I always believed that good environmental policies are crucial to the future of this planet, but for every year that goes by my faith in humanity’s ability to enact useful ones diminish. Partly because I think the main environmental issue is human overpopulation and unfortunately faith based organizations have sabotaged every UN attempt at pushing for some global policies and debates on that.

The other thing is that politicians seems unable to react in an intelligent way when faced with new data. And I am not just talking about the American right holding their hands over their ears screaming lalala for many years instead of facing the facts that global warming was real. Or arguments that science will be able to overcome any problems eventually so there is no need for hard hitting policies, the last argument strikes me as the same as encouraging unprotected sex with HIV positive people since science will probably come up with a cure before you die from Aids. While I am a strong believer in what science can accomplish you have to make your plans on what is currently available, not on what you hope is going to happen.

One of my favourite examples of political stupidity from Norway is milk carton recycling. You see, for many years the government did huge campaigns to try to get people to send in their milk cartons for recycling, most of these campaigns especially targeted towards children. Then some years ago a researcher pointed out that recycling these cartons was actually less environmentally friendly than just burning them. The pollution caused by transporting them in for recycling combined with the chemicals they had to use to dissolve the wax protection on the cardboard was a bigger environmental hazard than actually just burning the cartons at the local garbage treatment plants. So what did the government representative say when faced with this? Did the representative say that with this new information the recycling project would be stopped? No, instead the representative managed to say that since stopping the recycling project might undermine the faith in the environmental policies and due to the great symbol value of the project for environmental protection it would continue…… Yep, nothing strengthens policy support and provides greater symbol value than doing something stupid.

These days we are faced we what has turned out to be a similar stupidity on a global scale. Biofuels.

Biofuels has been hailed as a white knight for both energy problems and environmental policies, but recent research has shown that it actually might be a environmental disaster, not to mention its contribution to the rising prices of food will also make it a participant in a humanitarian disaster.

The problem with biofuels is that while the plants involved do photosynthesis like any other plant they do less than a similarly sized field of wild plants and trees. And since current biofuel policies are causing a lot more forest and wild fields to be turned into farmland for biofuels, the amount of CO2 converted to Oxygen lessen. And voila, the push for biofuels manage to accelerate global warming instead of slowing it. Question if how many years it will take for politicians to catch on to this and for instance the EU biofuel goal to get scrapped.

I learned today that that the Norwegian Equality and Discrimination Ombudsman have decided that public sector workplaces can not pay two groups with the same length of education differently. The specific case where a case where some nurses and some engineers in a small Norwegian community where earning different salaries, even though both groups had four years of higher education.

While the case will be taken to the courts, and hopefully overturned, it is an example of equality thinking having gone horribly wrong. There is so many problems with this decision that I have problems knowing where to start. First of all this decision forgets that the labour market, is in fact a market. Different salary levels come about as a result of supply and demand issues or a range of years. And if this rule is not overturned it means that public sector work places will basically be unable to get qualified employees in high competition parts of the labour market, as it is of course infeasible to increase the salary of every employee in the public sector each time one need to pay more for in demand labour.

The second part is that it makes the already ineffective tuning of the education sector to the needs of the labour market even more ineffective. If you can’t pay people who have been taking math in Uni higher for instance than someone studying other subjects, that means you have very few incentives for driving people towards harder and/or less popular studies which are needed for society to prosper.

If the rule stands it also plays into the already growing problem of education padding, where groups are continuously pushing for longer education periods to increase the standing of their profession. The financial education I took over four years is today actually a five year degree, and even when I did my degree I wondered to myself what knowledge or skill was actually passed to me during those four years which couldn’t been just as effectively transfered over three years.

The Norwegian socialists (communists?) need to wake up and realize that equal pay for equal work is not the same as equal pay for all work. Salary equality need to be aimed for on a macrolevel, not across random professional boundaries and organizations.The government is supposed to be involved in nation building here, not a re-enactment of Animal Farm.

And I am not saying that salary inquality is not something which cant be a problem. I do agree that policies aiming at making sure that women who holds basically the same job as a man should get on average equal pay is correct for instance. (And I repeat that the goal should be to look at that problem in the context of macro level averages as there are of course many cases where paying one person more than another is reasonable, even if they have similar backgrounds. An obvious example here is the world of pro-sports, but that applies just as much to other types of work, ie. Linus Torvalds is of course not comparable with any random person who spent the same amount of years as he doing computer science in Uni.)

And I was also musing while watching the US news and discussion shows on TV here yesterday, that
maybe one of the big issues undermining the US economy and sense of social unity is the enormous gaps in income here. But just like the gender equality issue trying to address that issues through public policy needs to happen gradually on a macro level and not on a micro level. For example are there laws or policies that could be put in place that would strengthen the bargaining position of those earning less and thus over time improve their average income level in relation to the rest of society?

Of course politicians today do not think in such high level terms, instead they prefer buying votes by earmarking money to specific groups.