… but vintage Carolina Review only gets better with time! Here’s an article from the September 2008 edition that I hope you’ll enjoy:
Every so often, thinking people get together to question the previously unchallenged assumptions of society. One of these assumptions is that recycling is a great and wonderful thing.
As the environmentalist movement continues to take hold in American life (not to mention UNC), this is a question most people seem to take for granted.
World savior or waste of space?
Municipal recycling is seen as part of being a responsible citizen and “saving the Earth.” By recycling we are extending the life of precious natural resources and preventing the citizenry from being buried in its own trash.
A more detailed analysis reveals that it is not that simple. If the goal is “saving the Earth,” defined as reducing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, then the whole business of locally mandated recycling could reasonably be seen as destroying the Earth.
Recycling certainly has some benefits. Indeed, recycling has been practiced in some form since antiquity, and not without good reason.
For one, it reduces space taken up by landfills (and in ages past, the amount of trash in the streets). The landfill where trash is dumped by Orange County was originally estimated to fill up by 2007. That date has been extended to 2011. The credit for extending the life of this landfill by roughly 30% is attributed to recycling and waste reduction efforts.
Another benefit of recycling is that it is sometimes much cheaper than obtaining the raw materials from nature. For example, copper and aluminum are valuable as recycled metals, which is why recycling companies are willing to pay for such resources. According to Bryan Joslin of Motive magazine, obtaining aluminum from used cans uses 95% less energy than obtaining it in a mining operation.
Also, with rising fuel prices, certain materials have become more profitable to recycle than before. Restaurants have gone from paying to have their used cooking oil disposed of to having individuals pay them to take it away for use as biodiesel. This is market-based recycling, and it has been practiced for millennia to the great benefit of society.
In times past, however, a society never coerced people into recycling. In this historical anomaly peculiar to our time, we have to pay people to take it away rather than recycling firms buying it at market prices from us. In Orange County, it costs over $3.5 million to run the recycling operation.
A sea turtle that, unfortunately, was not saved by recycling.
Some of these losses are made up by selling the recycled product. For fiscal year 2007-2008, the revenues generated by selling recycled material at market prices were about $627,000. The rest of the recycling budget comes from fees charged on a per-household basis. At this rate, we are getting a negative 80% return on our investment.
Upon first examining these figures, it looks like the town is throwing money away. For the most part, it is. The cost of recycling arises from the astounding inefficiency of collecting, sorting, and processing waste materials. For many materials, it is far easier and more efficient to obtain the products from their original sources.
Take, for instance, green glass. To recycle it, it must be hauled away from residential areas, sorted out from the other waste, and crushed into little bits called cullet. At this point it is either given away for next to nothing or we pay people to take it away even after we’ve paid all the labor costs for preparing it. This is because it still has to be melted down and have the toxic impurities (especially abundant in green glass) removed.
It would be much more efficient to make new glass from sand and let the old green glass go to a landfill.
According to the Recycling Business Assistance Center, the market price for one ton of delivered crushed green glass in eastern North Carolina for July 2008 was about $-8. For central North Carolina, the price is a little better at a positive $2 per delivered crushed ton. Of course, this still represents a loss since we have to pay the high labor, energy, and transportation costs of producing each ton of crushed glass.
Other recycled products have a higher return on investment, but none of them high enough to cover the huge cost.
At this point, proponents of recycling will object that there are other costs and benefits not taken into account by this bottom-line analysis. For instance, if we put all of our recyclables into the regular waste, then we will have the increased cost of filling up landfills faster.
However, at a tipping cost (cost of dumping 1 ton of garbage into the landfill, which takes into account the cost of building the landfill) of $49, the 15,374 tons of recycled materials in fiscal 2006-2007 could be disposed of in the landfill at a cost of only $753,326. This is a net savings of approximately $2.1 million (budget minus market revenues minus cost of landfill use) for the county.
Recycling proponents will again object: this is filling up the landfill and we don’t have an infinite amount of space. This is of course true, but it misses the point. Land in North Carolina is relatively cheap and abundant, which is why states from up North pay to use our landfills.
The main obstacle to starting new landfills in North Carolina is our state politicians, who recently placed a moratorium upon two new landfills that would have made N.C. the nation’s largest importer of garbage, a somewhat dubious yet lucrative distinction. It is not that we lack land, we just lack guts.
