing carbon emissions would still be greater with a reduction in burning coal.

The $1 subsidy is also derived from lower-emitting occupations not only those who use photocopiers. The photocopier is working whether you take the $1 out of the tax revenue or not, in this case the $1 is now working to reduce highly polluting coal emissions.

"For example, I once read that in India they recycle even a single thread from a piece of fabric...But imagine that an Australian public official were to be given the job of doing that: typically with a carpeted heated office, a desk, chair, computer, telephone, a kitchen to make a cup of tea in, a car, a salary of average weekly earnings, tax and super and so on."

One cannot judge until the energy involved in making a new thread from a piece of fabric is compared with recycling the old one. Why do you suppose that manufacturing a new piece of thread won't also involve an office, a cup of tea, telephone etc. Clearly it would and more besides like growing the cotton and particularly if the cotton is grown in an unsuitable climate affecting not only energy consumption but scarce water resources (eg. Cubbie station).

"Even if the $1 came from the wages of those in other emitting occupations (albeit smaller) the effect of reducing carbon emissions would still be greater with a reduction in burning coal."

How do you know? If the wages came from those who were burning coal, how do you know that the negative effect of burning the extra coal wouldn't be greater than the positive effect of the subsidy?

And that is to consider only the negative environmental effects from emissions. But what about the other negative effects from using natural resources to produce the extra dollar, from mining, ploughing, clearing, fertilising, driving to work and so on?

You are assuming that the photocopier would be going anyway. For a dollar, maybe. But to pay for subsidies generally, clearly people would need to engage in a whole lot of extra productive activity to pay for it, whether it was in primary, secondary, or tertiary industry.

"One cannot judge until the energy involved in making a new thread from a piece of fabric is compared with recycling the old one. "

That's fair enough but the fact is, there's no way of knowing it, except to do a detailed study in each case of recycling the old and making a new, and then how far back up the line of production do you go? So we still haven't got to the stage of establishing that the recycling is actually uses less total natural resources, while there is reason to believe that it wastes more resources than it conserves, otherwise people would do it without a subsidy.

In environmental economics, there are several mechanisms for contingency calculations i.e. environmental goods and services that have an intrinsic values that are difficult to quantify in dollars(eg clean air, water etc.).

Unfortunately, like most of modern academia, one can write a report saying it is really good or really bad depending on who is footing the bill. Big projects generally have a discount rate included, which is like the reverse of compound interest, but there is no rule for what the rate should be in the proposal. Of course it could get uncomfortable when the Japanese realise they could do the same thing to gain support for whale hunting...