One problem with environmental regulations is that they often create one or two environmental problems for each environmental problem they mitigate.
Fuel-additive laws reduced lead emissions, but they gave us MTBE. Ethanol subsidies and mandates reduced petroleum usage, but they gave us toxic runoff, deforestation, and some pollution increases. Outlaw the traditional incandescent, and you get more lightbulbs made in China (at plants with worse pollution records than the U.S. plants they’re replacing) and mercury gas in bulbs. Impose fuel-economy standards, and you get aluminum-framed cars made through GHG-intensive processes in Australia. I could go on….
Through the liberal environmentalist website Grist and the liberal Mother Jones, we get this item about hybrid gas-electric cars. Your Prius relies on rare-Earth metals and:
But, of course, hybrids have been immensely benefitted by federal and state-level subsidies, such as tax credits and special access to car-pool lanes. So, our green subsidies have been causing some environmental harm. Again.
The problem is that environmentalist laws so frequently focus on a very narrow source of pollution — the tailpipe, for instance — thus pushing rational businesses to activities that might cause a net increase in environmental harm, or at least diminish the environmental benefit to the point it is definitely not worth the economic costs.
If you’re going to pass laws to protect the environment, they should be as broad as possible. But if we stopped subsidizing specific “green” technologies, where would the politicians turn for their campaign money?