Most importantly, if you consider that the extra money and energy that we expend to have people running a fleet of trucks and collecting and separating and processing and distributing our recycled materials, we are also adding unnecessary carbon to the atmosphere. If we stopped mandating recycling in favor of using the more efficiently produced original products, we would most likely be putting less carbon into the atmosphere.
Sadly, a full analysis of the carbon footprint of recycling versus the production of new product is beyond the scope of this article. However, given the enormous difference in the cost of production between new and recycled materials, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the energy used in recycling (collecting, sorting, processing, delivering) is much higher the energy used to deliver new materials. This also seems reasonable in light of the fact that the original producers have huge advantages in terms of economies-of-scale (i.e. there are lots of cost advantages in producing lots of something all at once).
If this is true, then recycling contributes to the destruction of the Earth just as much as, if not more than, gas-guzzling SUV’s (if CO2 is, in fact, destroying the Earth). Thus, recycling is destroying the Earth.
None of this is to say that trash is good or recycling is always bad. As Ms. Muriel Williman of Orange Community Recycling so axiomatically pointed out, “waste is wasteful.” No matter how waste is disposed of, someone has to pay to get rid of it. Recycling just costs more.
Furthermore, if it is worth your time to earn the dollar you would receive for collecting and delivering a pound of aluminum cans, go for it.
But it is highly objectionable for Orange County to waste its citizens’ time and money (and potentially its climate) when it could be putting those resources towards more constructive and valuable things, such as promoting gay tourism, which currently accounts for only $10,000 of Chapel Hill’s budget.
UPDATE: Be sure to check out this lecture on recycling from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It’s a bit long (about 25 minutes) but worth checking out if you haven’t heard this side of the story before.
It’s on tomorrow! Yes, the Kentucky Derby, the most exciting two minutes in sports, is tomorrow evening at about 6:30. As someone who aspires to make more than “enough” money, I feel a certain duty to report the goings-on of some of the people who have already attained that august distinction, and so here are a few highlights:
Paddy O'Prado, the notorious "mud-dog"
Lookin at Lucky is the odds-on favorite, and it looks like he‘s going to be tough to beat. Mike Welsch over at ESPN.com is reporting that Lookin at Lucky, trained by the renowned Bob Baffert, has been looking very good over the past week and a half. A potential trouble for Lucky, however, is that he’ll be starting from the inside rail position. According to Sarah Sessoms, Carolina Review‘s in-house horse racing expert, “that’s a really hard position to get stuck in, even if you are the best horse.”
Jerry Bailey, hall-of-fame jockey and ESPN analyst, predicts Sidney’s Candy to be another top contender. “I like his speed,” Bailey said. If he gets to the lead, Sidney’s Candy will be very hard to catch. Candy actually beat Lucky in the Santa Anita Derby earlier this month, although in recent practice rounds he has been sending “mixed signals” and is going to be a “major question mark” on Saturday, according to Welsch.
Paddy O’Prado, with odds of 20-1, is a bit of an underdog, but, depending on the weather, could be a serious contender. “That horse is a mud-dog,” said Sarah Sessoms. With a 60% chance of rain tomorrow, things are looking good for Paddy. Further, “Paddy’s jockey is Kent Desormeux, and he runs a fantastic race, so he may slip in there to win.” Plus, Mike Welsch says Paddy has been looking really good in pre-race practice runs, “machine-like in his efficiency during routine morning gallops, chugging along with the look of a horse who can run all day.”
Personally, I’ll be pulling for Paddy, but it should be a great race in any event.
So said Russell Kirk to a group of scholars discussing what it takes to arrive at scientific truth, borrowing from Proverbs 1:7. Naturally, he succeeding in shocking the gentlemen he was with.
Several churchgoers in the group protested: “Oh no,” they said, “not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?” But Mr. Kirk meant what he said.
Some people who attend church regularly, who are “given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform,” are revealing something deeply significant about the state of their spiritual lives when they express shock at the idea of fearing God: basically, they are not taking Christianity seriously. If they were a bit more fearful of God, writes Kirk, they would not be so fearful of men– not “given to trembling before Caesar … Much at ease in Zion [but] timid in the presence of a traffic policeman–” as they were when he talked with them.
Perhaps it is because of the rarity of the God-fearing man in the West that religion has been on the decline. Perhaps. But that is not what Ryan Lee, writing in the Daily Tar Heel last Friday, thinks is the main problem.
