We need to target environmental outcomes, not the alleged best ways of achieving them.
Text shared thousands of times on social media claims green energy is "more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye." But the posts make various inaccurate claims, including that ... solar panels or wind turbine blades cannot be recycled.
The source also questions claims about the quantity and environmental cost of minerals used for electronic car batteries.
My conclusion from such debates about the costs and benefits of different ways of gernerating electricity or powering vehicles is simple: advocating one option over another is just too complicated. Life-cycle analyses can be done, but they come festooned with boundary issues and are unlikely to be robust against changes in technology and our knowledge of environmental impacts, and other variables that change over time and space. And how shall the different costs of, say, child labour be weighed against possible reductions in greenhouse gas emissions?
Can you imagine any government doing that? And getting it right? And
continuing to get it right when new technology or new information about, say, mining or carbon dioxide
emissions and their effects becomes available? It's not going to happen.
Which
is why we need, urgently, an outcome-driven approach. The old way of
doing things, with government doing what it thinks is best, might have
worked when government was well intentioned, and relationships between cause and effect on the environment much simpler to identify. It just doesn't work nowadays,
when government is subject to powerful corporate interests and environmental
relationships are much more complex. Government is not up to the job of
working out whether climate change is best tackled by subsidising rail,
electric vehicles, windmills, or catalytic converters. It's not what government is good
at, and it's not what people go into government to do.
What government can do, though, is set up
a regime whereby people are rewarded for improving the environment or helping bring about climate stability,
however they do so. In other words, it could contract out the
achievement of a better environment or a more stable climate to a motivated, diverse, adaptive
private sector. Government could stipulate the environmental outcomes it would reward, which is a simpler and less contentious task than trying to work out how best to achieve them. If it did so by issuing Environmental Policy Bonds, or Climate Stability Bonds, then it's likely that a new sort of organisation would arise: ones that would research, experiment, refine and implement an array of diverse, adaptive approaches to society's environmental goals. They could perform their own life-cycle analyses if they wish; but whatever they do would be done with the aim of achieving our goals as cost-effectively and quickly as possible.
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