The law of unintended consequences holds that good intentions that mean well are somehow worth the risk of any unintended consequences. The theory is that meaning well is enough to justify the coercive means to promote hopeful ends. Costs can be excessive in programs that only result in harm yet the intentions being presumed to be good are supposed to be a pass for what might otherwise be considered criminal activity. There is a long list of well meaning environmental solutions that have ended very badly at significant costs with absolute negative implication and negative benefits.

These include the EPA requirement that MTBE water soluble additives be added to the nation’s fuel supplies that have resulted in some of the worst ground water contamination imaginable. The companies mandated to use this chemical additive by coercive law had not choice but to comply and as a result the government takes no responsibility and the blame is heaped upon the companies forced to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency mandates. The amazing thing is the people really responsible are still deemed to have had obedient enough intentions, they keep their jobs and shift the blame entirely to the coerced. This is not an unusual situation when it comes to environmental extremist special interest legislation and mandates. The exact same thing happened with the spotted owl fiasco where billions of dollars were wasted on a sub-species of the barn own–non-species that resulted in a destroyed economy in several regions of the country and forests that were left to burn instead of being harvested. The consequences of the spotted owl mandates were truly catastrophic when forests due for cutting, thinning and pick up were left to burn for no economic benefit as if leaving it to fire was the aesthetic alternative.
The Spotted owl was never “saved” because it was found to be interbreeding with “other species.” Someone forgot to tell the wildlife biologists who ripped of the US government for billions of dollars to protect the spotted owls what the definition of what a species is.

Believe it or not, asbestos was once required in building codes by governments for fire protection purposes. If you ever wondered why fire stations and school buildings are now contaminated by asbestos you might wonder why governments ever might have mandated such things be passe in government building construction. Once again, government takes no responsibility for their part in the asbestos aftermath. Instead what has happened is anyone or any company that might have directly or indirectly profited by using asbestos gets hit with the damages and government gets a pass. Profit motives are bad but the benefits government gained or imposed by requiring the expend of asbestos are completely negated.

Asbestos is hardly ancient history. Environmentalist are raising a fuss about mercury released into the atmosphere by burning coal with trace elemental mercury and yet the same government agencies are mandating that people install these made in China mercury vapor florescent light bulbs that pose many times the environmental mercury risks of human exposure than the burning of coal resources. The mandated mercury bulbs are fragile and easy to break, difficult to collect for recycle, difficult to recycle, more dangerous if accidentally broken in the home than having old lezd paint on the premises. The mandated mercury bulbs may consume less energy but they cost consumers more and contrary to what it says on the packaging they don’t last longer than incandescent light bulbs. LED light systems look to be an energy saving promising technology but the reliability of most led fixtures is worse than the mercury filled bulbs. The LED lights so far on the market waste resources because they don’t last long enough for the higher initial costs to pay for the eventual energy savings as prominently advertised on the packaging. The same happens to be true of other green technologies including solar and wind energy systems. Many of these fancy new devices do not last long enough for the added cost pay back period to work out the promised math. Adding on to this the tax credits that essentially move economic feasibility to uneconomic feasibility and there is absolutely nothing sustainable about the solution.

The garbage fetish of the environmental extremists can be outright dangerous. You may be forced to eat food in packaging or on napkins containing post consumer waste percentages of recycled paper. You might not want to when you find out that avid home recycling kooks are putting those handy dandy not very long lasting mercury filled light bulbs in the recycling bins with their recyclable newspapers, magazines and junk mail. You could be eating out of a mercury laced post consumer waste product and not even know it because no one is about to rock the boat and test for mercury in what has become a lucrative special interest. Right now the major testing is on Chinese made toys that may have lead content. The environmental testing does not begin until after a new hysteria is started. You will have to wait for the coming recycling unintended consequences because that is how the system works. Unintended consequences have to be maximized before the good intentions are vindicated and the new problems can be blamed on anyone other than those actually responsible.

The United States Congress is at it again with their carbon cap and trade nonsense. The intended consequence is artificial scarcity of carbon based fuels. Thus Gasoline prices going to $14 a gallon is not an unintended consequence as even the President acknowledged. The untended consequences are still hard to gage but include the US becoming an even greater net energy importer and could mean seeing unpleasant wind power generators as far as the eye can see so that at some point in the future the name for Midwest tornadoes will have to be changed to reflect the damage done when wind turbines turn into fields of missile causing unbelievable death and destruction. The unintended consequences of cap and trade will mean much higher priced food since fuel costs will not be exempted to agricultural requirements and will also mean grand higher prices in various energy intensive commodities . Making aluminum from scratch or recycling it takes stout energy reserves. The other metals are mined with a verbalize correspondence to fuel costs in extraction, processing and transporting to where the markets are. Some of the most necessary basic materials could go up in price so as to earn the alternative technologies more expensive than the original assumptions say they would be. Smart technologies are dependent on rare earth metals and other elements extracted from the earth using vital amounts of energy. Higher overall commodity prices means a lower standard of living but in terms of replacement technologies it could mean excessive replacement costs and much lower reliability which ultimately would mean a return to the old hated carbon based fuel resources by necessity if not mass starvation.

