As a conservative, I believe in conserving resources whenever reasonable and not unnecessarily wasting resources. I turn off the lights when I don’t use them. I cool things before refrigerating or freezing them. I do a dozen things every day like this that save energy and resources, and yet I never deprive myself of anything. I simply don’t believe in waste.
Thoughtful conservatives believe in efficiency and abhor waste. Such desire for efficiency and abhorrence of waste is actually more grounded in the principles of conservatism than the vague do-gooderism of “Progressives” for “saving Mother Earth”, who more often than not choose feel-good solutions that actually are more often than far worse for the environment than rational behaviors of thoughtful conservatives.
Bottom line, I manage my life in such a way as to be as efficient as possible with my time and resource usage, though I never deprive myself in any way by such thoughtful behavior.
Recycling is one such effort. Where I live, recycling is single stream, so you toss garbage in one container and recyclables in the other. Garbage is picked up weekly and recyclables every other week. There are drop-centers for larger items. Throughout the county, contractors save money by hauling large quantities of recyclables to these centers which they would otherwise have to pay to landfill. The county has a county-wide processing center that processes all of these materials, and railroad cars of useful materials, including metals, glass, paper, and kraftboard are put back to good reuse every week.
Prices of such materials go up and down on a daily basis and some are worth more than others. In boom times, almost all basic recyclable materials can be sold for a profit, but in a depression, not so much. But recycling is not like copper mining where you just shut down the mines for a while when demand is low: recycling processing and collection infrastructure is in place through thick or thin times, including the many manufacturing facilities which have been optimized specifically to use these recycled materials.
In good times, recycling is self-sustaining, in slow times, a small subsidy is required, but the savings in terms of energy either way is enormous as it takes WAY less energy to reuse existing glass, steel, and aluminum than to make new, not to mention that high quality iron ore and high quality aluminum ore won’t last forever. So, recycling helps to make sure that our children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren will have some resources left for them to use as well.
And yes, at times recycling requires a subsidy, but everything that preserves the environment requires an economic subsidy. Clean air, clean water, clean oceans, clean everything all have hidden economic costs, and it’s all a matter of degree.
I can’t imagine very many people here would like to see our land, water, and air fouled like early industrial revolution England, or China in the 1980’s, have PCBs dumped into the Hudson River, see Cleveland’s rivers catch on fire, etc., and yet to preserve our health from these kinds of toxic environments does have an economic cost.
On the other hand, we understand the economic point of diminishing returns, for example, making our land, water, and air that extra 1% cleaner makes no sense if that extra cleanliness comes at a cost of the first 99%.
I agree with your thoughts there. Not having much to add, i’ll make a comment along the lines of some of your last thoughts.
I live in Southern California. I came back to live here in the early 70s. It is amazing how much cleaner the air is now than it was back then.
We pay more for our gas, but we do live a healthier life because of it.
I’m not against some regulations and some efforts to keep things clean and not waste, but as you pointed out, it has to be reasonable.
This “reduce the use of fossil fuels” by 2050 in California is just plain nutty.
The government of California is ripe for open revolt. It’s absolutely terrible.
We’re taxed to death. They misuse the funds and raise taxes more. They promise tax increases are temporary and never remove them.
They steal gas tax dollars for mass transit, then demand toll roads because there aren’t enough highway funds. And then folks just buy in like good little lap dogs.
You make it sound like recycling requires that very little money is extracted from taxpayers unwilling pockets.
That’s simply not true, it requires very large amounts of money to be confiscated from taxpayers.
The proof?
How many of the non-metal recycling efforts are operated by private enterprise unsubsidized?
Very, very few, if any. These are all government enterprises with limitless budgets, and no accountability.
Even the post up thread, I’ll wager that the company receives government assistance of some sort directly related to the recycling.
It’s very wasteful to recycle most things we throw away in our daily lives.
HELP SAVE THE EARTH...........STOP RECYCLING.
Like you I have nothing against people recycling if they want to, but it should be completely voluntary, and understood that for the most part it has nugatory benefit.