Nancy Pelosi's "Green the Capitol" Initiative Turns out to be Massive Waste of Resources

Chris | InformationLiberation
Mar. 03, 2011

The LA Times has an excellent report detailing the miserable failure of Nancy Pelosi's "Green the Capitol" initiative which involved using "cornstarch-based knives, forks and spoons" instead of plastic. Per all supposed "green initiatives," rather than save resources, it wasted them, en masse.

The LA Times reports:

After about a month in control of the House of Representatives, Republicans haven't managed to undo as many deeds of their Democratic predecessors as they'd like. They couldn't get rid of "Obamacare," and they haven't made much headway in slashing the president's $4-trillion budget. But the GOP has succeeded in short order in one critically important venture: getting rid of the "compostable" cornstarch-based knives, forks and spoons that were a universally — and bipartisanly — hated feature of the House cafeteria operation.

The tableware, the color of mucus and as bendable as a pocket watch in a Salvador Dali painting (and thus unable to pierce any foodstuff firmer than the innards of Brie cheese), was the most visible manifestation of recently deposed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Green the Capitol initiative. That was her carbon-cutting effort to use the food-service and other House operations to fight global warming and a host of other perceived environmental, health and social ills. During the lunchtime rush, you could observe dozens of staffers struggling to stab lettuce leaves and poultry pieces with fork tines that appeared to be double-jointed as well as dull.

But on Jan. 25, Dan Lungren, the GOP congressman from the Sacramento area who now heads the House Administration Committee, directed the House chief administrative officer to trash — so to speak — the composting program, which converts the dining service's cornstarch tableware, along with its biodegradable plates, trays, cups and drinking straws, into garden mulch.

It turns out that the composting program not only cost the House an estimated $475,000 a year (according to the House inspector general) but actually increased energy consumption in the form of "additional energy for the pulping process and the increased hauling distance to the composting facility," according to a news release from Lungren.

As far as carbon emissions were concerned, Lungren concluded that the reduction was the "nominal ... equivalent to removing one car from the road each year." He plans to switch the House to an alternate waste-management system recommended by the Architect of the Capitol, in which dining-service trash would be incinerated and the heat energy captured.

Note the republican's solution is not to scrap the whole thing as a total waste of resources and worthless show, instead they chose to put their own show on with a different wasteful "green" stunt.

The fact of the matter is, the only thing which assures an efficient use of resources is the market economy. Businesses have every incentive to get the most out of their resources because that's how they can increase their profits. That's why all technological innovation is done by private companies, not government bureaucrats. Oil, for example, is being used more and more efficiently with every year, motors are being constantly improved to get more out of each precious drop. Why? Because of the supposedly "evil" profit motive which forces people to be intelligent in order to succeed.

Government, on the other hand, will drop the entire life's wealth of Bill Gates on one useless high speed rail project, despite there being almost 800 cars for every 1000 Americans.

Do you want to know why America is going completely broke? It's because our parasite government is burning all our wealth up in socialist schemes like this, both figuratively and literally.
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Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com. He's an anarcho-capitalist who believes in the total abolition of the state. You can find more of his commentary here.