"Guilt is a tricky thing to quantify. In the grand scheme of things, a hot shower represents just a fraction of your overall water and energy usage. And the Lantern will admit that she, too, needs the promise of a few steamy, soapy minutes to rouse herself out of bed on a frigid morning. But that doesn't mean that she condones epic showers."

This is moronic. Guilt should be directly proportional to harm. There is nothing tricky at all about that. If it represents a tiny fraction of your impact, it should only be a tiny fraction of your guilt. The fact that this isn't crystal clear just highlights the degree to which the Lantern, and the columns followers, are simply acolytes of a new Ascetic Eco Religion. Harm-independent guilt is the hallmark of a Puritan religion. Pox on that idea and everyone who promotes it.

If we are taking too many hot showers, that really means only one thing: they are too cheap. It doesn't mean we are bad people, it doesn't mean we don't care about the world or our neighbors. It means that the price of the water and energy we are using does not properly include the cost of externalities, like global warming. The message we get when we take a shower is that it costs, essentially, nothing. The solution is not tricky or mysterious. If we are emitting too much CO2 into the atmosphere, we need CO2 markets (cap-and-trade). This will bundle in the cost of the CO2 emission into the price of fuel, raising the price of heating up all of that water for your hot shower. The same goes for the cost of water. It's absurd to talk about water usage like a moral concern. If water is scarce, as it is in the part of California where I live, water should be very expensive. But the price of water is kept virtually free in most places by artificial means, and then everyone acts all surprised that we use it to water lawns, or that farmers think it's a good idea to farm in the desert. It is a good idea, if water is free. If water is scarce, though, it's price should reflect that. Sell it to the highest bidder and we'll see whether it makes sense to grow strawberries in the desert, as happens near me. Instead of letting the price of water do the talking, though, we engage in endless wrangling over it, we enact bans on various activities (watering lawns, say), and stupid symbolic gestures like prohibiting restaurants from automatically serving water. It's an absurd way to try to control a scarce resource.

And, of course, water scarcity is a purely regional issue, something I never see mentioned in the Lantern. Houston, where I come from, has the problem of trying to get rid of all of the fresh water that rains down on it every year. Houston is swampland, criss-crossed with Bayous which routinely flood. There is no water shortage in Houston. It's absurd to even think about your water usage in Houston. Similarly, heating your water for your shower is potentially a regional cost too. If you have an electric heater, and a nuclear power plant (or wind, or solar), then the impact of your shower, on global warming at least, is zero, no matter how long the shower. Individuals would have to know an awful lot about the sources of their resources in order to act "morally", but if we bundle the environmental costs of activities into the price at the source, people only need to know the price of what they want to do, all the costs will be bundled in. Then people will only need to make economic choices, not moral ones.

Moreover, if you bundle CO2 costs into fossil fuels, that will have the positive impact of encouraging the building of alternative power sources. Feeling guilty and abstaining from a few showers notably lacks that economic signal. The puritan activity does nothing to actually improve the state of the world. It's just a hope that if we are pennant enough, if we are ascetic enough, that the Eco Gods (Mother Earth? Gaia?) will somehow spare us from catastrophe. I want an environmentalism dominated by environmental engineers and economists, by markets working out the most efficient solutions, not by envionmental shamans shaking their rattles and checking my piety.

Kolmogorov

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kolmogorov:

....If we are taking too many hot showers, that really means only one thing: they are too cheap. It doesn't mean we are bad people, it doesn't mean we don't care about the world or our neighbors. It means that the price of the water and energy we are using does not properly include the cost of externalities, like global warming. The message we get when we take a shower is that it costs, essentially, nothing. The solution is not tricky or mysterious. If we are emitting too much CO2 into the atmosphere, we need CO2 markets (cap-and-trade). This will bundle in the cost of the CO2 emission into the price of fuel, raising the price of heating up all of that water for your hot shower. The same goes for the cost of water. ....

