Green Metal

Most everyone has seen or read the Lorax at this point. If you haven’t, than fifty year old spoilers! In the Lorax, Dr. Seuss tells the story of the destruction of the truffula tree by unscrupulous industrialists. The industrialization of the forest leads to climate change and demographic change with the local wildlife. A classic tell of the tragedy of the commons. 

So what would happen if someone discovered the truffula tree today? Harvesters would have to deal with work stoppages for OSHA safety inspections. The EPA could put controls on emissions and limit water usage. The FTC could force earnings disclosers about truffula tree reserves. If the truffula tree became endangered, NGO’s would have standing to sue to stop additional harvesting. The natural result of these inspections would force truffula tree harvesters into parts of the world that don’t have worker safety or environmental laws. 

What are the truffula trees of today? One contender is rare earth metals/elements (REEs). According to Apple, the company has sold over one billion iPhones in the past decade. The phones wouldn’t be possible without rare earths. They fuel the modern economy from batteries, to computers. REEs are mined in countries that don’t have strong environmental and safety regulations. Those mines undercut the viability of mines in countries that do have, or follow, regulations. 

The US used to be one of the largest suppliers of REEs. Now, the US imports 70% of its rare earths from China even though the US has one of the largest rare earth mines in the world. The US mine went bankrupt due to environmental cleanup costs and “dumping” of cheap REEs by China. The mine recently reopened but it ships its ore to China for processing. In order for US REE mines to be truly viable, consumers would need to choose to pay more for better, and more expensive, mining practices.

Moving society to better mining practices is complicated. Part of the answer is to increase product lifespans by replacing the function REEs are serving in our economy with other materials that don’t require mining or toxic processing. For those functions that can’t be replaced, governments and individuals need to disincentivize imports of cheap REEs mined without regard to social or environmental costs. One possible way this could be achieved would be to raise the price of cheap minerals with environmental import taxes or a value added tax. These taxes could be invested to extended product lifespans or to develop greener product replacements.   

Another option would be voluntary. Behavioral economics could be used to incentivize consumers to purchase REE products at higher prices. Pushing the public to want to pay for more expensive metal could come in the form of explaining the damage current rare earth mining practices cause; a branding and marketing label centered around “green metal,” or “organic metal.” Consumers already pay more for “organic” food and might welcome a way to pay for greener electronics.

The Messy Straw

Everyone keeps saying Americans use 500 millions straws a day (Jacopo, 2018). The claim originated in 2011 with then nine year old Milo Cress (Langone, 2018). Since then, the claim has been published everywhere and had a huge impact on public policy. In the last two years, straw bans have been moving across the country one city at a time (Gibbens, 2019). This despite the fact that the central claim, that Americans use 500 million straws, has been widely debunked. Even Cress has said that people “should take it for what it is, which is a rough estimate from seven or eight years ago by a nine-year-old” (Graves, 2018). What gets lost in this debate is the truth. Straws aren’t a huge source of plastic pollution. 

No one actually knows how many straws are used in a day. It’s well below 500 million (Graves, 2018). Neither does most plastic come from the US. Close to 90% of all ocean plastic comes from only ten rivers in Asia and Africa (Patel, 2018). Not only do straws contribute little overall plastic to the world, eliminating them could be worse for the environment. Starbucks has developed new lids to replace straws. Those lids actually contain more plastic then the straws they replaced (Mahdawi, 2018).

We’re left with a dilemma. Is it better to signal to the world support for the environment with straw bans that might be counterproductive or should the messy truth be the message instead? Like most issues, reality is more complicated than the debate we’re having. 

References listed here

Revisiting Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin, an ecologist, published the influential Tragedy of the Commons essay in Science in 1968. Hardin defined the tragedy of the commons as the situation where common goods, such as a grazing land or clean water, will get overused by selfish individuals. Today we would call those people trolls. Hardin believed that the best way to limit the tragedy would be to give individuals ownership of common resources. Owners who would work to conserve their resources.

The tragedy of the commons is a useful philosophical tool to look at resource management. Unfortunately, Hardin used tragedy of the commons to focus on over-population. Hardin helped front a quasi-scientific movement in the 60s and 70s, including Paul Ehrlich, that focused on overpopulation. They made the rounds with pessimistic, hyperbole, the sky is falling rhetoric.

In Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin demonstrated an inherent conflict between the idea of building a society of the greatest good or one for the greatest number. The conflict arises from the mathematical fact that it’s impossible to maximize for two variables at once. Thus, enjoyment of life for some must come at the expense of others. Put another way, the assigning of calories for everyday life for everyone won’t leave enough calories for anyone to have any energy to create a life beyond necessity.  

Hardin’s view leads to a stark, false, choice: recommend that we all become monks or start deciding who’s worthy enough to get extra calories. Hardin did the latter. He attacked the welfare state for causing over-population by providing food for the poor and criticized the UN Charter on Human Rights as immoral. He ended his essay by lamenting human’s desire for freedom and warned that humanity needs to be managed or all the newly born people would limit the wealth potential of those already maximizing society. A real, “it’s tough being the 1%” argument. 

In 1974, Hardin expanded his views in Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor. Hardin argued that if the Earth’s a lifeboat then there aren’t enough necessities to go around. Success is zero-sum. Hardin pushed lifeboat ethics to justify restricting reproductive rights (eugenics), keeping excess food from countries that are in famine and limiting the free movement of immigrants. He argued that letting people suffer because of their geographic birth location is a moral obligation of all right minded people. A sort of white-man’s burden that doesn’t even pretend to help others. Hardin doesn’t describe how population controls should be enacted just that there should be an authority in place to do so. 

To most modern readers, Hardin comes of as a bit of a monster. His beliefs feel like rebranded Social Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest.” Only the fittest in this case are the ones lucky enough to be born geographically close to food. I love how he assumes that the act of controlling population growth can be achieved without negative side effects such as riots or war. Side effects that are possibly as bad or worse than overpopulation. 

Hardin offered a false dichotomy because, while it’s true that two variables can’t be maximized, both numbers can be a lot closer to whole than Hardin ever imagined. In the last fifty years, the world’s population has doubled and the average standard of living has increased (see UN Millennium Goals). In the more developed world, population growth has decreased without the need for population controls. Which suggests that the way to reduce population growth is to expand wealth, not force poor people around the world to be sterilized or be allowed to starve to death.  

If the Earth’s a lifeboat, Hardin wanted to start killing the weak and unlucky with a year’s worth of food left. Which makes me wonder if he actually believed that choosing who had more worth was really a question of biology or simply an ex-post facto intellectual game to justify his beliefs on who deserves the world’s spoils.