Monthly Archives: August 2019

“Recycling Is Largely Fake”

30 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Recyclng, Social Costs

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The quotation headlined above is from Duke University economist Michael Munger, and it’s essentially what I’ve contended for years (see “When Is Recycling Not Wasteful?“). Munger’s latest essay on this subject is entitled, “For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment“. The reasons are very basic: resource costs. As Munger says, the degree of economic and environmental justification for recycling varies, depending on the item, but few supporters of recycling ever bother to look into the details.

First, a very basic economic point: resource conservation is beneficial for the environment. Sometimes there are technological trade-offs between conservation of different resources, but costs are always a matter of resource use: less use, lower total costs. Resource conservation is synonymous with lower costs. Indeed, that is why we are told to recycle, and that is what most people think they’re doing when they recycle.

But while recycling always conserves some resource more or less directly, the mere process of recycling uses other resources. This includes the costs of rolling trucks to collect the items, including fuel, labor, machinery and labor for sorting, water, chemicals, more distant shipping, and separate processes to convert the items into usable goods. In its entirety, then, recycling often does not conserve resources.

Voluntary consumer-recyclers seldom face the marginal costs of recycling directly. This highlights the general nature of environmental problems that arise in any society: external costs are often borne by parties external to the activity in question. And here is where the story of recycling’s poor economics gets interesting. Recycling advocates would have us believe that our private use of products, for which we generally pay full cost, imposes external or social costs on others unless we recycle all recyclable components of the product and it’s packaging. In fact, the opposite is often true!

Therefore, governments, fully on-board with popular recycling myths, often mandate recycling, which is another way of saying that you are not free to make your own decision based on costs and benefits. So the costs of recycling are on you, but you are unimpacted at any margin along which you can make decisions. You are forced to internalize some part of the costs that are presumptively avoided via recycling according to the myth. You pay taxes to fund the collection of materials at the curb, but governments often require citizens to clean and sort those materials. That carries significant costs that governments prefer to remain implicit.

This is to say nothing of the actual net value of the recycled materials, which is often negative. Certain items require so much processing and produce materials of such low quality that no one wants them. Virgin materials are often cheaper than fully processed recycled material, and usually yield better quality, or both. Far better, then, to pay the cost of transporting these kinds of discards to landfills and paying for the low-cost landfill space, which is plentiful, contrary to greenist propaganda.

Munger provides examples of such wasteful-to-recycle materials. For instance, attempts to recycle glass bottles are often completely non-productive relative to landfilling. That’s due to cost factors, lousy quality after processing, and weak market prices for recycled glass. Plastics are of questionable value as recyclables as well: huge quantities had been shipped to the Far East, but the volume was too much for the Chinese (and too dirty, they claimed), so it often ended-up in landfills anyway. Last year, the Chinese banned imports of recyclable plastics from several countries, which means that our plastic materials are probably headed for our own landfills. Yet we still go to the trouble of preparing and collecting them for recycling.

According to Munger, aluminum cans are worthwhile to recycle relative to landfilling. So are certain types of cardboard (though the Chinese don’t want some of those either). Also, scrap metals are privately recycled via active markets for the materials.

Private parties who can internalize costs in their voluntary decisions are wise to abide by the following:

“I have sometimes suggested a test for whether something is garbage or a valuable commodity. Hold it in your hand, or hold a cup of it, or tank, or however you can handle it. Consider: Will someone pay me for this? If the answer is yes, it’s a commodity, a valuable resource. If the answer is no, meaning you have to pay them to take it, then it’s garbage.”

Of course, society as a whole must internalize costs. There’s no way around it. Therefore, governments should behave as if they internalize costs as well, though they hardly ever do. They would sooner mandate recycling when they know full well that the simple economics outlined above don’t support it. That means an unnecessary consumption of resources is attributable to the recycling charade, which is environmentally unsound by the strictest of Green standards.

I am not quite so hard on government recycling mandates when there exist significant external costs associated with sending uneconomic trash to landfills, or when there are real efficiencies associated with recycling. Landfills must price their space efficiently, collecting sufficient fees from users to pay for environmental mitigation as well as the payoffs necessary to mollify those nearby who might happen to harbor NIMBY-ism. But recycling mandates offer strong evidence that the economics of recycling are not worthwhile. So please, whenever you are told that recycling is virtuous, be suspicious. As Munger says, it’s largely a fraud.

