Slashdot rant

[chipotle]

I came across a post on Slashdot as a comment on a link to a skeptical (but apparently somewhat dubious) article about global warming a bit ago--the post was called "Environmentalist = Communist in drag."

This was my response. I don't rant often, but sometimes you just gotta.

* * *

While I should know better than to get into this, it really pisses me off when people damn others for making huge, sweeping generalizations while making huge, sweeping generalizations themselves.

"True environmentalists" don't believe in taking people's rights away, no. News flash. You don't have a right to pollute the river that flows past your property because that river then flows past my property. You ever hear the old Libertarian maxim, "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose?" It applies to the environment, too. You don't have a right to do things with your property that affect my property, or anyone else's.

Water and air are a common good that cannot be owned by anyone. This ain't communist propaganda. It's fucking common sense, people. And it means that sometimes as a property owner your rights are going to be curtailed. Deal with it. I support gun rights, but they don't include a right to fire your gun without paying attention to where you're pointing it.

And, no, companies not wanting to clean up their act is not hogwash. Companies want to spend as little as they can and charge the highest prices they can. This isn't because they're evil, it's because they're trying to increase their capital. Hello! That's why it's called capitalism. Not all companies are responsible citizens. Some of them will do exactly the same calculation Ford made with the Pinto: balance the cost of expected fines and lawsuits from doing things sleazily against the cost of doing things the right way, and doing things sleazily if it's a lower expense. They can do this because when they're caught, they can apologize profusely and know that they will have lots of defenders saying thing like: "The presidents of these companies are pople like you and I."¹

Furthermore, people with your attitude seem to be really hep on bashing environmental groups for having "vested interests" in scaring people. You never once seem to be willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, corporations making billions of dollars on practices those environmental groups are criticizing could have a vested interest in making sure that you dismiss the environmentalists as kooks. Individual donations to the Center for Science in the Public Interest make it a scare group, but the blatant industry backing of JunkScience.com couldn't possibly influence their reporting, right? Check.

Funny, to me being about individual rights has nothing to do with promoting corporations and bashing government any more than it does to do with bashing corporations and promoting government. Some libertarians have figured that out. Have you?

Scientists who aren't on Exxon's payroll aren't arguing about whether the temperature's rising, and they're not even arguing about whether humans are having an effect--the debate has moved to what effect we are having, and how to control it. If you think this is just the province of Greenpeace kids hanging signs from smokestacks, congratulations! The industry is keeping you in the '80s. This debate isn't going on in Granola Crunch Quarterly anymore, it's going on in Nature.

Wake up. By and large environmentalists are not out to send us into the dark ages or to create a happy Marxist utopia. They're out to make us think about the resources we use and to convice us that we should use less, even if using less is going to be inconvenient. And, yes, using less might mean some industries have to change. It's happened before. Why is it so horrific to consider that it might have to happen again?

¹That was a line from the post I was responding to.

Comments

Careful, you'll put your eye out.

[xydexx.livejournal.com]

your right to swing your nose ends at my face

Your right to swing your nose?

Re: Careful, you'll put your eye out.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

It's a REALLY BIG nose!

What?

Oh, right. Heh. It's fixed now.

Re: Careful, you'll put your eye out.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

In my family, a statement like that makes sense. Dratted wop genes... =};-3

And nicely put, Chipotle. If these were truly wise businesses, they'd see that all that waste being thrown away is actually a resource waiting to be mined.

Re: Careful, you'll put your eye out.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

Most of these issues have spawned from the dislocation of the objectives of the management of a company and the stock holders of a company.

The management in modern companies are interested only in short term profits, because this is what gets them money.

Stockholders want long term returns.

These two plans often do not often match up, thus you have a huge schism between the two parties and thus has created many of the huge 'company disasters' (Enron, Worldcom etc.) in the past few years.

Management, since it is in for the short term, has no care for long term effects of things like pollution. Their power, unfortunately, outstrips the shareholders in the modern day marketplace because the shareholders are diffuse and generally unorganized because there are so many of them.

Thus the management's plans often go through until they are fired and new management is brought in and they start right back over again.

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

Well said!

In other news, I have discovered Ben & Jerry's, originally because I was so ticked off at the bizarre right-wing (and mean-spirited) ice cream company which is making the news, but now because I like Ben & Jerry's.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

I've yet to read enough to convince me about global warming, but I support many initiatives to downplay our use of fossil fuels simply because there's more or less an economic consensus, but it gets pretty much zero press, that we're using it too darn fast purely from a economic efficiency standpoint. This is not even taking into account possible environmental effects.

Many many things in economics have a Laffer curve, not just taxes. Efficient use of resources also has a similar hump-backed curve and we're on the far downslope when petroleum usage is concerned.

Part of the problem in the US is the cost of transactions when it comes to pollution. In a perfect economy, a small farmer that has his crops killed by a textile mill would have to be compensated for the damages by the company. If the company's profit it gets from polluting is less than the farmer's damages then they cut back production until there's an equilibrium.

However given the legal costs and barriers setup by crooked local, state and federal officials things like this rarely happen. Plus in the US we have the rather complicated issue that no one really owns waterways. They are all a public property more or less.

A river may run through your property, but you do not own it, thus there are less legal grounds to sue on, unlike in Brittan where waterways are allowed to be owned by individuals and companies.

This spawned from the earlier days of the country when land usage was as big an issue, because there was more land than people used. Occurrences such as these are often referred to as the “Tragedy of the Commons'

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Wow. I've never seen you so incensed. I like it. :D Excellent, excellent post, and do let us know if anyone actually starts thinking about the issue instead of doing the usual alpha-geek dodge-and-dismiss... ;) I might recycle some of your arguments in the near future if it's OK with you...

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Land itself is just a very slowly transferring form of common property, so one can't do just anything to it either. The company I work for is frequently involved in remediation projects to clean up old gun ranges, discovered toxic contamination, and other interesting things that supposedly "never happen" because no property owner would willingly decrease the value of their land, counting it as an investment to be sold at some point in the future. Often, it is treated more like a disposable resource that is used up in some more profitable activity. In that instance, the most cost effective option is to hide evidence of the degradation and hope people forget.

The Love Canal (http://www.globalserve.net/~spinc/atomcc/history.htm) is just one good example.