Conservationists Cannot Escape The Laws Of Energy.

This is the title of this editorial by Warren Brown, which could also be called "How Conservationism Resembles Religion."

In it, he points out that many of the most highly-touted current solutions to our environmental consumption actually fail to solve the overriding problem.  In fact, all these solutions do is transfer our consumption from one formerly-organic resource to another organic resource. 

That means hybrids won't solve the fuel consumption problem.  Once those batteries run out, they have to be either disposed of or recycled.  Either recourse will require environmental destruction and/or energy consumption...neither one of which is an energy-free process.  Because of this, hybrid cars actually use more energy than regular cars in spite of the fact that they require less gasoline. 

All alternative fuels have this inherent limitation, or some other equivalent handicap.  Until we discover an entirely new energy source that we haven't even considered yet, and technology progresses to the point that these new energy forms become practically useable, not much will change.  Banning plastic bags or switching to sugarcane ethanol, or hybrid cars, or all of the above, will not solve the problem.  As brown points out, they will only delay the inevitable. 

But here is my favorite part of the article:

"Aware of all of this, some environmental activists have embraced the notion of abandoning cars and trucks, or of at least reducing our enormous reliance on them. They romanticize a return to "walkable communities," a time when we grew our produce on our own land and transported it to local shops. To hear them talk, it was a time when we were all happy, when no one worried about oil.

But there were trade-offs then, too. The "cheap energy" used to sustain that bucolic past often came from slaves, indentured servants or poorly paid labor. It relied on overworked horses and other animals that, once their energy was expended, died unheralded."

So you can forget about "the good old days."  Those days weren't nearly as good as some conservationists report.

The way I see it, there are two ways out of our current environmental pickle: innovation, and incentives aimed particularly at corporations first and individuals second.  Simply asking people and organizations to change the way they behave simply because it "makes the world better" is a fool's errand and a waste of time.  If you don't want people to use plastic bags, you have to provide incentives for them to carry their shopping with something else.  More importantly, you have to make sure it is in a corporation's best interest not to use plastic bags.

Handing out bans and telling people what to do without providing MEANINGFUL incentives to change their behavior will leave us exactly where we are now.  Asking China to not abuse the environment the same way every other industrialized state did during a particular period of history will make China laugh.  And it should. 

As a society, we should encourage spending on education, research and technological innovation focused on becoming more energy-efficient.  Otherwise, we can keep talking about change and putting our papers and bottles in the recycling bin without actually accomplishing anything lasting or worthwhile.  

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