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SHOULD CONGRESS LIMIT CONSERVATION TO REDUCE THE DEFICIT?
By admin | September 21, 2011
As sophisticated as we like to consider ourselves, we are, at the end of the day, relatively simple creatures that require a few very basic things to survive”water, food, and air. We extract these basic things from the environment, which is already so polluted that in many cases we can’t consume them directly, but instead have to spend significant amounts of money cleaning them so that we don’t fall over dead when we do consume them.
Conservation isn’t just about having pretty things out the window. It is about protecting the environmental systems that provide every fundamental thing we require for survival. It isn’t possible to limit conservation to reduce the deficit. Limiting conservation will only degrade the environment further and increase the costs to purify what we consume. Limiting conservation does nothing but shift costs from one place to another. Instead of preventing environmental degradation in the first place, it would end up paying to mitigate that damage later and that trade isn’t necessarily one-to-one, since mitigation after the fact can cost more than prevention in the first place. Environmental degradation doesn-t happen over night, and so limiting conservation might yield immediate deficit relief, it would do so only by passing on an even greater debt to the future and that just isn-t responsible.
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