The buzz words of the environmentalists — “alternative green energy,” “conservation,” and “recycling” — no doubt convey a sort of happy, positive approach to the challenge of maintaining a clean, healthy environment. But despite their popularity, these “solutions” can’t fix problems that are associated with too much government.

Let us take the supposed grassroots activity of recycling. How many hours out of each month do people spend separating glass, aluminum, and cardboard? In Sweden it is mandatory to recycle. Recyclers that don’t do it the way the state demands are taken out behind the recycling barn and fined — or sent to jail. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the mayor of San Francisco would like to fine people up to $1,000 for improperly sorting their recyclables!

How much time is spent driving to unsightly and unkempt dump containers where people chuck last week’s pizza box into the cardboard bin or toss half-filled cans of soda and beer bottles into the glass compartment? You may ask what the carelessness of a few people has to do with the idea of running a recycling program. Ask the citizens of Sweden, who were being spied upon by government employees to make sure that they put all thei recyclables in the right bins. Sweden even makes its citizens wash the containers before taking them to a recycling center. How much water is used to wash what normally sane people would consider garbage not worth cleaning before tossing?

There is an actual monetary cost involved with recycling that many people have never thought about. How much does it cost to hire drivers and extra mechanics to maintain the extra recycling trucks? How much smoke is blown into the air by those extra recycling trucks?

Conservation is another one of those formerly meaningful, but now overused, happy words that applies to government jobs more than the private sector, since many overpaid government employees produce nothing but paperwork and produce not an ounce of energy. The term “conservation,” however, has been used to scare the American people into environmental fanaticism, via a constant hammering into the American psyche that we are running out of everything — everything except government regulations! But America is not poor in terms of natural resources. Geologists have proven that our country is chock-full of oil, coal, and natural gas. Add to this the virtually endless source of electrical energy from nuclear power, if only the government would get out of the way and let the energy producers build enough plants to fill our needs!

Americans are being cast into the mold of a poor third world country, a nation of paupers reduced to recycling “scarce resources.” People should be free to take their empty cans to a recycling collection center, if they believe it is beneficial, but why should other citizens be forced to pay for needless trucks and extra city employees to pick up cardboard and plastic? America is becoming a Pack Rat Collection Society, instead of what we once were, a highly efficient industrialized nation. It should make Americans feel angry that our government officials recommend recycling empty milk cartons and cardboard while the frozen moonscape of ANWR sits unexplored! 

City governments take the cardboard and plastic that is collected for them by citizens and sell these recyclables to private companies, but the “redistribution of the wealth” isn’t shared with homeowners. Maybe if the city government gave citizens a rate decrease on garbage collection more people might consider setting out a batch of cardboard and plastic. However, most mayors are unimaginative politicians who think that a proper reward for citizens forced to work for free (involuntary servitude?) is a rate increase.

In a modern industrial nation being miserly with energy resources is the wrong solution to the problem. In order to maintain our standard of living, energy needs to be expended and used by people living in a modern multi-megawatt society. We’ve gone down the energy conservation road since the 1970s and that approach won’t provide for our expanding energy needs. We need to free up the market in order to maintain and compete with other highly advanced countries. The alternative is to go back to the technologies of the middle ages and become a nation of serfs.

The unfounded claim that our carbon-based resources are about to run out, when in fact they are in abundance, is leading people to accept scarcity in their lives. If we continue to subsidize “alternative” energy sources, Americans will soon realize that the puny energy put out by acres upon acres of solar farms and hundreds of acres of wind turbines just aren’t meeting our future energy needs no matter how many inflated dollars politicians put into the Green kitty.

We cannot afford to lie around waiting and “conserving” our energy like an old hunting dog under the front porch. Energy producers need money to explore and to develop new energy sources. Where will they get the money to produce and to invent new sources of energy if people are pressured into using less of their product, thus shrinking their market? Producers have to make a profit to stay in business regardless of how many public regulation commissioners may think otherwise.

The good news is that our country’s energy producers could positively get us out of this energy crunch if people stopped fiddling around with their trash and called their Congressman to abolish the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and all the other energy stifling laws and acts. Therein, in my opinion, lies the reason for the popularity of recycling — to keep people busy “saving the planet.” As long as people are involved in dead-end projects instead of getting the government out of the way of the real producers our energy woes will only worsen.


 

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