Virtue over impact: Greens environmentalist policy likely to backfire

[There is] a particular kind of increasingly common environmental regulation: one that is short on impact but big on virtue signaling.

Consider [some] examples from the past few years:

• Some American states have banned cafés and restaurants from offering their customers single-use plastic straws.
• Many jurisdictions around the world now require grocery stores to charge their customers for plastic bags.
• The EU has phased out incandescent light bulbs.
• The EU has also banned plastic bottles with removable caps, leading to the introduction of bottles that don’t always properly close once they have been opened.
• Though not yet implemented, some prominent organizations and activists have called for gas stoves to be banned.

These … examples share an important commonality: They are a form of policy intervention that achieves small improvements for the environment at the cost of a salient deterioration in quality of life or a large loss of political goodwill. For that reason, each of these interventions is likely to backfire.

Environmentalist policies don’t just need to be well-intentioned or feel virtuous; they need to be effective in accomplishing their stated goals. It’s time for a new paradigm. Call it “effective environmentalism.”

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