Yes of course- the Free Market Gods will fix everything! Just price everything right! For example- in your fantasyland, poor people will have to choose between eating a meal or taking a bath because they are priced out of daily showers. Whereas rich CEO's can take as many hot baths as they damn well please because they get paid millions in bonus just for breathing air. Water scarcity? No problem - the magical free market will ensure that no poor people can afford to drink water, or eat- since food is grown with water. Problem solved.

I'll stipulate that subsidies may be needed for the very poor, and that there are lots of CEO's whose pay is obscene and vulgar given their contributions to the world. Those are independent of my point.

I don't think the free market gods will fix everything. Cap-and-trade, after all, is a government program. It's the creation of an artificial market by the government, but it's still a government program. Natural markets don't include many things we really want to have, like clean air. Such things are called "externalities". Since there is no natural market for clean air, if you want clean air you have to do something outside the natural market. One way is to have government officials sit around and mandate all the allowed activities. You could have the government decide how many showers each citizen gets, how many miles they get to drive on their cars, whether or not you get to eat oranges in Minnesota, and so on. That's one way to achieve the end of lower pollution. Or you can let people choose for themselves what they want to do within the constraints imposed by the real cost of the activity. Currently people don't pay the pollution costs of many things, so they are essentially freeloaders. The key question, though, is who should decide how many baths you get to take? Me? You? Some third party? The city council? Who should decide where you can grow Strawberries? If a resource is scarce like water, or the air's capacity for pollution, someone, or some process, has to decide who gets to use the resource and how much. How is that done in *your* fantasyland?

Kolmogorov

Previous rant on this topic
And another

I agree with most of this wholeheartedly... but at one point you state that "Similarly, heating your water for your shower is potentially a regional cost too. If you have an electric heater, and a nuclear power plant (or wind, or solar), then the impact of your shower, on global warming at least, is zero, no matter how long the shower."

This is not so true. This would only be true if 100% of your electricity was carbon-neutral. If ~20% or so was carbon neutral, the nuclear plants are "always on" and the wind turbines operate at the whim of the weather (these are actually pains for the power industry)... so the less power that is used on any local grid the higher percentage of nuclear power there is on that grid. However, whenever more energy is demanded, coal and natural gas plants kick in to fill that demand... so by offering additional demand, you essentially require the dirtier power options to be used.

Nonetheless, we agree on government policy adjusting the market to reflect our priorities - and if we refuse to allow this those aren't really our priorities.

However, I would defend the Lantern as a harmless diversion. I seriously doubt people started switching their preferred music storage method when the Lantern showed a (gasp) 400 g difference between CDs and MP3s or something... But barring any real or useful blog on Slate about environmentalism, we check in here and just kind of play around.

:)

As for water, hooking a few reverse-osmosis desalinator plants to a nuclear power plant would fix Southern California's water problem for FAR less than money (for the consumer) than restrictive pricing costs... But the environmentalists can only think about reducing consumption - not about increasing availability - and nobody else seems to think about it at all.

kolmogorov:

...Natural markets don't include many things we really want to have, like clean air. Such things are called "externalities". Since there is no natural market for clean air, if you want clean air you have to do something outside the natural market. ...

Exactly- now you understand that the free market is not a panacea.

kolmogorov:

One way is to have government officials sit around and mandate all the allowed activities. You could have the government decide how many showers each citizen gets, how many miles they get to drive on their cars, whether or not you get to eat oranges in Minnesota, and so on. That's one way to achieve the end of lower pollution. Or you can let people choose for themselves what they want to do within the constraints imposed by the real cost of the activity. Currently people don't pay the pollution costs of many things, so they are essentially freeloaders. The key question, though, is who should decide how many baths you get to take? Me? You? Some third party? The city council? Who should decide where you can grow Strawberries? If a resource is scarce like water, or the air's capacity for pollution, someone, or some process, has to decide who gets to use the resource and how much. How is that done in *your* fantasyland? ...

