The Problem With Green "Solutions"

(NOTE: I had a VERY long post planned and pretty much completed. I spent a few days on it, actually. But most people would have skipped it, and I realized I could say what I wanted to say in much less space. I also struggled with the title, for a number of reasons. Below is my final post.

This link (courtesy of Heidi) to a recent story from Fox News, about a grad student at Yale who built a "green" house, made me think yet again about the issues that Mankind will continue to face as it tries to find "green solutions to our problems". Let's look at a couple of these "problems": "Sprawl", air quality, water quality and conservation, energy use and dependency, production and use of fossil fuels, or old-growth forest protection. They're all related.

And here's what environmentalists do: they just keep asking you to give things up. They come up with solutions people don't want to willingly pay for, because their "solutions" are actually less efficient, less directly beneficial, less aesthetically pleasing, and/or less personally gratifying to human beings. Consider they kind of tripe they're pushing on us all:

Smaller, boxier, less attractive, less functional cars
Electric cars
Immediate death to any power source that isn't solar or wind
New Urbanism
Water conservation vs. building new dams and reservoirs
Recycling

Look up all of those and compare them to what we currently buy. While there are folks who favor those solutions for their own reasons, look at polls about what people want. Look at the market. Look at recent history, as well: DDT, Freon, unleaded gas, unleaded gas with ethanol, unleaded gas with LOTS of ethanol, low-flow toilets and fixtures, eco-friendly cleaning products, organic farming and food products...nearly every "solution" actually requires a big step backward in many areas only for the sake of some ethereal, abstract concept like "stopping global warming" or "protecting Mother Earth". The pattern you will see emerging with green solutions and products goes like this:

1. Great in theory, terrible in practice.
2. They cost consumers more money.
3. They aren't as appealing to consumers.
4. They are less effective or efficient than the solutions and products they are replacing.
5. They often have unintended consequences that are equally "dirty".

So you and I pay more for something we like less, that doesn't work as well, and that costs us more. Is it any wonder that the Greenies have to make us do this stuff by the law, and that most Greenies are socialists and communists? Green solutions and products could NEVER compete directly with regular, less eco-friendly products. That means these solutions and products must invalidate the free market and freedom of choice...you have less choice, less freedom to buy what you want. Basically, the only thing green solutions are good at is making mankind give up its freedom to thrive and progress. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are exceedingly rare and much lower-profile.

Note that I am not saying that we're stupid to be mindful of the environment, or work to find solutions and make products that provide as little negative impact as possible. (We are capable as a species of doing that, if we put our minds to it.) I just want to know why all of the solutions they keep coming up with suck so bad, when compared to what we have. Mankind needs incentives, and eco-friendliness in and of itself doesn't provide enough incentive to keep moving backward. Why don't we all just go on socialist-environmentalist welfare, with no product choice and no free will? Is that the future you want, that you want for your kids?

To tie this back to that original story from the link in the first paragraph, notice that the eco-friendly grad student had to use land "donated" to her, build with materials "donated" to her, and she even has to borrow someone else's bathroom. These solutions cannot stand on their own unless someone else sacrifices, unless someone else pays the price. Let's find REAL solutions to these problems, not pie-in-the-sky nutball pseudo-science nonsense.