Don Boudreaux notes that his kid has stumbled upon an old staple of my childhood, Captain Planet. I have to admit that when I was a kid it was one of my absolute favorite shows. I still have the theme song memorized, as do many of my friends, and I can still recall some specific episodes. The one Professor Boudreaux’s son watched is fairly demonstrative of the show’s general formula: Some EVIL CORPORATION is POLLUTING THE ENVIRONMENT and must be stopped by our five multicultural heros and heroines; they’re never strong enough on their own, however, and must combine their powers (Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart) to form Captain Planet who goes on to show the EVIL CORPORATION what-for. It’s sort of like Transformers, only lamer and made by hippies.
The absolute best thing* about the show is that the corporations in question never actually produce anything. In the world of Captain Planet companies are paid simply to produce waste and pollution. In one specific episode, now my favorite for purely comedic reasons, there is a giant tractor-like machine that eats trees and makes smoke. That’s all it does. It doesn’t make lumber, it doesn’t build spec homes, it just eats trees and makes smoke. I seem to recall that it was being used to clear land for…something, maybe a housing development. The best thing, the absolute best thing, is that the company hired to clear the land was using this machine that ate trees and made smoke. I seem to recall that the developer was only slightly evil, and repented at the end. Oh, yes, and the tractor was driven by a fat, porcine villian with pointy teeth. That was really the classic hippie agit-prop capstone of the episode.
Captain Planet is a great example of the unthinking environmentalist movement. They fail to consider, at all, that people actually want the products produced by these companies and they fail to realize that you can’t make stuff without making waste. It’s also sadly obvious that much of the environmental movement thinks we’re living in the 18th and 19th century: no laws, no understanding of externalities, and a disturbingly high number of Victorian children falling into looms. Fortunately for all involved, this simply isn’t the case.
Technological progress has drastically reduced the amout of waste produced by the manufacture of goods and services. Cars are more efficient today than there were even a decade ago, especially hybrids. Hybrid gas milage may come up short of EPA estimates, but the EPA tests use emmissions to back-out the gas milage. That means that hybrids are putting out drastically lower emissions than their conventional counterparts, even if they’re burning just as much gas.
When I took Public Finance the professor put forth a supposition that I found hillarious and the left-liberals in the class took a lot of issue with: The United States is the most efficient polluter in the world, and should therefore be the only nation allowed to pollute. While it’s true that the US creates a lot of pollution, we also produce the vast majority of the stuff. We have the largest, most dynamic economy in the world, so of course we’re going to produce the most waste in terms of sheer volume. But, we produce the least waste per unit of output.
This has gone pretty far afield from Captain Planet, but the point is that Captain Planet really exemplifies the sort of ignorance about the economics of environmental regulations in which many activists live. I don’t think it’s poisoning our children or anything, but I agree with Professor Boudreaux that the Playboy Channel is probably less damaging to the thinking abilities of his eight-year-old.
* “Best” meaning “most humorous”.