The famous statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro, with characteristically open arms
Citing the responses left on a “kvetching board” of sorts set up by the on-campus Christian group Cornerstone earlier this month, Mr. Lee identified the two most frequent reasons people said that they are not Christians: intolerance and hypocrisy.
Indeed, the reason for record-low numbers of self-identifying “Christians” in a Gallup poll conducted last year is that “the Christian Church has unfortunately moved away from the core teachings of Christ, becoming intolerant and hypocritical.” Additionally, “the Christian faith has grown increasingly judgmental, political and, if radical steps aren’t taken, outdated.” Instead, “the Church needs a new kind of Christian– those deeply saddened over the disparity between Christ and Christian.”
I have several questions for Mr. Lee. First, what, exactly, do you mean by “intolerance?” Do you mean the exclusion of homosexuals, adulterers, drug addicts, etc.? If so, is not the current iteration of the Church, by this standard, more tolerant than any other in the history of Christianity? Unless I’m very much mistaken, I do believe it was churches in the last fifty years or so, rather than the first or second or third or fourth or fifth or … nineteenth century, that accepted first female and then openly gay clergy.
If the reason for the decline in self-identifying Christians is lack of tolerance, how on Earth did Christianity survive twenty centuries to make it to today? I’m pretty sure they didn’t have openly gay preachers under Otto III, although I could be wrong. Do we not live in an era of unprecedented tolerance? Indeed, what have we gotten in exchange for all of our new-found tolerance? To quote the poll Mr. Lee cites, we have got unprecedented decline.
If he means by tolerance that the Church should actually accept sinfulness as is (e.g. Jesus hung out with prostitutes because prostitution really isn’t bad), then he is advocating something other than Christianity. Yes, the Church should and does accept sinners (according to Christianity we are all sinners, after all), but for it to tolerate sin is asking it to do something that it has never and could never do. Christianity is irrevocably at war with sin, and it would not be Christianity if it were not.
The charge of intolerance, then, unless I am very much confused on the what Mr. Lee means, is insufficiently explanatory. Either the Church has followed his advice already and to a greater extent than at any previous point in history and it is in unprecedented decline or he is advocating transforming Christianity into something other than what it is.
The charge of hypocrisy, however, has considerably more merit. Jesus exhorted us not to sin, and He never did– but He is the only one who can say that. The rest of us who advocate against sin, since we are still sinners, are at least a little hypocritical. But to cease being at least a little hypocritical would mean we would have to stop advocating against sin, and thus stop doing our Christian duty.
Mr. Lee calls for a “new kind of Christian– those deeply saddened over the disparity between Christ and Christian …” But why should Christians be sad? If they actually understand Christianity, why would they expect Christians to be perfect? Earthly perfection, if I am reading the Gospels correctly, is not what Christ promises– even Saint Peter, the rock of the Church, denied Jesus three times. The Gospel is called “Good News” because it promises new Life apart from our old sinful selves, and that is something to be tremendously happy about, not saddened by.
In sum, Mr. Lee’s argument against the modern Church, like all things that keep people from God, should be taken seriously. It should also be refuted by all instructed Christians and students of history. We need more God-fearing men, not ever-more tolerant ones.
Why Bill O'reilly called UNC pinheads
If this is going to be anything like last time, you may want to bring your riot gear. Tom Tancredo, former Colorado congressman and anti-illegal immigration crusader, will be speaking on the subject of “Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?”
If you’re one of those people that actually have to ask that question (or even if you’re not), I would highly recommend coming out. The event will take place in the Franklin Porter Graham Student Union auditorium at 7:00pm tomorrow (Monday). If you’re thinking about going, tickets must be picked up at the box office in advance.
As a security precaution, no bags will be allowed in the auditorium. Yes, SDS, this means you.
The facebook page is here. Hope to see you there!
Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield will be speaking today (Friday) at 2:00 pm in Union room 3206 (don’t blame me, I didn’t pick the time). He will be speaking on the subject of manliness and gender-neutrality in our modern culture. You can read more at the facebook event page here.
If you’re interested, a sample of his writing on the subject “Is Courage a Masculine Virtue?” can be seen here.
Also, a quote from Winston Churchill which vaguely has something to do with manliness:
“There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”
If mentioning my friends is beginning to sound like I’m congratulating myself on my own popularity, I apologize. As it happens, however, one of my good friends is about to ship out to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army and some of my old friends in the Air Force ROTC are about to be commissioned as officers, so I thought it would be a good idea to briefly survey the situation facing US/NATO/Afghan troops.
