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[ad]We are, on a daily basis, fed the idea that the world is coming to an end – and it is all our fault. Global warming is going to cause a new cataclysm and we are all going to die. And the reason? We use technology, we lead good lives, and we emit CO2 when breathing out.
Al Gore is and has been preaching the end of the world for quite some time, and was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his long and hard work telling us we are destroying the world. He is investing a lot of time, effort, and money in making people believe he is doing everything to not make things worse; he is telling us what to do and wants to be seen as a good example. This is why his contract explicitly states that he refuses to be picked up at the airport in an SUV – he prefers a small car or hybrid – and he tries to avoid first class travel to save the environment through joining the crowd in coach class (or was it business?).
It is therefore not surprising that Gore was proud to announce that he took the electric train from Stockholm airport when having flown from Oslo to attend the Nobel Prize reception in city hall. However, he failed to mention that his luggage was picked up at the airport and transported in a Mercedes. (I guess he cannot carry such heavy luggage to and from the train because it would make him breathe too heavily.)
Also, this prophet of environmentalism, when leaving Stockholm for Brussels, was treated by the Swedish taxpayers to a flight with the Swedish government’s “private” jet. He cannot travel in an SUV because of the emissions, but a private jet for two or three people is probably very beneficial for the environment.
Meanwhile, the Swedish recycling disaster continues. It is definitely a system Mr. Gore would find commendable: it is thoroughly force-based, centralizes power, and distributes the main costs of the basically ineffective measures on common people. People like Gore and his friends in the top tier of government would not have to worry about the costs.
I write about this scam today on the Ludwig von Mises Instiutute‘s web site. In the article, which is available here, I show how this system has at best no effect on the environment (even if we accept the ideological claims that CO2 will effectuate the end of the world) while generating enormous costs for society. The purpose of the recycling system, like most of the current environmental mania, is of course to increase the powers of the state in a way that, at least at first glance, would seem “legitimate.”
After all, the environmental threat has a fantastic potential in causing universal feelings of fear, shame, and guilt – feelings exploited throughout the centuries by religious powers. But even though we have been through all this before, I doubt we have learned from history. It should be obvious from how the environmental threat is propagandized that it is but another “leftist” attempt to have us all give up whatever liberties and freedoms we still have left in order to further increase and centralize power.
As is always the case with centralized planning systems: they are good for one thing only – power and the powerful. And the environmental panic around the world will allow the powerful to look good – in our own eyes! – while stripping us from our liberties. So trust me in that it will not be long until President George W. Bush will “come to his senses” and sign the Kyoto Protocol. After all, he should not be able to resist the obvious temptation.
What is your recycling model if there is any?
How and why is Kyoto Protocol bad?
Is environment a commodity?
Per – – –
1. Had an engineering project in Linkoping a while back. Only growth industry I could see was private security. Students, looking forward to graduation and a decline in lifestyle, would get drunk and riot each week-end evening.
2. Had another project in Berlin at the power plant where Berlin burns its garbage, which is also a recycle collection center. The Germans dutifully separated all the various recyclables at home and workplace, which were then re-combined and all burned as fuel at the plant.
NOTE 1: European garbage is not more sophisticated than American garbage. Actually it is inferior – about 5,000 BTU/pound versus American garbage at 10,000 BTU/pound (the same as typical coal).
NOTE 2: Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C. burns its garbage. One garbage-burner plant is so clean that there’s a restaurant about half-way up the stack with a nice clean view.
NOTE 3: We can burn trash, save energy, and reduce landfill problems, too. See Waste-to-Energy plant in Charleston, SC…
I think the biggest point made by your article is the “free” labor associated with Sweden’s recycling program. As long as you have the ability to force people to work for free, and are entitled to the fruits of their labor, you can always make a profit. So, in Sweden, someone wants to make their kid a can of soup. Mommy goes to the store and buys a can of soup. She gets home and opens the can and pours it into her little soup pot and heats it up. Now while it is heating up she goes to work for the government: 1) she washes the soup (now, does she have to peal the label off since it might be made of paper?) can. She determines that the soup can is made of aluminum and looks for her aluminum recycling bin. 2) After Junior is fed, she decides she needs to take the aluminum can to the recycling center. She drives her car and soup can to the recycling center and disposes of it. The can is now given to the “government” to sell. The “government” gets to sell the can and “make a profit” because it does not count as a cost, her time, her gas, and her insurance costs. To a Socialist she is a model citizen; to Friedrich A. Hayek she is a serf.
Hej Per!