Talking about stavation… the present presidential administration believes that the US has a responsibility to section it’s wealth with the rest of the world. The plan is sparkling crazy when the consequences are considered and even alarming with the carbon cap nonsense proposals passing and this is because it could cause agricultural collapse and lower yields that do benefit the starving populations around the world. The United States is not a country that is not used to sharing resources. Most of the world’s foreign aid has come from the USA. The US foots has footed most of the bill of the United Nations. The Marshall plan was mostly an American success story without any precedent in ancient or modern history. Yes it is true that The Soviet Union bankrolled Cuba with foreign aid but it turned out to be a disaster and remains a basket case economy unlike US Marshall aid recipients. Should the US go into guilt convulsions and redistribute it’s superior wealth to the world it could be a dinky like the Marshall plan to begin with but would ultimately leave the country unable to support itself let alone provide economic aid to others. The Marshall belief never was a redistribution program but rather was a pie growing exercises not a redistribution of pie slices. The cap and trade proposed legislation is one of the most hazardous proposals guaranteed to result in unintended consequences as it already has in European countries that have already adopted it. The final most unsafe unintended consequences are difficult to predict because government will install a propaganda program to cover up anything that seems amiss until they can no longer hide the obvious but by then they will also shift the blame to the companies and individuals forced to comply with the new regulation.

One consequence that could be anticipated is the complete and utter collapse of the US dollar as a viable international/ local currency. How this can be anticipated is by knowing how financial markets really work. Potential energy on tap in the USA does directly translate into economic activity, jobs and the higher average wealth of the American people than in many other countries. These relationships are well known to professional financier and traders but not to the general public. It is a fact that international oil prices are quoted in dollar terms and then translated into the Varioius other currencies. There is confusion in that environmentalists and nationalists do not realize that a lot of foreign oil production ultimately imported to the US for consumption as portion of the 25% of energy resources imported can come from our have national companies importing their own foreign production resources. US oil companies anecdote for a huge percentage of world oil production once you diminish the foreign ownership of the fields the oil is extracted from. The petro-dollar relationship can approach to mean US oil companies are foolish to sell any of their world wide production in the USA until they compensate for currency devaluation. Production and it’s benefits at lower relative prices will go elsewhere just because of hard non dollar currency. The unintended consequences may not be unintended but clearly they can be predicted from past experience. The problem comes in with too many variables that create too many different scenarios to tack and before legislation is in place and all the loop holes are understood it is difficult to know if proposed legislation is just a giant scam to transfer money from one group of people to another or that and a combination of some disastrous as of yet unknown consequences. The economic consequences of creating artificial scarcity is more production elsewhere in the world possibly coupled with a gray or gloomy market and also coupled with lack of competitive economic feasibility that raises costs of the new technologies so excessively they become worthless industrial installations before ever really put to use.

There is some legitimate fright that many of the proposed new savior technologies for saving the earth from carbon dioxide and global warming are really untested perpetual motion machines. Recent studies have shown that contrary to popular beliefs some tall SUV cars fully loaded with passengers and their goods can be more fuel efficient than mass transit buses and trains. The reason why people missed the economic efficiency of large gas guzzling cars over mass transit is because a lot more energy can be spent manufacturing larger transportation systems and like everything else there is built in planned obsolescence. Ralph Nader missed the notion of planed obsolescence against the inventor’s of the concept which only meant to put a notion of machine entropy in the equation and recognize replacement and maintenance costs in the engineering calculations. Planned obsolescence calculations are imperative in figuring out cost benefit analysis of systems and energy control equations. Big mass transit systems can consume a lot more energy impartial to install them than a private automobile might and that energy has to be factored in from the beginning. The durability of the mass transit system being more favorable than the individual automobile is assumed but in reality it may not be so. Have you ever noticed how your mass transit district always has unique trains and buses and the old ones disappear? You are clueless about how some of these systems work. In Europe the improbable high hasten train systems might consume less energy on paper than aircraft travel but you might also find that the airlines are operating more efficiently because they are not running as empty as the trains maybe due to high costs including the hidden government subsidies.

