Green movement has it wrong

I hate to be the garden at your skunk party, but I think the green movement has it wrong. The whole idea now is to "reduce" what we use. I know reuse and recycle are there as well, but it's really all about reduction. Reusing and recycling generally come with some reduction in quality. I'll just address those two briefly first. We are told to use crappy paper products or cheap items in general because they use "recycled" material, sometimes as little as 5%. We are expected to make this sacrifice for the good of "Mother Earth".

Reusing is a similar concept. "Sure a new product would be better and you would prefer that, but just reuse the old one to help the environment".

But most of all, it's about reduction. It's such a simple answer. Use less electricity. Get shorter showers, maybe in cold water. Wash your clothes in cold water - it will reduce the quality of cleanliness, but hey you're helping the environment. Buy a smaller car, even though it's more dangerous to drive and not as comfortable. Don't drive as much in general, instead walk or bike even though you don't want to and it takes much longer. Use public transit even though it takes much longer to get where you're going and they are probably worse on the environment anyway. Don't eat meat or eat very very little, that way you can eat all vegetables and that's better for the environment.

For the first time in hundreds of years, people are supposed to be lowering their quality of life rather than improving it. According to some environazis, we haven't gone far enough until we live naked in the wild.

My contention is, we are barking up the wrong tree. Instead of demanding that everyone lower their quality of life, we should be finding new innovative ways to increase our quality of life and levels of consumption. In fact, the free market is the best way to do this anyway. The price system guides people from rare products to abundant ones. The free market always seeks efficiency. Whenever energy or products are lost, this is lost profit. Increasing efficiency saves money.

I like the new innovations in cars, but let the market work. You don't need to use peer pressure to force people to drive hybrid cars. Once the technology improves enough and it becomes a cost-saver, people will automatically buy into it.

The ironic part is that the solution most people propose is to extract money from successful companies and just pay people through the government to operate a certain way. If a company is charged millions of dollars in taxes, that's millions they can't spend on R&D and responding to the demand for more fuel-efficient cars. The government does not innovate. It simply steals money from one group and gives it to another. If the government steals $10 million from a car company and then gives a rebate of $10,000 to 1000 drivers to buy a hybrid car, this does not provide innovation. The car company could have used that $10,000,000 to research new and better ways to produce fuel efficient cars.

Anyway, my point is that people will buy into things once they make sense economically and meet their needs better. Redistributing wealth does not create innovation. The free market loves to innovate. There is already a market demand for environmentally friendly products. It's pointless for the government to take money from the economy that could be productive and effectively kill its productivity.

Also, making cheap products artificially more expensive mostly hurts poor people. It's all fine and dandy for celebrities to talk about the benefits of hybrid cars, but poor people need cheap vehicles and once they establish themselves, they can move on to more fuel efficient models.

Let's work to increase quality of life instead of decreasing it while also pursuing our interests in the environment.