Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Lew Rockwell writes that “[e]nvironmentalism has long been a counter religion, with roots in ancient pagan nature worship.” And George Reisman distinguishes between the greenies who “merely… like to see flowers bloom on open meadows and love trees, whales, and polar bears, and the like” from their more destructive cousins.

It used to be that most of nature was pristine, because humans lacked the power to subdue it. Now that most of nature has been to an extent civilized and put under control (though make no mistake: nature always seeks to break free and kill us), people suddenly clamor for patches of unspoiled wilderness in the midst of urban jungles. Fine. But isn’t it interesting that environmentalism has not reached the conscience of the common man pretty much until now, when technology has advanced to the state when non-polluting power production is economically viable, and the market stands almost ready to provide power sources whose operation has no negative externalities?

In other words, the drive, in particular, to switch over to clean cars has come from two directions. First, people have become so wealthy that they are now willing to spend money on “clean consciences,” that is, on secure knowledge that they are not harming their neighbors by polluting the air they breathe. Second, the technology has matured to the extent of being able to be incorporated into cars that are presumed to be attractive to the regular consumer, that is, to you and me. Both are equally necessary, representing the demand and supply respectively.

It is therefore not the government nor even the environmentalist ideologues who should get the credit for this and similar innovations, though I agree that a certain awareness of air quality has played a role in the process of developing and converting to clean cars. It is private entrepreneurs who have made choosing such cars and devices an easy thing to do. The explanation is not difficult to find. In business there is employed the phrase “good will” which differentiates trusted brands and companies from those considered to be less trustworthy. If a firm is seen to care about what Murray Rothbard calls the unowned and probably unownable “general conditions of human welfare” such as air or to spend money trying to eliminate the negative externalities of the products it offers for sale, though it does not “have to,” then people understandably come to trust it more, to consider it a “good corporate citizen,” and themselves to feel good about owning its goods. There is even such thing as socially responsible investing. Thus, no government intervention is needed to spurn this kind of progress.

In other words, producing clean cars not only simply satisfies the demand but also makes the job of the company’s PR department easier.

(All this, assuming, of course, that neither homesteading nor negotiation can resolve pollution problems.)

It may be objected that even taking ideology and good will into consideration, clean cars will be underproduced. Two points must be made here. First, absent market prices we can never know the optimal number of such cars that ought to be produced. The political test is too crude to be useful. Second, the factors mentioned will still be sufficient to get the majority of the population to switch to the new technology. You’ll see.

I fully endorse flowers blooming on open meadows (though not the assumption that meadows must be owned by the state), useless though such things are. But not if this obvious luxury interferes with economic progress and general happiness. Perhaps the new crop of “zero-emission” cars will shut the environmentalists, or at least most of them, up, such that the near-insane “moralists” who consider humans to be a virus to be eliminated for the sake of the Earth Mother or some such thing will be relegated to the fringes of the genuinely lunatic left. As Reisman writes, “The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science and bent on the destruction of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but in its demented old age.” (Capitalism, 102)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 12:50 am and is filed under Economics, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.