This article is notable in that it contained this sentence:

> Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit, and never really caught on.

Which made me realise, the first time I read it, that he didn't know what he was talking about and was just repeating what he heard in his weird echo chamber with unwarranted confidence. If you're in that bubble that will apparently seem like a totally normal thing to say, if you're not then it will seem like utter insanity.

Even more so when you follow the link, and realise he's linking to a New York Times op-ed, which doesn't even agree with the claim (though it's trying pretty hard to give the impression it is).

> THE environmental benefits of recycling come chiefly from reducing the need to manufacture new products — less mining, drilling and logging. But that’s not so appealing to the workers in those industries and to the communities that have accepted the environmental trade-offs that come with those jobs.

Oh so recycling actually works, but we need fake jobs for people who don't care about economic efficiency? I'm glad we got some clear eyed realists in to explain this all to us.

> Oh so recycling actually works, but we need fake jobs for people who don't care about economic efficiency? I'm glad we got some clear eyed realists in to explain this all to us.

That's not what the op-ed is saying. The existence of benefits does not mean the benefits are bigger than the costs. In context, that sentence is part of an argument against the idea that landfills are filling up.

So how big are the benefits relative to the costs?

Well, it cites some data to say that recycling paper and metal does a good job, and that everything else combined is pretty useless. That doesn't strike me as wrong in any obvious way.

Combine that with "That money could buy far more valuable benefits, including more significant reductions in greenhouse emissions." and "He concludes that the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of some metals, and by imposing a $15 tax on each ton of trash that goes to the landfill." and this doesn't sound like an argument for fake jobs or ignoring economic efficiency to me.

So the quote:

> Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit, and never really caught on.

Linking to an article that, in your words:

> cites some data to say that recycling paper and metal does a good job

and

> the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of some metals

But also says metal mining and logging communities are against it because they 'have accepted the environmental trade-offs'.

Again, from within a certain bubble that may not seem contradictory and illogical, but it is.

Nor is cheaper ways of reducing CO2 a sensible argument. Every method of reducing CO2, except for one, has cheaper options. We should do all the ones that are a net positive, and so save us money, not only the very best one.

The whole article is weak sophistry of this kind. As I said, it doesn't support the argument, just does its best to pretend it does.

If mass recycling doesn't work well except for two materials, then it's not unreasonable to disparage recycling in general. Especially when you're talking about recycling as an alternative to landfills.

> Nor is cheaper ways of reducing CO2 a sensible argument. Every method of reducing CO2, except for one, has cheaper options. We should do all the ones that are a net positive, and so save us money, not only the very best one.

Since CO2 is all fungible, we should only spend significant amounts of money on the methods that are in the same ballpark as the cheapest option.

And what do you mean "save us money"? One main point of that piece was that it cost a lot of money to try to recycle everything.

You can't even give away many kinds of recyclables, after paying to collect them.

> The whole article is weak sophistry of this kind. As I said, it doesn't support the argument, just does its best to pretend it does.

The argument was that trash isn't piling up. Which is supported just fine.

Yes, the article tried to give the vague impression that recycling is expensive, and then admits that metal recycling would increase the social good and should be subsidized.

So it's not 'expensive', it's expensive not to do it, no matter how much that total subsidy comes to. In fact the higher the total subsidy the more we save. (Not coincidentally the same applies to CO2, carbon fees are the economists solution to achieve higher efficiency by subsidizing alternatives)

Which must be hard for a contrarian libertarian to admit, so the fact that he does so in an article about how bad recycling is, is very telling. I mean he's just told us that mining communities don't like this idea, it's just stupid rich liberals from the other tribe who want a more efficient economy, now he's telling us to use tax money to put miners out of jobs, for the 'social good'? That we should tax landfills to reduce their use and incentivise alternatives? What kind of hippy talk is that?

So, back to SSC, he proved that trash wasn't going to pile up, which he dubiously claims is the original, false reason given to recycle, by linking to an article and saying "recycling didn't work and never caught on", but the article says it saves money and we should do it for that reason.

His source literally calls for a pigouvian tax on landfill use. To reduce landfill use. So he proves trash wouldn't pile up and we'd never run out of landfills, by citing an op-ed by a guy who thinks we should disincentivise landfills? Where is the logic here? Maybe people wanted to reduce landfill usage for whatever unstated reason his source has for wanting the same thing and believing it was economically optimal?

> In fact the higher the total subsidy the more we save.

What.

If someone offers a way to spend a hundred thousand dollars per ton of CO2 saved, you should not give them a single penny. It does not increase social good to fund such a program.

Unless that sentence was just about the efficient types of recycling. In which case yes, fully fund those programs.

> which he dubiously claims is the original, false reason given to recycle

The argument the article makes is "90s environmentalism said we'd run out of landfill space and trash would pile up everywhere. This was wrong."

Not that it was the only reason to recycle, but that it was a massive part of the messaging, and completely wrong.

You're so laser-focused on that single sentence that you're making a strawman out of the article. The section is not geared at the overall practice of recycling. One single sentence is going too far by being too glib.

These historical successes are encouraging, but it is very important not to extrapolate any of them to anthropogenic climate change. The processes underlying every single one of the examples in the SSC article operate on time scales of years or decades. CO2 causes effects over centuries and persists for millennia. It is a completely different beast.

The atmospheric chemistry one was Ozone which turned out to be real, and was solved through regulation.

Yes, but you've missed the point: the problem with ozone was depletion in the upper atmosphere by CFCs. But CFCs do not persist for millennia and ozone is continually produced by natural processes. So if you stop emitting CFCs the problem naturally fixes itself in a short period of time (a few decades).

But even if we reduced CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow that would not solve the problem because we are already at 150% of pre-industrial CO2, and CO2 persists for thousands of years. We've taken carbon that was sequestered by natural processes over a period of hundreds of millions of years and released it back into the atmosphere in a period of a few hundred years. That genie will not go quietly or quickly back into its bottle.