City and county officials all across North Carolina are
under pressure from special interest groups to adopt "sustainability"
policies. Wake County established
a Sustainability Task Force last January to provide the commissioners with
recommendations that will improve the "sustainability" of water, energy and
solid waste.
I serve on the Task Force and it has been operating for nine months
now without a definition of "sustainability." I hope this is not typical of efforts in other counties and
cities.
As I point out in this Locker Room blog post, I offered this
definition early in the process as an alternative to the usual definition used
by many environmentalists:
Definition of Sustainability:
Meeting
the needs of the present and future generations by using privatized resources
based on incentives produced by a fully functioning price system.
History shows and economic science demonstrates that the
best system ever devised for efficiently allocating scarce resources across
generations is the one based on private contract, free exchange and voluntary
initiative.When the allocation of natural resources has been dominated by the
system of free exchange, they have tended to be more abundant, in an economic
sense, over time.
This N&O article and this blog post about
a new solar project in Holly Springs report that taxpayers are paying a
$700,000 subsidy and the Progress Energy ratepayers are paying 18 cents per
kilowatt subsidy to make this project "profitable" for the private company.
Clearly, these subsidies, forcibly taken from taxpayers and
ratepayers, are not sustainable. Taxpayers and energy ratepayers do not have an endless supply of money
to spend on the pet projects of special interests and politicians. More importantly, these subsidies are
not sustainable, because they waste scarce resources. All of the raw materials, labor and capital devoted to this
solar energy project are producing energy at prices higher than energy produced
by alternative means. Thus this
project is an inefficient and wasteful use of resources. By any measure, that is not the way to
a more sustainable world.
