EU to ban incandescent lightbulbs.
by Vinay Gupta • October 13, 2008 • The Global Picture • 5 Comments
Four years ago, I said
You know when I’ll say we’re taking environmentalism seriously as a people? When the government *BANS* incandescent lighting in general applications. Just flat out bans it, like they did with PCBs or lead-based paint or other hazardous substances.
That’s how real change is effected.
CFLs contain mercury, so they better make it damn easy for people to dispose of them safely!
How do you square that statement with believing in individual liberty, btw? Have your views changed in the years since, or do you believe (for example) that coercion could be justified in public goods questions?
I can’t get everywhere from individual liberty. The problem of demonstrating damage from environmental issues at an individual level to resolve them by lawsuits looks, to me, like a tremendous hack based on treating nature as human property by default, rather than acknowledging that nature has, in some sense, in inherent natural rights.
I think the Ecuadorian model, of recognizing that nature has natural rights to continue to exist is a much more plausible foundation for environmental legislation: pollution == chemical assault against the “person of nature.”
Then the question is who has the right to act as a proxy there – who can prosecute that assault. One option is “any witness to the event” which is, I think, the right answer. The wrong answer is “only the advocate-for-nature agency.”
We shall see!
Well, as you know, I’m not much for natural rights as the theoretical framework for liberty; and I sure as hell would not grant legal personhood to Nature
Neither would I think of preventing pollution as an *end* in itself; rather it’s *a means* to ensuring that the *effects* of pollution (e.g. catastrophic climate change) don’t end up messing with *the end*, i.e. *human life* on the planet.
In other words, there is no “harmful” aside from “harmful to us”. All valuations are subjective. The planet, and its “health” (subjective), has no inherent objective value, only what value we grant it. Therefore I think demonstrating *human* damages must be the basis for environmental regulation, and that would be handled just fine within existing legislative thinking in the libertarian tradition. It’s always about individuals.
In any case, I’d find inconsistency of principles somewhat worrying. I think we’re presently witnessing in ever so many ways where middle-of-the-road policy eventually leads. The adoption of any form of a-priori coercion into a legal framework for liberty can’t help but be the hairline crack that will one day break the dam.
I don’t think of human life as being the only goal. I’m entirely sure that organisms like elephants, dolphins and whales have as much of a sense of personhood and individuality as we do, and I think there’s a more than reasonable chance they will turn out to have languages. How far down the scale of animal intellect does that go? I’m not sure.
But I think that affording basic right-to-live protections to intelligent beings of whatever species seems like a rational and reasonable basis for environmental protection.