The aesthetics of mass transit might trump the automobile but because of some of the fixed characteristics of these systems we find that eventually passengers end up in automobiles or having to use them for transporting goods, services and local transportation. Fixed mass transit can raise costs to consumers buy channeling them into expensive shopping zones which actually raises the cost because all costs are costs and as it turns out the dream of high density cities is much more energy consuming than improper level suburban sprawl. The big environmental planners are keen on going higher and higher density but tend to disregard the higher energy costs requirements that build and keep high density urban cores humming. High density urban cores cause even more energy to be wasted because electric transmission lines might have to go much further from the source to to get it into the city center and as far away from the unsightly polluting or perceived to be dangerous nuclear plants. Surprisingly a lot of true Eco green living believers turn out to be complete hypocrites as their energy consumption is mighty higher than what might be considered socially just by their acquire absurd calculations. The belief that a free market economy is not better at doing something than a lot of intentional natty computer planning is usually wrong because free markets do a better job of allocating resources at the same time controlling cost than any grand scheme has.

Other environmental programs have gone catastrophically wrong and these include the efforts to kill hatchery fish as if they somehow became un-natural even though they were originally picked as the best fish able to navigate dams and fish ladders. The idiot ideology wild life fish biologists wanted only wild fish to survive even though all the fish hatchery stock were selected from nature. Now recently the same idiots killing the successful fish over many years are saying that they think the success of fish to over arrive the dams (even though there never was any bellow evidence that dams were harmful to fish) is due to instant “evolution” of the fish. Over many years the idiots have been intentionally destroying successful hatchery fish in the habitats which is utterly amazing. The same idiots have arbitrarily decided that rivers need to have tree buffers and Hippie dams made out of dull trees put in the river scape. The evidence for all their hysterical aesthetic concerns is non-existent. A major flood comes and every sort of waste goes into the rivers and then suddenly miraculously the fish populations surge afterwords. More accelerate off pollution in rivers might even seem to encourage fish populations more than keeping the rivers super. The environmentalists routinely discount the fecal mater that would have been in rivers with dense populations of animals like beavers that some areas once boasted when fish populations were at their zenith. The evidence and the aesthetics problem solving solutions do not necessarily mesh.

What happens when environmental solutions get more extensive, more expensive or even attempt to replace the entire economy? The unintended consequences can be even more catastrophic and so severe as to cause even more environmental harm when people are forced to resort to desperation not to end up starving to death. Haiti comes to mind where desperation thanks to a lack of wealth completely devastates the environment. That would be some unintended consequence to hit most of the industrial world. It could happen fair because of the need to go “green”. It might happen incrementally as untested technologies near online and break one by one becoming useless garbage in the landscape that is too expensive to fix or dispose of simply because natural resource extraction is too expensive without economically efficient fuel resources available because investment no longer goes to the economically feasible but pays for an Al Gore slush fund which is tax advantaged and reinvests in destroying efficient resources instead of creating new ones. Sustainability in outmoded history was having a supply of slaves to serve a few masters and that is where the whole green movement could be heading us. Public planning is not about doing anything other than controlling you for the benefit of others. You can see it directly in Portland, Oregon which gets a lot of credit for the nonsense. Portland, Oregon is moving to depression level jobless rates, some of the highest taxes in America, lowest production and amazingly over rated public planning that has made a class of people instant millionaires in a sea of unemployable people. As it gets worse more people attracted to the flame of the public propaganda program pile into the city to live the failing green dream and soon Portland might have an unemployment rate that rivals that of Latin American banana republics with unemployment levels over 50% but it will be Green!

That definitely is sustainable . Chronic unemployment and abject poverty in Latin America from 50-80 percent has proven viability over periods longer than centuries. That may be what the greenies want. The problem is that poverty begets desperation. Thanks to medical marijuana everyone is tranquil happy?

Children who feel overly restricted by the limits imposed by their parents eventually grow up rejecting those limitations for the sake of keeping score. The piquant thing to note is that these children eventually grow up only to replace one set of restrictions with a new arbitrary set of limitations as if in equal and opposite reaction. Social reactions for the sake of reaction is what some of it is all about. One sees the distrust authority bumper stickers on the same cars that support bigger and bigger Obama bumper sticker government. What are these people trying to say with their bumper stickers? One theory is they were furious with their parents when restricted from doing what they wanted to do as children. When punished by the parents on top of the restrictions placed on them these children felt as if they wished they could have killed their parents but being dependent had to displace those feelings affixing them on other authorities. It never was authority that they did not like they just never wanted anyone to have authority over them that is why they eventually grew up to become even more authoritarian? It seemed like the whole anti George Bush dance that went on should have continued with Obama especially when Obama has turned out to be much more authoritarian but suddenly the protests have all stopped with Obama taking on phony cult status. All the anti war fervor in the press has stopped as the daily US military deaths count has ended in the liberal media. This behavior of supporting authoritarianism after pretending to be against it seems to be the unintended consequence of children being told NO by their parents. That may explain why what is described as green will turn out to be red or brown.

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