Those RMA Replacements: "not a sort of RMA 3.0, but a TCPA 4.0 plus a separate environment thing."

Yesterday I was looking at the announcements. Today I'm looking more at the two replacement Bills themselves, mostly the Planning Bill. [ONLINE HERE.] (Although I can't help noting, of those announcements, that anybody who can seriously assess these sort of changes to produce 46% fewer consent applications, not 45% or 47% but 46%, has a problem only assuaged by a large consultancy cheque).

Still, if the needle were shifted to that extent it would be a start. Would the replacements do that? We have a nation who hopes so, and a Minister who seems to intend so.  But then they all told us back then that the RMA was permissive ....

So, thoughts upon reflection:

** Iignore the major hype. Property rights are still not explicitly mentioned, except as a reference to matrimonial disputes.

** Where they are mentioned implicitly, it's in terms of compensation (see below), and of effects. (Again, this follows the RMA in being allegedly "effects-based." So prepare to be underwhelmed.) Yet whereas the RMA looked at ill-defined and undefinable "effects" like "amenity values," "natural character" and "the architectural style or colour of a neighbour’s house," this seems to be somewhat more objective. A big emphasis is on which effects should be ignored, about which it is quite explicit, and which areas it insists councils meddle (equally explicit, see subsection (2)).

** Contrast all this with a common-law system – something commentators still don't understand. (Here's one ignoramus who thinks the RMA's subjectivism is an example of common law, FFS!). Common Law protections have the unique beauty that they protect both property rights AND the environment—the stronger the property-rights protection, the more the law sets up "mirrors" reflecting back to us our own actions, especially long-term ones. (As Aristotle already knew, when people need to heed their own stuff, they are more careful than when they deal with commonly-owned resources.) Here’s how it could be done. 

FIRST, ENACT A CODIFICATION of basic common law principles such as the Coming to the Nuisance Doctrine (the ideal antidote to zoning) and rights to light and air and the like. 
“Second, register on all land titles (as voluntary restrictive covenants) the basic 'no bullshit' provisions of existing District Plans (stuff like height-to-boundary rules, density requirements and the like).
“Next, and this will take a little more time, insist that councils set up ‘Small Consents Tribunals'…” 

** Anyway, I put that paragraph there to show the distance from that idea. So what do we have here? Much of the format, plans, rules, standards and zones of the RMA are still with us. Councils will still write Plans. The Plans will still have Zones. Zones will have Rules and Standards. A council planner will assess your Consent application. And then you, your planner, their planner, your lawyer and theirs will work hard at it until your bank says "That's enough." Much of that will still be with us, even if terms are changed. 

There will be fewer zones, and fewer plans, but so what? It doesn't matter whether you have 17 rules saying "no" or one-hundred and 17 ... if the rules are still telling you "no." (So ignore the headlines about that announcement as well.) It does mean that much of the law built up in courtrooms over the last thirty years is still applicable. But when much of that law should be shovelled out, that's not altogether a bonus.

** If there is a "balance" required from the law here, it's simply between the rights of land-owners to build and the effect of that choice to build on others' land, and on themselves. Note that each owner has equal rights: the right to peaceful enjoyment of their property—the boundary between land and actions being defined by that right (my rights to do whatever the hell I like, including enjoying my spread peacefully, ending where your equal right begins). That's what good law should (and common law did) recognise. it should recognise it, not restrict it. 

** The RMA had a Purposes heading, Part 2 (sections 5 to 8), around which all parts revolved. What it contained was mostly mush, the residue of the nineties non-sequitur of so-called "sustainable management." It was this wherein judges had to adjudicate on what "sustainable management" might mean for your carport extension, or whether that boundary retaining wall might avoid, remedy, or mitigate any adverse effects of activities on the environment. Or not. (This, for Henry Cooke's benefit, is the source of much of that 'judge-made law' he talks about, not the common law with which he has it confused.)

Instead, the replacement Planning Bill replaces Purposes with Goals. You can see that terms like "well-functioning" and "incompatible" will get lawyers' invoices juiced, but for the most part an effort has been made to keep things moderately objective. Except for section (i), which allows for virtually everything here to be outsourced....

