Environmentalists are crying for faster adoption of alternatives to oil-consuming products and eco-friendly corporate practices- but, as always, through a flawed process that ignores their own responsibilities within a free market system.
I leave nearly every light on in my suburban house, even in rooms I don't plan on being in for hours. I drive an SUV-like vehicle, and I am notorious for making a single back-and-forth trip out of everything I need to get from various stores. I use copious amounts of paper towels to clean up any spill. I have never recycled a day in my life, and I prefer plastic to paper.
Oh, and I'm an environmentalist.
Hypocritical? Not so fast. You see, I could have listed a variety of personal likes, dislikes, and characteristics of mine that are much more eco-friendly- I work from home and probably drive only 40 miles total each week, I have a compost pile in my backyard, and so on. I could then rage on about how you, too, should follow in my footsteps in a communal effort to help our environment.
Today's environmentalists (by that I mean the past 30-ish years of the movement) practice what I call "back-filled morality." This is where one builds specific rights and wrongs around actions they already partake in because of personal preference. My favorite is the trend of modern, young urbanites to bike rather than take cars. One-hundred percent of the time, it's a completely personal preference first- driving a car in the city is a nightmare, its good exercise, its fun, and so forth. However, for those who bike and are of the "environmentally conscious" ilk, you'd be hard-pressed to find one that isn't convinced that cars are wrong for everyone, and that cars are an evil we've leashed onto the planet.
Funny how arguments of global rights-and-wrongs always fit nicely into- and demand zero sacrifice of- the personal likings of the individual making the argument.
- FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM -
Americans don't generally make sacrifices. I don't, environmentalists don't, no one does. It's not that we're selfishly corrupt and perilously greedy, as many like to think. Though many are in denial about it, we all inherently know, through centuries of inherited personal experience, that we actually have a system that figures out how to conform to both mass personal preferences and external necessities like a good environment- all without the need for much sacrifice at all. It's called the free market.
The big, ugly, money-obsessed, take-no-prisoners free market? Well, the "free market" is a bit of a misnomer. The "market" is only a small part of the whole system. When people think of the free market, they assume it applies only to the trade of goods, services, and currency. They assume that seemingly non-economic issues like environmentalism inherently exist outside of the free "market" and must be regulated through some other system. Not true.
Take, for example, the problems in America that are slowly arising from dependence on a depleting and hostilely-controlled oil supply, and foreign oil specifically. A problem, indeed. Yet, when you look at the adoption curve of alternative systems- like hybrid and non-gasoline cars- it mirrors the beginning stages of pretty much every other culture-altering invention before it. We, as a people- with minimal regulatory interference- invented and adopted electricity in a matter of a decade. We invented, learned to use, and widely adopted the Internet in a matter of a few years.
