RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Beam-in-the-Eye Environmentalism  Tue Aug 24, 2021 5:52 pm | |
| States and localities enact symbolic green regulations while embracing land-use regimes that harm the environment.
Recently, video-game computer company Alienware announced that several states had banned some of its products for consuming too much electricity. “This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states,” read a disclaimer posted on Alienware’s website under several computers it offered for sale. The environmental benefits of these regulations are questionable: a trade publication notes that the California regulations targeted consumption in low-power modes, but one of the computers has a “short-idle energy consumption of 66.29 watts,” similar to a single incandescent bulb. Compared with total residential electricity consumption, it’s hard to see such regulations having much effect.
Such regulations are of a piece with other measures of the environmentalist movement that prize symbolism and “raising awareness” over substance. Take, for example, plastic-straw bans, enacted by cities including Seattle and San Francisco. Plastic straws hardly feel environmentally friendly, but they are a minor contributor to environmental problems. The website Earth.org admits, “Despite the concerted efforts by corporations, the plastic straws ban has only made a minor difference in plastic waste production. National Geographic reveals that where 8 million tonnes of plastics flow into the ocean every year, plastic straws merely comprise 0.025% of the total.” Earth.org also quotes an organization that suggests that the obtrusiveness of plastic straw bans is largely the point: “Lonely Whale, an organization that led the straw ban movement in the USA, proposed an interesting idea towards this question. They expressed that ‘Our straw campaign is not really about straws. It’s about pointing out how prevalent single-use plastics are in our lives, putting up a mirror to hold us accountable. We’ve all been asleep at the wheel.’”
But the same state and local governments that pass such pettifogging environmental regulations also uphold a set of egregiously anti-environmental land-use laws whose effects dramatically outweigh even the most stringent regulations of computers and plastic straws.
The most obvious example: zoning codes that many cities have adopted in the last few decades have practically forbidden urban redevelopment. California offers perhaps the best-studied example. According to an analysis of census data on characteristics of America’s housing stock by economist Issi Romem, development in California’s largest metropolitan area, Los Angeles, exemplifies a now-nationwide pattern of “pockets of dense construction in a dormant suburban exterior” in which most new housing construction takes the form of dense building in a few central areas (though not nearly enough to satisfy regional housing demands) and suburban expansion in remote areas such as the Mojave Desert and San Bernardino County. Such a pattern emerged in the 1980s; before then, the Los Angeles metropolitan area saw widespread low-intensity redevelopment of already-developed areas, including near the coasts, as was typical of development around the nation.
https://www.city-journal.org/environmentalism-in-name-only
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