I think readers of this blog know something of the junk science argument, and I've seen the junk science do a lot of harm in practice, wasting huge amounts of public money to pick up "recyclables" that end up in the landfill, creating toxic waste in the drive for "clean energy," etc. This is something we need to continue fighting, hard.

As for "free market environmentalism," it would be helpful if we could recognize its limits, and the extent to which it is ideological poppycock. I'm not saying the programs themselves are not often good and effective (e.g. cap and trade) but to call them "free market" is worse than silly. A tax is a tax. It is a government program. When you use a tax as a disincentive for certain behavior (e.g. polluting) you are engaging in government policy for a public end. You will be more or less effective according to how high the tax is, but won't necessarily tax at the highest rate out of concern for other ends (e.g. jobs). The "free market" aspect of taxing pollution has only to do with allowing for the trading of allowable units of pollution. That has to be limited, especially geographically (what if we let companies in Dallas do all the polluting?). Moreover, it is simply a structured market — structured by the government. We are not arguing about whether to regulate, then, but how. And the mindset that says it's okay for the government to structure the market so long as everything in it has a price already has led to too much socialism and too much faith in the power and goodness of placing a pricetag on everything.

We see the alternatives in arguments over development. I for one am very much in favor of marking large, even huge tracts of land "off-limits" to full development. I want to be able to take my kids to wild places. I even want to know that there are wild places I may never visit off in the mountains, but which others might. I think we lose something important when beasts die out, and when we lose the opportunity to simply climb a mountain and look out on God's natural creation. So both parks and wilderness areas make sense to me. But programs to have local governments buy up land around the town are worse than useless, most of the time, because that simply increases the price of land — until eventually crowding and land prices cause the city to decide to sell off that land, at a higher price. The city, in effect, is trying to structure the market in land, and failing. If the land can't be taken permanently off the market, it should be developed properly from the start. The problem is that we structure our markets in land very badly. Why? Because we have lost our understanding of what it means to build and live in a community. Sorry, that's the last chapter, but all these are part of the same problem. A conservative is someone who wants people to be able to lead good lives. Part of that is living with respect for God's natural creation; part is understanding of how we should build on that world so as to make our lives better.