Mass Shootings and Mass Manipulation

21 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Gun Control, Second Amendment

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The drumbeat for gun control from Leftist authoritarians never stops, and the recent mass shootings in Dayton OH, El Paso TX, and Gilroy CA, have been greeted with so much political agitation that the victims have become mere footnotes. Attempting to marshal facts in this debate can be quite confusing due to the variety of definitions of “mass shootings”. This variety contributes to certain myths about guns and gun violence that are often repeated by the media to a brow-beaten public. The confusion also motivates anti-gun policy prescriptions that are likely to be ineffective at best, and in all likelihood, counter-productive.

What constitutes a “mass shooting”? The traditional FBI definition counted an incident as a mass killling if four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator. Broader definitions include cases in which 4 or more people are killed or injured, including the perpetrator. Gun rights opponents seem to prefer expansive definitions, including those that count gang-related killings, domestic shootings, or those occurring in the commission of another criminal act. Criminologist John Lott contends that these kinds of killings are driven by fundamentally different social forces than the mass public shootings that are at the center of this debate. For example, with respect to gang killings, Lott says:

“... the causes and solutions to drug gang violence are dramatically different than for the vast majority of mass public shootings, where attacks are designed to kill or wound as many people as possible. Padding the numbers by lumping the two together doesn’t make much sense.”

The more expansive definitions give rise to the notion that mass shootings have been trending-up dramatically in America. In fact, as Christopher J. Ferguson reports, data from The USA TODAY/AP/Northeastern University mass killings database show that the rate of mass shooting incidents per year has been flat since the early 1990s and are not much higher than the averages of the 1970s.

Another prominent distortion often accepted uncritically is that the U.S. leads the world in mass shootings. The U.S. totals are often inflated, but part of the reason for this misperception is that it’s easy to undercount foreign mass shootings. They do not always receive the same intensity of news coverage as mass shootings in the U.S., and tracking reports published in other languages is inherently more difficult for researchers. Lott says the following:

“Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.”

The tragic nature of mass shootings should not prevent us from keeping the magnitude of these events in perspective, as Chris Buskirk explains in “Everything They’re Telling You About Mass Shootings Is Wrong“. For example, almost three-quarters of U.S. mass shootings in 2018 (four or more killed or injured) were associated with criminal activity, bar fights, and the like. And of course other social problems dwarf public mass shootings, such as the 70,000 opioid deaths that occurred in 2018, a phenomenon not coincidentally associated with the War on Drugs. And as Buskirk reminds us, the number of fatalities in public mass shootings is infinitesimal relative to the total number of defensive gun uses.

The Left’s reaction to these events is wrongheaded and their policy prescriptions are dangerous. A simple example is the widespread designation of buildings and public spaces as “gun-free zones”. However, it is highly likely that ending these designations would be an effective preventative against mass public shootings. John Lott writes in “How gun-free zones invite mass shootings” that 98% of the mass public shootings since 1950 occurred in areas where guns were prohibited. And we know that mass shootings are indeed prevented by armed citizens. Yet the Left staunchly opposes such a change and promotes the futile and foolish elimination of gun rights in general (also see this).

Leah Libresco, a statistician and former news writer at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, was highly disillusioned after devoting considerable effort to researching gun deaths. She expected to find that broad gun control measures were the answer. Instead, she says:

“… the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns. 

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans.”

Then there are the continuing, uninformed calls to ban “assault weapons”. As Libresco explains:

 “… no gunowner walks into the store to buy an ‘assault weapon.’ It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, arocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.”

Bill Clinton weighed into the debate last week by claiming that his assault weapons “ban”, which began in 1994, was so effective that we should be eager to accede to plans recently put forward by Democrats. Mark Overstreet quickly called him out as a liar, and on no less than six counts. Not only were existing “assault weapons” exempted under Clinton’s “ban”, but Americans actually added to their private stocks of weapons that met the law’s criteria during its enforcement. Existing large ammunition magazines were exempted, as well as imports of such magazines. Thus, Clinton’s so-called ban did not even approach the draconian measures now being proposed, which range from manufacturing and import prohibitions all the way up to confiscation.

