Here is the latest Papal Bull from the European Union:
A series of “green crimes”, enforceable across the EU and punishable by prison sentences and hefty fines, are to be proposed under a contentious push by the European Commission into the sensitive area of criminal lawmaking.
The drive by Brussels to apply penalties for ecological crime reflects concerns that some countries treat offences such as pollution and illegal dumping of waste more seriously than others, allowing criminals to exploit loopholes.
It used to be the dream of socialists and utopians of varying degrees of malevolence or stupidity to want a world state. In a world state, pesky local regulatory differences would be obliterated and replaced by a rational grid of laws from which no escape was possible. In true ‘watermelon’ fashion – green on the outside, red in the core – the Greens are embracing the instruments of a pan-national state to enforce their ideas.
There is a superficial plausibility to this. Pollution knows no barriers. If a German coal-fired power station emits carbon dioxide and other things, that will not just affect the Germans living near to the station but other nations. If a Swiss chemicals firm accidentally spills toxic material in to the Rhine – this has happened – then people in Holland get affected, and so on.
But what these sort of cases do is not to suggest that we need to give a centralised, international body coercive powers over people living across a whole continent. Rather, we should keep reminding people that rigorous enforcement of existing property rights, and creation of such rights in hitherto unowned resources, allied to the incentive structures of markets, provide the best route for tackling real environmental problems such as pollution. In any case, with certain emissions, it pays to remember that a pollutant for one person might be a positive benefit – or “externality” – for someone else.
The global warming/pollution/generally-we-are-all-doomed agenda is a significant threat to our liberties at the moment, so I make no apologies for going on about it.
“…a pollutant for one person might be a positive benefit – or “externality” – for someone else.”
Interesting. Can you ofer a few real-world examples. I don’t mean of side-benefits in general but of an agreed “pollutant” from person A’s activity which is in fact a benefit to person B.
Pollutants have spawned an entire industry in environmental services.
I’m interested in the conception, which I’ve seen in other contexts used as a pretext for extraterritoriality, that where something is not a crime in one place, but is in another, somebody doing it in the first place is still “a criminal”.
Spam deleted
Seattle Man, some examples. My apartment in central London is next to a couple of restaurants. The smells that come out of the kitchens are often wonderful, in my view, but clearly might be pollutants as far as someone else is concerned.
Take “visual” pollutants: a person may erect a building that some people think is ugly and they wish to use planning regulations to get rid of it but other people may love the building and claim that it even enhances the value of their own property. A lot of disputes over land use seem to run this way.
A couple of general examples: in the controversy over “acid rain” in the 80s- this seems to have faded – my father pointed out that farmers in some areas benefited from acidic rain because it countered the excessively alkaline mix of their soils, which would otherwise need to be corrected with chemicals or whatever.
Seattle Man: “Interesting. Can you ofer a few real-world examples.”
DDT
The most polluted places on earth are found in the territories of those states whose political history is entirely anti-commercial and anti-individual, such as Chernobyl and Lake whats-its-name in the former SU, and several equally degraded sites in China.
Anti-pollution efforts are furthest along in societies in which individual initiative, both political and economic, and private enterprise are the norm.
The response that needs to become the standard reposte’ in any discussion of environmental concerns is “Why do you contend that the solution to any of these problems is state action through an increase in state power over more and more areas of life”, not some increasingly arcane disagreement about the amounts of this chemical or that gas that might constitute a pollutant.
Too often, we are sucked into a discussion of minutiae when the critical issue is the fundamental assertion of the green collectivist camp—that state power and state action are the only possible, and most desirable, course of action.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the history of mankind, much less the last few centuries of industrialization and increasing statism, supports that contention, and yet, because of the unspoken assumption that any effective action regarding social issues must consist primarily of state action through increasing state power, it is the primary default position.
This idea, which has been drilled into the heads of several generations so thoroughly that it isn’t even acknowledged any longer as an assertion which requires some proof, but simply accepted as a given, is the taproot of the entire collectivist green organism, just as it was for the earlier variations of socialism and fascism that have been discredited by the experiences of those unfortunate millions who suffered and died under their depridations.
And, when challenged, greens react with the same switcheroo that their earlier philosophical brothers employed—“Oh, then we should just do nothing and let the earth die from pollution? (or global warming or the crisis of the week that’s in vogue), just as the progressive response to any objection to their increasingly statist proposals always ended up with,
“Oh, so we should just let the poor starve (or die of disease or whatever), and do nothing?”
The alternatives are not state action or nothing. The alternatives are liberty or repression.
The latter is always dressed up as “necessary for the common good”. The former will never survive if we accept the idea that anyone who can wrest control of the apparatus of state power has the right to control every action we might take.
The current debate regarding global warming has now come to the point at which the collectivist assertion is that the issue is settled, and no further discussion is legitimate or necessary. Punitive measures are now being discussed for anyone who doesn’t fall in line.
Much like the affirmative action debate, in which any disagreement was denounced as racist, the latest tactic to stifle any debate about GW is to label anyone who questions the proposals of the green faction as a “denier”, ala the Holocaust and its deniers.
Those who would prefer the survival of individual liberties and rights must abandon all the indignant outrage, and spluttering, angry responses, and recognize the strategy being employed, and then cooly go about the business of challenging the underlying assumptions upon which it is based.
A cooler head is the appropriate response to the many proposed global warming “solutions” whose only benefactors are the apparatchiks of the state.
Better than acid rain – Sulphur.
People didn’t really have to apply S (usu. as ammonium sulphate) across much of the UK through the 70’s ‘cos all that SO2 was washed down.
And possibly the particulates that kept the seas from already having boiled, ‘cooling us’
And, Iodine based milk-line cleaners and teat dips, though not intended to enter the food chain, did in useful quantities in milk (though somewhat less so now as more competition from other types). Given most of the populace didn’t (still doesn’t) get enough I that’s good.
[and all this stuff that’s caught by the waste directives, that previously would have been cheerfully re-used but now requires (1) waste permit (expensive) (2)breaking the law (ridiculous) or (3) shutting down// Booker’s done plenty on this]
horse muck, city streets, -> roses?