Something that shits me at the moment is the frequency with which I’m seeing comments like this – that environmental activism is just a new religion. I’ve seen it on blogs, in newspaper Op-Ed pieces, and on Usenet. Often it is combined with a view that market forces will avert problems or provide the best solutions.
Yes, it’s true that environmental activism may be a religion to some. But to others it is just cold, rational, thinking. It is simply not in our interests to severely disrupt an environment that our comfort, economies and lives are deeply entwined with, in complex ways that we sometimes have a poor understanding of. ‘End-times’ scenario’s are often the realistic consequences of not changing our behaviour to acknowledge this.
Part of the problem is that the issues with the biggest consequences also have the longest time scales, and we’re not good at thinking on long time scales.
When waste products are produced which have obvious consequences on short time-scales we have no problem with taxing their production. For example, the “end-time scenario” for not constructing sewage systems in our cities is us being buried in excrement. We’ve realised this and nowadays people pay taxes that maintain and build sewage systems.
We find it more challenging to deal with medium time-scale consequences. In much of the developed world industrial pollution must now be made inert before being released into the environment. This is done because there is an end-times scenario for us – death and deformity by poison. Industry pays to neutralise these toxins, and now most people agree this is good. They value health over GDP (if we accept the questionable claims that clean industry means damaged economy, and that GDP is the most important parameter of the economy). But in many cases this had to be hard fought for in the developed world – and is still being fought for. And it is still not the case in parts of the developing world. Market forces just don’t work without a cost being put on pollutants.
A longer-term issue, in Australia, is salinity. This is a serious and expensive environmental problem over much of the land. A result of land clearance and inappropriate agricultural practices. Once upon a time it wasn’t known that salinity would be a problem in Australia. There was some evidence of it by the 1890s, but it wasn’t until 1925 that it was generally accepted in science. It was believed that everything would be okay, and it wasn’t worth doing anything about it. Despite this, even now, there are some that still aren’t taking seriously, with further economic cost to us. How could this have been averted? Well a tax on land clearing and poor management practices might have been a good start.
Global warming is even longer-term then this and so is tougher still. Some people still argue that there isn’t any evidence for it (though not Lomborg) and that it isn’t worth doing anything about it (like Lomberg). A problem with global warming is that the science allows for effects that may not be blindingly obvious at this time, and which may be difficult to do anything about by the time they become obvious (a bit like salinity). So people can jump up and down claiming that global warming ‘alarmists’ are just religious nuts. But given the complexity of the issue, it seems to me that folk who emit quotes like the one above may be the True Believers. They have an irrational belief that they are Saved, through an unwavering faith in market-forces/natural-variability/Superman.
Given that the market doesn’t seem to work when the resource being damaged is
a) free,
b) damaged slowly
it seems to me that a carbon tax, or some other way to add scarcity or cost to carbon, is a very sensible precaution right now. Perhaps also an opportunity to prove that there really is intelligent life on earth, that we can learn from past mistakes, and that we’re not ruled by our religious beliefs.
Interestingly, when industry is forced to change its behaviour for a better environmental outcome it’s often found that the costs to the industry are much lower then what is claimed by them while they are fighting the change. An example of this was sulphur dioxide emission control in the US. When the US EPA decided (in 1993) to auction off permits for the right to generate a quantity of SO2 above the given quota, the auction price began cheap and got cheaper to just $70 per tonne. It was suggested beforehand that they might go for as much as $1500/t. There was little demand for SO2 permits because industry had been exaggerating the costs of reducing SO2 [1]. The reality is that it was cheap and easy . A topic for another post.
[1] The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, pp 98-101 (London, Little Brown, April 2006)
Wheels World 
Vi said
It’s right up there next to scientology, I guess. 😛