Har just läst din utmärkta artikel på Lew Rockwell, The Recycling Myth. Finns den översatt till svenska någonstans? Jag skriver regelbundet på bloggen Everykindapeople.blogspot.com och skulle verkligen vilja publicera den del som påpekar hur oekonomiskt hela systemet är. Om du inte har någon svensk översättning hoppas jag du tillåter mig att översätta några paragrafer.
Keep up the good work!
Mvh. Berit
I am 44 years old. I have been recycling since I was a kid. It was the way I was raised. My parents were older than most of my peers and at times I thought what we did was not necessary, but today I am glad for what they taught. I personally have 5 containers which I use to organize my waste. Paper, aluminum, metal and plastic, composting materials and trash. We have a wood burning stove and I use it to burn my paper. We have a compost heap which we use for our garden. The aluminum we sell. I do wash my cans and bottles out and take their labels off. I guess if our government required us to do this and I had never recycled anything, I would perhaps have a problem. This is mainly a way of life. I learned that this was a good thing to do so I do it. It is too bad that there were not more people like my parents that had also made it their way of life. Then perhaps governments would not be required to force it onto their people.
Per, that was an educational article. I had no idea such a menial task as recycling could be enforced. I am no environmentalist, but I would think the things that do justify required recycling lie in acres of forest preserved and landfill space reclaimed for flora and fauna. Of course, these things might take years to quantify their affect.
Therese, I applaud your efforts and wish we were all willingly as eco-friendly.
I do wonder, is anyone in the business of collecting these items from your homes on a weekly basis to do the cleaning and delivering them to the recycling centers?
You didn’t prove anything in your rant against recycling.
You are going for a Phd in what, political sciences?
You spent all your time discussing how people take efforts to circumvent recycling and the supposed economic impact. You spent no time discussing the environment.
You only presented facts on the fact people have trouble following the recycling laws.
There are many good arguments on why a Swedish system is unnecessary in the United States. Small scale state action vs large state action, availability of natural resources, and the ease of digging new land fills are three such arguments.
You couldn’t even properly articulate or support your poorly formed arguments.
Isn’t necessary that Phd’s support the populist position. However when you spout unsupported crap in a public forum in a field ,that you are supposedly an expert in, you degrade everyones achievement.
If your going to be a wack-job at least make it appear your opinion is based on facts as opposed to personal beliefs.
Per,
You might enjoy these videos on the recycling myth from Penn & Teller’s “Bullsh*t” show…
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
I agree you didn’t “prove” much but that does not mean I disagree. I belive you should provide more points as to why it is envorimentally unsound and economically unsound.
Currently your article stood as an emotional expression of whats wrong rather than a factual.
Keep fighting the good fight against ignorance, they can’t ignore the truth for ever!
I am surprised that no one has replied to the false logic in this article by Per Bylund, who has the colossal nerve to refer to his organization as Anarchism.net . I wonder what the true anarchists at http://www.anarchy.no/ai.html think of this impersonation. In any case, I would like to comment on Bylund’s analysis that begins with the following passage after a lengthy description of the Swedish recycling system that refers always to neutral factors like reasonable (and necessary) laws in the public interest with dyslogistic terms like “authoritarianism”, which is a fallacy:
But the real question here is not to what degree the authorities are ignorant of what spurs human action. We already have numerous examples of this ignorance being quite huge. The question is: does this recycling structure work? The answer is that, from a government point of view, while it can probably be thought of as working, from an environmental point of view, the answer is definitely “no.”
[snip]
“Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market! ”
[snip]
… it is “energy saving” simply because government does not count the time and energy used by nine million people cleaning and sorting their trash. Government authorities and researchers have reached the conclusion that the cost of (a) the water and electricity used for cleaning household trash, (b) transportation from trash collection centers, and (c) the final recycling process is actually less than would be necessary to produce these materials from scratch. Of course, they don’t count the literally millions of times people drive to the recycling centers to empty their trash bins; neither do they count, for instance, energy and costs for the extra housing space required for a dozen extra trash bins in every home.
[snip]
Economically, Swedish recycling is a disaster. Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market! According to the government’s books, more money flows in than flows out; therefore recycling is profitable. But this ignores the costs of coercion .
[snip]
Wayburn answers:
Leaving questions of human motivation out of the argument, as the students of von Mises understand human nature no better than anyone else and probably less well, the question is indeed whether or not this recycling structure works environmentally. Is more energy expended upon it than is saved? The article does nothing to determine the answer to this question other than to mention that the government leaves the energy costs of the citizen moving garbage out of its calculations. Does this cost overwhelm the savings previously realized. It certainly would in a market economy – not because of the energy costs of carrying garbage but rather the energy costs of commerce. If the cost of moving garbage is too great, why not suggest ways to reduce it? As far as the energy balance is considered, the members of this group know that the citizen’s time and money are irrelevant and such time as he is prevented from doing business increases the savings in energy. The extra space in the house devoted to storing garbage needn’t be heated or cooled, so the embodied energy only in the original construction can be charged to recycling. In “The Demise of Business as Usual” and other papers I showed that a “productive market” is anything but sustainable environmentally.