For about the last eight years, the U.S. force in Afghanistan has basically been maintaining a holding action. Recently that has changed with a series of offensives, notably including the battle for Marjah.
Marjah is, according to the geopolitical experts at STRATFOR.com, “perhaps the quintessential example of a good location from which to base.” It’s in the heart of Taliban-dominated Helmand province and very close to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s “second city.” It’s also a religious center and the birthplace of the Taliban.
Some soldiers in Afghanistan cavalierly refer to enemy combatants as "Hadji," the character (above) from the sixties cartoon Jonny Quest. These soldiers are mistaken, however, as Hadji is, in fact, from India, not Afghanistan.
Not to mention the heroin: Helmand province produces more heroin than any country on the planet. Some experts estimate that the heroin trade in Marjah supplies the Taliban with around $200,000 per month.
In terms of overall strategy (with the long-term goal of changing the conditions in the country to make a stable democratic government possible), the battle for Marjah is consistent with two main U.S. goals.
The first is to deny the Taliban control of poppy farming communities and large population centers, and the second is to oversee the implementation of a civilian government opposed to the Taliban.
The success or failure of the American experiment in Afghanistan is far from certain; indeed, as Bokhari, Zeihan, and Hughes wrote back in February, “the only measure that matters cannot be judged until the Afghans are left to themselves.”
In any case, whether you think we should be there or not, whether a stable, democratic Afghanistan ultimately succeeds or fails, we ought to remember and be thankful for our brave men and women who are fighting the bad guys out in some of the most remote and inhospitable areas of the world.
Semper fidelis, blessed countrymen. You are not forgotten.
Update: According to Urban Dictionary, the term “hadji,” interchangeable with “haji” and “hajji,” has its origins in “al-haj,” the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Someone who has gone on the pilgrimage is given the deferential title “hajji,” although in army slang the term has been vulgarized to refer to all middle easterners. Special thanks to “panzodanzo,” frequent commenter on this blog, for this update.
It’s 4/20 tomorrow (Tuesday), and you know what that means…
No, we’re not actually going to be smoking anything, don’t worry. We here at Carolina Review encourage people to keep their brains as functional as possible, although we certainly do love interesting political discussions.
The Carolina Review and the UNC Young Democrats are co-sponsoring a discussion with UNC Economics professor Arthur Benavie on the subject of legalizing drugs in America.
Check out the facebook page here.
It’ll be at 7:30 in Union Room 3412. You should try it. Just once. Maybe you’ll like it. C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it…
Phyllis Schlafly, renowned author, syndicated columnist, talk show host, and all-around fantastic person will be speaking tomorrow (Monday) night at 7:00 pm in Howell 104 on the subject of “Feminism vs. Conservatism.”
So come on out! You can learn more about Mrs. Schlafly through the event page on facebook or her website.
Also, to close out the weekend, a few thoughts from Clive Staples (C.S., to the uninitiated) Lewis:
No emotion is, in itself, a judgment; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
Also from the same lecture series “The Abolition of Man”:
But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
My good friend Thomas Ginn*, a senior economics major and accomplished anti-poverty crusader, recently lent me his copy of The Bottom Billion by Oxford professor Paul Collier. It is a fascinating read and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in foreign aid, economic development, econometric tools, or helping poor people in general.
Anyway, one of the bits from the book that I found most striking is this anecdote from Dr. Collier:
“While I was directing the World Bank’s research department, the most controversial paper we produced was one called ‘Growth is Good for the Poor.’ Some NGO’s hated it, and it was the only time in five years that Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank’s president, phoned me to voice his concern.”
Now why would some of the world’s leading poverty reduction organizations be so uncomfortable about economic growth? Isn’t the problem with poor people the fact that they are poor? Wouldn’t growth go a long way toward alleviating poverty?
Dr. Collier points out that some people are concerned that economic growth doesn’t always trickle down: “The growth of Equatorial Guinea, for example, produced benefits for only a handful of its people.” Thus there is a focus among anti-poverty NGO’s on “sustainable, pro-poor growth.”
As one might expect, however, the case of Equatorial Guinea “is exceptional; growth usually does benefit ordinary people.” In fact, Dr. Collier (who is scrupulously nonpartisan) warns that focus on “sustainable, pro-poor growth” has actually “inadvertently undermined genuinely strategic thinking.”