** Compensation: Early opponents and the Property Council have both signalled that compensation from taxpayers for regulatory takings is a big part of both replacement Bills—which is not by any means the same thing as protecting property rights, despite what some people still think.

In the replacement Planning Bill at least, they take this form...

** Standing: I'd understood that to object to an Application one needed to have standing, e.g.., to be a neighbour on whom the effects of an application might have objective and measurable harm. Naturally, section 11(1)(i) above vitiates that, but we'd been told that, for instance, someone from Bluff couldn't object to a project in Kaikohe.

That doesn't appear to be the case (but happy to be corrected).

Sections 123 to 125 lay out the decision-making process around public notification of an Application. But I don't see that "Standing" (i.e., having a sufficient connection to and harm from the action or decision) is explicitly laid out.

** As a halfway house between a council decision and the Environment Court—a sort of limbo-land it might take months/years and several hundred thousand dollars to cross—the Planning Tribunal looks to be useful. Not game-changing, but useful.

** Remember, this replacement is resolutely top-down. Instruction comes from above. Zone are determined. Zones will be prepared with their various Rules and Standards. So a lot still rests for each property owner on what will be included as Rules or Standards with which to comply. For all the talk of "effects," when it comes to the home-owner the rubber hits the road in terms of a Rule or a Standard in a Plan. The more restrictive those Rules, the less one can do without a formal Planning Application. 

The argument of the RMA's authors' was that the RMA was more permissive than the more prescriptive Town & Country Planning Act it replaced because Application would be straightforward, with only 'effects' being assessed by council. But in reality, most home-owners did all they could to avoid an Application's perils. So the Zone's particular Rules and Standards became a sort of lockdown.

The irony is that while the  Town and Country Planning Act gave less scope to go outside those Rules and Standards, it's more prescriptive Rules and Standards themselves were often more permissive than those applied under the RMA. It was more prescriptive, but within that prescription at least one could act. 

There's a sneaking suspicion that with the replacement Environment Bill being separated, and this replacement Planning Bill being based on top-down prescription, that any sense of permissiveness will be similar. That (as one wag put it) what we have in these two Bills is not a sort of RMA 3.0, but "a TCPA 4.0 plus a separate environment thing."

There are two ways to throttle business. One is a noose thrown over them involuntarily by government — the other is the noose they put on themselves voluntarily.  One contemporary self-chosen noose is known as 'corporate self-responsibility', aka collectivism applied to corporations, explained in this guest post by Kimberlee Josephson. Corporations, she notes, have come to view themselves as social stewards for moral and social change, and are increasingly declaring that they have to "give back." But is that a good thing?

A Brief History of Corporate Social Responsibility

by Kimberlee Josephson

The phenomenon of so-called CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) gained notoriety with Howard R. Bowen’s 1953 publication Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, and although times have since changed and CSR has taken on various forms since, a constant question remains unchanged.

What is the role of business in society?

Some claim that a greater focus on corporate social performance over corporate financial performance is now warranted, while others adhere to a more classical viewpoint, siding with Theodore Levitt’s assertion that business should simply aim to achieve material gain while operating in good faith. Levitt, a German-American economist and professor at the Harvard Business School, spoke of “The Dangers of Social Responsibility” in a 1958 Harvard Business Review article. He posited that profit maximisation over the long term should be the primary goal of business as this would have a 'spillover effect' improving the wellbeing of society. [As if business's primary goal itself is unimportant! - Ed.]

The propensity to exchange to benefit oneself as a means for societal advancement was most notably espoused in Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. ("It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner," he declared, "but from their regard to their own interest."), but Milton Friedman later drove this message home in his seminal essay in the New York Times Magazine about how the “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”

Yet, the prioritisation of self-gain has proven to be a hard pill to swallow for a culture that seeks emotional fulfillment via altruism. As such, businesses have not only been encouraged to engage in CSR, but also to harness it and pursue a 'higher' calling.

