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 uranium. Everything for the most healthy, safe, secure, rewarding life is available without polluting and depleting.

When life looks hard for me, it reveals a market failure.

Example 1: Take powering my phone and computer when there isn’t much sun. I have a rowing machine. There are plenty of people figuring out ways to build or convert rowing machines to generate power instead of using air resistance, but each offering is expensive, complicated, and time consuming. Imagine if writing meant you had to build a pencil from scratch. You don’t have to because markets provide them.

There is plenty of demand for people to generate power without polluting or depleting, or even just to generate power instead of wind or heat with cardio machines in general.

But that demand is “met” with “solutions” that pollute and deplete—that is, that violate the Constitution—so the market hasn’t provided solutions. The market failure is that we have coercive markets that undermine what would be free markets.

Example 2: People lecture me about the challenge of buying fresh produce for many people because no farmers markets or grocery stores exist near them. Meanwhile, doof and food resulting from polluting and depleting systems of farming and transportation undermine potential markets.

Again, that demand is “met” with “solutions” that pollute and deplete—that is, that violate the Constitution. The market failure is that we have coercive markets that undermine what would be free markets.

Example 3: I have to climb eleven flights of stairs to put my solar panels on the roof since I can’t install them permanently. Meanwhile, air conditioners stick out people’s windows. If we enforced the Constitution, there would be a market of people providing services to install panels that stick out about as far as air conditioners. Instead there are only markets for people to install systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars and can only work for people with roof access.

Conclusion

Living without polluting or depleting is simple. Our coercive markets make it hard. We’ve lived in these coercive so long, we’ve come to believe we require them for life. We don’t.

To call them coercive understates their harm. They cause more death and suffering than slavery. Here’s the relevant plot (read The Scale and Pollution and Depletion’s Effects on People: Here, now, not future projections for details):