I’m going paperless. Specifically, I’m asking my banks and other financial institutions to stop sending me paper statements I can more easily obtain online. Yes, in a sense I’m “going green.”
Am I doing this to save these businesses money? No way; that’s not my job. Am I doing this for the sake of “society”? Even if I knew what that meant, it wouldn’t be my motive. My motive is purely self-interest and rationality.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. Technology, science and business make our lives easier. The answer to any environmental “crisis” is not the reduction or eliminaton of these things, it’s the expansion of them. You don’t blame inadequacies found in the automobile on the nature of automobiles, and demand an immediate return to the horse and buggy. Instead, you look for a way to build better automobiles. You don’t blame flaws in human civilization on the nature of man, and demand that he return to barbarism–you instead seek progress. Only the depressed and the mentally ill would suggest that life is so hopeless we might as well give up and destroy everything we have because it’s imperfect. Yet, this is the mentality of the depressed and the mentally ill who run our government and academic institutions. They offer no solutions other than to hamper science, restrain capitalism and reduce the release of human energy to a point that civilization as we know it will decline and maybe collapse.
If you’re pro-environment, in the sense that it means a better life for all humans, then you will want more and more capitalism, freedom, human innovation and technology to keep making things better and better. Going backwards is not the way to improve human life. Environmentalists seek to instill fear on the premise that humans will suffer if human innovation expands. Indeed, legislation awaiting Congress and the President’s signature seeks to reduce human activity and energy. What happens to humans then? Is the motive of this legislation to improve human life, or something else a bit more sinister and self-serving? If it is something else, they should be made to say what it is, explicitly. I’m interested in hearing it.