Bylund concludes:
The government bookkeepers also take advantage of the cost cuts they have been able to realize through centralizing the garbage collection system. These “cuts,” however, are mostly cuts in service, whereas rates for consumers have been increased. A recent problem with the garbage-collection centers is that the containers aren’t emptied very often (a typical example of government “savings”) and thus remain full, which means that people’s garbage piles up next to the overflowing containers while the government contractors sit idle: they are only paid to empty the containers on schedule, not to pick up the trash sitting next to these containers. The result? Disease and rats. Newspapers have been reporting on a “rat invasion” in Stockholm and in other Swedish cities in recent years.
If we consider the costs in monetary terms, in terms of wasted time, and in terms of increased emissions from automobiles, this is hardly environmentally friendly. Adding the annoyance and the increased risk for disease, Swedish recycling is at least as disastrous as any other government scheme.
This should be expected, since the system is so authoritarian in style, structure, and management. It might be more “high-tech” and advanced than the Soviet systems ever were, but it is still a system founded on command rather than voluntary choice based on interest or incentive. Interestingly enough, the system is too socialist even for Sweden’s number one socialist newspaper, Aftonbladet. In an op-ed on January 4, 2002, Lena Askling wrote on the public garbage collection system:
We [consumers] are supposed to sort, compost, parcel, store, and transport the trash. We are supposed to keep on with this cockamamie of storing compost garbage in small containers in apartments and villas and then transport the stinking, leaking trash to dedicated bins or collection centers, which seem to always be brim-full.
Why in the name of the Lord cannot the government introduce “market incentives” to stimulate industry and producers to develop rational packaging and garbage disposal systems enabling recycling, energy production and future import revenue? And perhaps a consumer friendly and hygienically acceptable system instead of the current trash and filth chaos?
While I’m waiting, mice are scurrying around in my garbage compartment.
Even Askling, who writes socialist propaganda for a living, knows the Swedish recycling scheme doesn’t work; and she concludes it is in need of more market.
Please enlighten me, wherein lies the so-often-acclaimed success of this system?
Wayburn comments on these concluding remarks:
This article does not provide an energy balance of any kind. It admits that the government has computed a positive energy balance, albeit with the citizen’s energy costs to move garbage omitted. Apparently, the proliferation of vermin and the spread of disease, which is not quantified, is the result of official corruption rather than recycling. I have the following question for Bylund who continually confuses monetary and personal costs like “wasting time” with energy costs: Why not put an end to official corruption?
Apparently the Swedish socialists understand energy no better than the Swedish ochlarchists and fascists at anarchy.org. And, there I must leave it.
Tom Wayburn, Houston, Texas
http://dematerialism.net/
http://dematerialism.blogspot.com/
http://dematerialism.wikispaces.com/
The previous comment was posted to the Yahoo group Energy Resources earlier. The URL for “The Demise of Business as Usual” is http://dematerialism.net/demise.htm .
Hello again.
I just finished watching the Penn and Teller videos about recycling on YouTube. Although they haven’t made their case because they don’t have a complete closed energy balance, it is possible that, in a market economy, recycling and other conservation measures do more harm than good as discussed at http://dematerialism.net/ReductioAdAbsurdum.html . Additional arguments along those lines can be found in “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario” at http://dematerialism.net/CwC.html to which the previous paper is linked.
Tom Wayburn, PhD in chemical engineering
Houston, Texas
Thank you Per,
I translated parts of your excellent article and used it on Every Kinda People.
http://everykindapeople.blogspot.com/2008/02/myten-om-tervinning.html
“Leaving questions of human motivation out of the argument…” You lost me after that comment, Mr. Wayburn. Anyone who wants to take human motivation off the table of discussion probably doesn’t have much regard for human beings, certainly not as individuals, anyway. (Not to mention that the logic of your post was nearly impossible to follow. I have no idea what you’re trying to convey, other than some vague diagreement with Bylund’s piece.)
Call me Socialist if you like but I love the Swedish system – recycling aluminium cans holds a financial incentive (you get your deposit back) and certainly doesn’t use more energy – possibly less than throwing it in the trash – since you take your cans with you on your next shopping trip (recycling stations are at supermarkets and corner stores). In fact all recycling is either at the supermarket (you don’t do a special recycling trip) or in the basement of your apartment. Of course all this voluntary labour in what most would call common sense and to me it seems less centralized than the alternative, which is to throw it all into the garbage and put it in a landfill.