We should celebrate when the government actually pursues policies based on correct information, as is the case with the Trump administration’s declaration that conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative. Their point is right — the fracking revolution has indeed meant that we don’t need to worry about the oil running out in 20 years, 30 years, or whatever it was the Club of Rome tried to tell us.
True, this doesn’t quite mean that we should break out the V12 engines to mow the lawn since there are other concerns to consider: Whatever your views, climate change and emissions aren’t altered by there being sufficient oil around. There’s also that small matter of the price tag. We definitely have a shortage of $30 oil and a gross surplus of $120 oil, but that seems to be the sort of thing we can all deal with.
In fact, the Trump administration here is only telling us what people in the environmental movement have been telling us for some years now. It’s what those increasingly pitched whines on stranded assets, and even the divestment in carbon campaign, are about. Their case is that there’s plenty of oil out there, so much so that if we went and used it we’d boil the oceans. Therefore we shouldn’t use it, rendering much of what we have valueless. That is the stranded asset argument, and the argument for why we should all divest — so that companies don’t go looking for more.
Obviously there’s a bit of fun in seeing the administration agree with environmentalists, who are both saying the same thing: There’s plenty of oil out there, and we don’t have to try to save it just to save oil. That, of course, won’t stop the environmentalists from shouting at the administration.
But the key question here is how does this affect what we do about the world? Depending on your climate change views, emissions might mean we should still be parsimonious in burning the stuff. But non-emitting uses now seem to be unconstrained, which means we don’t have to worry about recycling plastics.
Think about the twin arguments on plastics: that they litter the oceans and the planet as a whole (OK, that could be true), but also that by not using them we’ll preserve precious natural resources. Yet we’ve just all agreed — Right and Left, free market and environmentalist — there’s no need to conserve either oil or natural gas, the two main raw ingredients of plastics. That means plastics are just a waste management issue, not a resource one.
At that point the mania for recycling plastics becomes entirely irrelevant. We just don’t need to go to the expense nor devote the time and resources to developing the technology. Sure, we have to gather all the plastic up once we’ve used it, but then we simply need to dispose of those bottles, straws, and the rest. Burn ‘em or bury ‘em, it makes little difference.
The Trump administration is correct, and so is the militant wing of environmentalists that whines about stranded assets. But we just don’t have a grand shortage of oil, nor of any of the fossil fuels. The big implication of this is that we don’t need to be recycling plastics. What natural resources (that we actually need to conserve) are we trying to conserve by doing so? As long as we don’t litter the earth with plastics we’re set, aren’t we?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