A prominent depiction of the evolution of business interest in CSR, along with society’s expectations for business behavior, is Archie Carroll’s 'CSR Pyramid,' first published in 1991.

At the base of the pyramid is the economic responsibility for firms to be a productive element of society and contribute to the financial wellbeing of the organisation. The next level concerns the legal responsibility of a firm to abide by the ground rules and regulations within the societies they operate. Further up the pyramid concerns a firm’s ethical responsibility, since laws are not sufficient in and of themselves for maintaining order. Indeed, societies establish mores and conventions which influence culture and communal interactions. For instance, it is not illegal to cheat on one’s spouse, but it does violate the institution of marriage; and to the same extent firms are wedded to the societies they are established within and should abide by certain expectations to maintain a healthy relationship.

The top of the pyramid is designated as the discretionary responsibility of philanthropy, wherein the company “gives back,” and this responsibility was posited to be “desired” by society rather than required.

The CSR Pyramid is still widely referenced and Dr. Wayne Visser, CSR professional [sic], who attests it to be a useful framework for managerial decision making. However, over time, the expectations for the top two tiers of the pyramid have expanded, and even what constitutes ethical behaviour has evolved since Carroll’s publication.

In today’s competitive landscape, CSR constitutes a management strategy that goes beyond corporate giving and charitable networks. In fact, as defined by the United Nations, CSR is quite distinct from philanthropy given that in addition to an economic impact it takes into consideration a firm's social and environmental impact.

An emphasis on the people, planet, and profit has become par for the course, and a variety of methods and forms of assessment regarding "sustainability" have come about for companies to prove their “good” work. John Elkington, who coined the term triple bottom line (TBL) for determining the social, environmental, and economic impact of a firm, claims TBL doesn’t go far enough and the business view of CSR is too narrow. Elkington claims that firms should go beyond aiming to be the “best in the world” and instead aspire to be the “best for the world.”

What is “best,” and for whom it is best, though, is largely subjective and open to interpretation. For instance, some social issues are undebatable, such as the desire to end world hunger, but the means for addressing them are usually complex and contestable. [And corporations by their own productivity — and by focussing on their day jobs — have been doing that dramatically in recent decades with barely any applause whatsoever. — Ed.]

Nevertheless, corporations now view themselves as social stewards with a moral charge, and this is an important shift to note, particularly since it is being driven by public opinion.

A 2018 study reported that 78 percent of Americans believe companies must have a positive societal impact beyond their productive purpose, and 77 percent of Americans “feel a stronger emotional connection” to purpose-driven corporations. Companies are responding to public sentiments and reinforcing such expectations through cause-related marketing campaigns and social labelling schemes, and this is a worrisome matter given the potential to compound the issues at hand.

Unlike the stages of the CSR Pyramid, which tended to be industry oriented, firms stretching beyond their domain of competence to prove themselves as worthy contributors to society at large (rather than streamlining efforts toward core stakeholders) is disconcerting for shareholders and distracting for budding entrepreneurs.

The spearheading of virtuous ventures and advocacy advertising show no sign of slowing down—and it won’t, until social pressure shifts back to value rather than virtue.

[Kimberlee's post first appeared at FEE.Org. Hat tip Loiuse Lamontagne and Thomas Miovas Jr]

ESG creates a new rent-seeking class

“How many environmental justice majors does it take to calculate the CO2 emissions of a light bulb? This isn’t a joke. Businesses now employ scads of college grads to do this. For years America’s political class has lamented that too many college grads are working in low-paying jobs that don’t require post-secondary degrees. The diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental, social and governance industries—DEI and ESG, respectively—are solving for this problem while creating many others. In the modern progressive era, young graduates are finding remunerative employment as sustainability coordinators, DEI officers and 'people partners.' Instead of serving up pumpkin soy lattes, they’re quantifying corporate greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring employers don’t transgress progressive cultural orthodoxies.”

~ Allysia Finley, from her article 'Bidenomics and the Boom in DEI and ESG Jobs' [hat tip Samizdata]

A question on 'sustainability'

"What is '#unsustainable' about entrepreneurs figuring out how to best use resources to satisfy consumers?
    "Nothing. The only thing #unsustainable is the central planner trying to supplant the role of the entrepreneur in the marketplace of value creation."