I'd much rather have a government mandate how many gallons of water each person is alloted, than your system where the rich gets all the water they need to bathe their poodles in bubble bath, while the poor have to drink malaria infested muddy water.

Ideally there needs to be a balance of both government mandated equality, and also a measure of market forces. Such that each person is guaranteed some minimum of water allotment. There will be surcharge for exceeding the allotment; or maybe anything above the minimum alllotment is purely subject to market pricing.

The solution, which seems quite easy to me, would be to progressively increase the cost of water - so a household's first 100 cubic feet of water are nearly free, and the second 100 cubic ft costs 50% more than the first hundred, and the third 100 cubic feet cost 10% more than the second hundred... and so on and so forth, so the household using only 400 cubic feet might be paying 1.5 cents/ft3 for the last cubic foot they use... but the household using 1000 cubic feet might pay ~2.4 cents/ft3 for the last cubic foot... and the household using 4000 ft3/month would pay ~41 cents/ft3 for the last cubic foot they use (that's more than a penny a gallon).

Basically, you can always start the first 100 cubic feet at a penny per ft3, and then just adjust the incremental multiplier according to the water availablility... poor people get water, but the market would force people to use water efficiently. *shrug*

Kolmogorov is right, this isn't hard.

Tundrayeti:

The solution, which seems quite easy to me, would be to progressively increase the cost of water - so a household's first 100 cubic feet of water are nearly free, and the second 100 cubic ft costs 50% more than the first hundred, and the third 100 cubic feet cost 10% more than the second hundred... and so on and so forth, so the household using only 400 cubic feet might be paying 1.5 cents/ft3 for the last cubic foot they use... but the household using 1000 cubic feet might pay ~2.4 cents/ft3 for the last cubic foot... and the household using 4000 ft3/month would pay ~41 cents/ft3 for the last cubic foot they use (that's more than a penny a gallon).

Basically, you can always start the first 100 cubic feet at a penny per ft3, and then just adjust the incremental multiplier according to the water availablility... poor people get water, but the market would force people to use water efficiently. *shrug*

Kolmogorov is right, this isn't hard.

It's not universally necessary, though. We've got a well and a septic system. Get all the water you want for the cost of the electricity to pressurize it, which I think works out to about 6 bucks a month for a family of 5. Water doesn't go into a sewer to the ocean, but back into the land you took it out of.

Let the yahoos in L.A. worry about their water, and tax them up the ying-yang for its use! Fine by me. Uncle will never know how many gallons we use, and I sure don't want to pay him for "borrowing" the water from Mother Earth for awhile.

You do know that this is common practice anyway??

In the 9 states that I've lived in this has been the norm for water. It really sucks for people who experience a catastrophic pipe failure.

The solution is completely self-evident.

I've always been baffled by people complaining about water issues. This isn't rocket science. We have the capacity to understand how to fix it...

*shrug*

Of course, when I hear about people that have 500+ water bills because they live in areas with a constant water shortage... I can't help but wonder why their city doesn't build a water desalination plant and pipe in water. Reverse osmosis for seawater works out to about 7 cents/ton... That's a lot cheaper than they're currently paying.

I live in Columbia, SC... We will likely never have to worry about water issues here, but if we did, I'd hope that someone just desalinates and pipes in water rather than making me pay ~10 - 20 times as much for it.

There is a lot more passion in the eco movement than there is third-party unbiased information.

So someone wants the state to invest in subsidizing solar panels - because they'd be good for the planet, regardless of the cost to the state...

While someone else finds death valley so beautiful that they mount a giant petition to stop solar farms from generating carbon-neutral energy there.

Both of the examples of environmentalists are extremely passionate, and both are nuts. Their passion, in both cases, is keeping them from seeing or understanding the big picture, and keeping them the object of scorn and derision for most of the rest of the U.S.

It would be nice if there was some objective resource for the environmental movement... but they don't have such a thing available yet. They have propaganda from various companies seeking to exploit them, and they have equally false propaganda from the republican party trying to discredit them... and nothing in between.