Also preposterous are the Left’s routine characterizations of mass shooters as “right-wing extremists”. The truth is hardly clear cut. For example, despite expressing strong anti-immigrant sentiment, the shooters in El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand were both environmental radicals or “eco-fascists”, in the Christchurch shooter’s words. The Dayton shooter was a self-described socialist and a supporter of Bernie Sanders, as was James T. Hodgkinson, the gunman who attacked a group of Republican legislators at a baseball practice, seriously injuring Congressman Steve Scalese. These madmen clearly weren’t crazed right-wing zealots. If anything, their profiles usually reflect severe psychological as well as ideological confusion.

Even one public mass shooting is too many, but their prevalence in the U.S. has been exaggerated in several ways. The hyperbole is often politically-motivated, intended to create negative public sentiment toward Second Amendment rights. But you can’t stop public mass shootings by foolishly disarming or criminalizing the very law-abiding citizens who are often the only force capable of providing an immediate defensive response.

Snopes Attacks Satire In Ominous Self-Satirization

12 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Censorship, Free Speech

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Snopes.com began as an investigator of urban legends and rumors, exposing myths in an exercise that was useful and often fascinating. More recently, despite its founder’s weak argument to the contrary, Snopes has fully revealed its bias against certain political viewpoints, along with a tendency to avoid reporting some actual facts as facts when it suits itself. Lately this has reached a pathetic level, with the site drawing amused reaction to its confusion over the satiric nature of The Babylon Bee. The Bee is a truly funny site similar to The Onion, but it bills itself as “Christian Satire”. If you find that off-putting or think it means the humor must be cornpone, think again. Of course, there is no doubt that the Bee’s humor often pokes fun at the Left, which probably explains Snopes’ motives.

Snopes itself has not been above a bit of fibbing. Its “political fact-checker”, Kim Lacapria, is a former leftist blogger, known to have maligned the Tea Party as “Teahadists”, a funny mischaracterization of the unquestionably peaceful movement as violent. She’s not exactly a person you’d trust as an impartial arbiter of political “fact”. Linda Sue Grimes wrote an informative article with several prominent examples of bias by Snopes. There have also been reports of sordid personal and financial exploits  by one of Snopes’ founders, much of which stands up to scrutiny. 

In its latest misadventure in fact-weaving, Snopes’ has charged that the Bee published a story “intended to deceive” readers, and it claimed the Bee  had done so in the past. The story was entitled “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure“. It was inspired by an incident in which the same Georgia lawmaker apparently had too many items in the express checkout at a Publix grocery store. She claimed that an angry white man told her to “go back to where you came from”. However, the Publix clerk with whom she had the altercation, who happens to be Cuban, denies having said any such thing, though he did admit to calling her a bitch. The lawmaker’s allegation seems suspiciously coincidental, having come in the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s controversial tweet that the quartet of federal lawmakers known as “The Squad” should “go back to where they came from”.

Apparently, the humor in the Bee’s article was just a bit too subtle for Snopes, whose “woke” employees have particularly vivid imaginations. The Bee article was funny precisely because it ridiculed those who hear racial “dog whistles” everywhere. The idea that a Chinese employee working a drive-through at Chick-Fil-A would say such a thing is unlikely to say the least. Anyone who has ever visited a Chick-Fil-A knows it. Too many of those with whistles in their ears haven’t had the pleasure.

Has the Bee intended to deceive its readers in the past? Perhaps Snopes was referring to an article entitled “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication“. Snopes went to the trouble of calling that story false and bringing it to Facebook’s attention. Facebook actually issued a warning to the Bee (for which FB later apologized). But here’s the thing, in Grimes’ words:

“Debunking a piece of satire renders the debunker as functionally illiterate, appearing too ignorant to understand that a piece of satire does not function to relay information as a news report would.”

It’s actually much worse than that. If Snopes wants to to assess the objective truth of claims, that’s one thing, but it has drifted into the assessment of literary and authorial intent. That’s ominous for the cause of free discourse, especially to the extent that social media sites rely on Snopes as a filter to deplatform certain voices or silence points of view. Snopes has no business attempting to draw distinctions between satire and “fake news” or any intent to deceive, because it’s bound to get it wrong and already has. They might as well fact-check stand-up comics whose routines might confuse a few dimwitted members of the public, and Snopes just might do so if the comic doesn’t support its preferred political narrative. Snopes’ role is not to protect the unsophisticated from satire, and apparently its fact-checkers feel no compulsion to debunk the satire produced by The Onion, for example. The Bee’s pointed satire often serves the purpose of exposing the Left for its congenital stupidity, but that is anything but an effort to deceive, as much as Snopes might wish it was so.