As an example, he mentions a banking expert who was trying to promote banking reform which evidence strongly suggested would improve economic growth. However, he was hindered by concerns that NGO’s wouldn’t accept it since there was considerably less evidence that the reforms would help the poor.
Is this a case of bleeding hearts gone awry? Perhaps—it certainly seems that the NGO leaders have been at least a little influenced by leftist politics.**
Leftists the world over consistently appeal to people’s envy, the only one of the seven deadly sins that does not give at least temporary pleasure (to borrow a line from George Will), which is why you hear so much whining and complaining about “inequality.”
I would like to posit here that inequality is not really a problem—or, in any case, only a rather minor problem. Consider: if a starving Ugandan doubles his annual income and is now able to feed his family, does it really matter to him if his neighbor has quadrupled his income? The first man may be a bit envious, but certainly things could be worse: his primary problem has been fixed.
As Dr. Collier declares, “We cannot make poverty history unless the countries of the bottom billion start to grow, and they will not grow by turning them into Cuba.” Paging President Obama…
*Disclaimer: Thomas Ginn does not necssarily endorse any of the views presented here. Actually, I’m pretty sure he would disagree with me on some points.
**Not to let right-wingers totally off the hook: Dr. Collier notes a tendency among the right to view poor policy as the cause of poor country’s problems. That is a problem, to be sure, but the rest of the book details other significant non-governmental problems that keep the bottom billion down.
Just about everyone who is moderately up to speed with regards to American politics likes to trash both the Republicans and Democrats, and who can blame them? Democrats (and John Maynard Keynes) may have brought us such absurdities as ‘countercyclical demand management’ programs so that my family is paid to not grow corn, but how can Republicans blame them when they are the ones responsible for such notorious boondoggles as the “bridge to nowhere?”
Many people have called for (or been involved with promoting) a third party to cut through the great heaping filthy mass of political corruption. Politicians, in order to differentiate themselves from the mess, are fond of casting themselves as “above” politics with claims to be bipartisan.
Some, including my recent acquaintance Korky Day, have called for a change in our political system from the plurality-vote winner-take-all system, which tends to produce a two-party dynamic like ours, to a system of proportional representation, which tends to produce a multi-party dynamic like much of Europe and Latin America.
But would an election process based on proportional representation actually improve things?
Now, I’m no political science major, so there are certainly those with more authority to speak on this than myself. Still, as an avid student of politics and political thought, it seems to me that there are several serious flaws with the proportional representation system.
First, it would not solve the problem of earmarks and culture of backroom deals (e.g. the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback”), one of the reasons that Mitt Romney was so fond of saying “Washington is broken” back in 2008.
Human ambition, the cause of said brokenness, can’t realistically be eliminated, especially among cynical politicians; however, rules can be changed without altering the whole electoral system. People act on incentives, and I don’t see any way a pro-rep system would alter politicians’ incentives to be less corrupt.
Second, proportional representation would promote political extremism. There is an American Communist Party, but it is relegated to the fringes of polite society. In Europe, with its system of proportional representation where each party is allocated representation based on the percentage of the total vote they receive, fringe parties can become a significant part of the ruling class.
I’m not saying we should try to silence dissent. Quite the contrary. But there is certainly something to be said for the moderating influence of the winner-take-all system that forces politicians to tack to the center in order to get votes. There’s no nationally significant Communist party in the U.S. and there’s no nationally significant openly racist party (in contrast to Europe) and I think we should all be grateful for that.
Third, the winner-take-all system in this country in which representation is allocated among the states based on geography and population ensures “no taxation without representation,” in terms of geography.
Maybe Korky can correct me on this, but in a proportional representation system in which the party selects the list and order of candidates to represent the party, is there any means of making sure that Oklahoma receives the same representation as Rhode Island? If several states vote largely Communist but the Communist party leadership decides the representatives should all come one or two states, is there any recourse?
Last, it seems to me that proportional representation gives way too much power to political parties. Would you rather the life-long political hacks at the Democratic National Committee (or horrors! the RNC) or the local district’s working men and women decide who represents us?
People are wont to criticize political parties, and not without good reason. Promotion within the party is based not on service to the country but on service to the party, and, of course, the interests of the respective groups don’t always coincide. If this system were given greater importance through pro-rep, the country would suffer.
Extreme polarization would be institutionalized. Claims by politicians to favor “bipartisanship” would be even more fatuous than they are today.
Anyway, it seems to me that the current system has worked well for the United States throughout our history, but maybe we could improve. Let me know what you think.
