[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by Tactitus

So many people were "stealing" the metal that was put on the curb for recycling that the city had to make stealing trash a crime. This leads me to believe that there's enough of a market for metal recycling to actually pay for itself.

Yeah, as I wrote about this on my blog recently but a few years ago people used to dump/abandon cars on our estates (because scrapping rates were outweighed by dumping costs) which used to cause us various problems. Now, thanks to higher commodity prices people not only scrap their cars, they nick the copper pipes out of our empty properties. And having seen how ingenious people can be when it comes to stealing "scrap" metal (including removing an entire set of metal railings from a staircase using a portable cutting tool) I'm confident that when the incentives are right people will sort out many of the problems we're having now.

I thought making a moral point was what environmentalism was all about?

Overall everything is probably some kind of moral issue, but I just mean that in some cases it's not really practical to waste our time condemning why people do certain things but instead understanding why they have certain behaviour patterns. I think for example that a hell of a lot of office paper could be saved if computer applications were designed in a slightly different way, or if users were better trained to understand alternative ways of seeing similar sets of data. That isn't an issue where someone needs to get overly excited about the pig dogs ruining our planet, but might yield some modest results.

However, if by "adjust the cost-benefit analysis" you mean "raise taxes on things you find morally objectionable" then I don't see the difference.

Taxes might be the only practical way we can represent certain externalities. Again, I wouldn't phrase that as some kind of punishment for driving your car, but merely representing the true cost of transportation. Mass transit isn't much better - as I said earlier, a lot of the time the costs are just hidden via subsidies, tax breaks, etc. In other cases, if organisations and individuals can show slight bias towards eco-friendly options when procuring goods and services which would mean that businesses would find certain options more profitable than otherwise.

Of course, we need to be careful that we don't engage in irrational behaviour - we could be back in the same mess we are with certain subsidies. But it's a mistake that market prices don't already take into account a range of subjective factors (e.g. a products brand) so there's nothing objectively true or real about current prices. If that makes sense.