Pollution and Depletion

When people see me for the first time in a while, they often ask if I still don't fly and if I'm still off the grid. I think they see the behavior as noble acts of deprivation and sacrifice. If you were born in a slave culture but in adulthood learned about slavery, I figure you would do your best to avoid supporting slavery, including avoiding slave-produced goods. If so, would you ever go back? Would you consider it deprivation? ... or would you consider it appropriate? Wouldn't you prefer to extend liberty and freedom from people you would otherwise take these values from? To me, people asking if I still don't fly or connect to the electric grid from my apartment sounds like they're…

Before considering pollution as an externality, let's first consider another practice that deprives people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. Sadly, I have to point out that comparing things doesn't imply saying they are equal. Anyone who reads that I am equating these things is misinterpreting me, likely deliberately. Practice 1: slavery. Slaves aren't paid for their work. That lack of payment may make the cost of their labor an externality, but that externality is a minor point. The bigger issue is their loss of life and liberty. If you enslave someone, taking away their freedom with force and violence, but pay them competitive wages, you haven't fixed the biggest issues. Practice 2: pollution. People whose property loses value from pollution…

My past few posts cover how I work with less electrical power and less consistent supply. I know that nearly everyone interprets my situation as deprivation, sacrifice, extreme, and other legitimizing myths, as people viewed those who freed slaves. If it was legal, why work hard when you can force someone else to work for you? Or today: why work hard when you can plug something in that can do it for you (unstated: despite contributing to far more death and suffering than slavery caused)? I know most people act as if the legitimizing myths that without polluting and depleting we'll revert to the Stone Age, die at 30, be invaded, etc, but life does not require pollution or depletion. It doesn't require fossil fuels or…

Pollution and depletion deprive people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. The Constitution doesn't define property, but all the founders, including those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, understood it as John Locke wrote, including that you can not allow people to make property---that is, to appropriate---from nature without leaving enough as good in common for others. In other words, bringing fossil fuels and uranium into the biosphere violate constitutional property rights. Those rights are defined not for the fun of it or arbitrarily. They are there to protect liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security from tyranny, civil war, and invasion from disunity, preceded by civic breakdown. You may like the perks you get from activities that violate these protections.…

I've written plenty about a person who has become one of my great role models, whose actions are poignant today. He freed the most number of slaves of any American before the Civil War. He didn't ask to be born into a culture in which slavery was legal and financially rewarded. Yet he acted. We didn't ask to be born into a culture in which polluting and depleting, which cause death and suffering orders of magnitude greater than US slavery did. Most of us don't act. It's tempting to say we aren't holding whips, a red herring. Few people held whips then. They bought cotton, tobacco, and other slave-produced products and services. They paid for others to whip and enslave, just as we pay people…

People call pollution an externality---that is, a cost imposed on someone who wasn't part of the choice. It may be an externality, but that identification misses a bigger point. It also violates the consent of the governed, deprives people of life, liberty, and property, and violates the Declaration and Constitution in other ways. Pollution is not just an economic issue. It's also political and the political ramifications are much greater. Violating the Constitution is important, especially when everyone in the nation does it, the government profits from it, politicians become corrupted by it, and more. If you don't fix the economic problem, money gets distributed not to those who solve problems best but to those who coerce the most. You distort the economy and inhibit…