~ composite quote from economist Per Bylund and tweeter Caged Bird 

 

"It is no wonder submitters have warned that Parker’s new laws will be worse than the RMA he wants to repeal. That is some achievement."

"So just what is wrong with [David Parker's proposed replacement for the RMA] For such a complex reform exercise, the problems with can be succinctly stated.
    "They include multiple conflicting objectives with no mechanism for evaluating costs and benefits to resolve trade-offs.
    "They largely disregard property rights, so will have a chilling effect on investment.
    "They presume that planners know best – and will be able to predict society’s complex and diverse future needs.
    "They will undermine local democracy by conferring planning decision-making powers on new regional entities.
    "And perhaps worst of all, they introduce a Pandora’s Box of new amorphous concepts.
    "A generation or two of lawyers have got rich litigating the meaning of the RMA’s core concept of 'sustainable development.' New requirements like 'enabling the use… of the environment in a way that supports the well-being of present generations without compromising the well-being of future generations,' will have environmental lawyers licking their lips.
    "Not to mention the new 'fundamental principle' of Te Oranga o te Taiao. This principle is defined to include the relationship between iwi and individual hapu and the environment. It places untested, undefined and unpredictable race-based considerations at the centre of the planning process.
    "It is no wonder submitters have warned that Parker’s new laws will be worse than the RMA he wants to repeal. That is some achievement."

~ Roger Partridge, from his post 'Three Strikes Against David Parker's RMA Proposals'

 

World-class surfer of central banks' tidal wave of counterfeit capital,

Klaus Schwab, speaking to fellow surfers at his absurdly influential World 

Economic Forum. [Image credit: World Economic Forum, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Vladimir Lenin once boasted that capitalists would sell the rope to hang themselves -- and then set about organising things to make that happen. He failed, but so-called capitalists still line up to keep trying: one latest attempt being something they call 'stakeholder capitalism,' characterised by so-called 'responsible investing.' As Dan Sanchez explains in this Guest Post, it's anything but...

"ESG" -- Capitalism's 'Great Reset'?

Guest Post by Dan Sanchez

Capitalism needs few descriptive adjectives beyond the words "laissez-faire" or "unhampered." In recent years however, so-called "stakeholder capitalism" has taken the global economy by storm. Its champions proclaim that it will save—and remake—the world. Will it live up to its hype or will it destroy capitalism in the name of reforming it?

Proponents pitch their "stakeholder capitalism" as an antidote to the excesses of so-called “shareholder capitalism,” which they condemn as too narrowly focused on maximising profits (especially short-term profits) for corporate shareholders. This, they argue, is socially irresponsible and destructive, because it disregards the interests of other stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and society in general.

"Stakeholder capitalism" [which earns every inverted comma we can muster - Ed.] is ostensibly about offering business leaders incentives to take these wider considerations into account and thus make more “sustainable” decisions. This, it is argued, is also better in the long run for businesses’ bottom lines.

The Rise and Reign of ESG

Today’s dominant strain of "stakeholder capitalism" is the doctrine known as ESG, which stands for “environmental, social, and corporate governance.” Got that? The acronym was coined in the 2004 report of Who Cares Wins, a joint initiative of elite financial institutions invited by no less than the United Nations “to develop guidelines and recommendations on how to better integrate environmental, social and corporate governance issues in asset management, securities brokerage services, and associated research functions.”

In other words, how best to make businesses throw themselves under the bus before governments do it for them.

Who Cares Wins operated under the auspices of the UN’s Global Compact, which, according to the report, “is a corporate responsibility initiative launched by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000 with the primary goal of implementing universal principles in business.” For "universal" read "the UN's."

Much "progress" has been made toward that goal. Since 2004, ESG has evolved from talk of “guidelines and recommendations” to hard, explicit standards that hold sway over huge swathes of the global economy and billions of dollars worth of investment decisions. ESG has begun to move the world.

These standards to which businesses are all-but required to dance are set by ESG rating agencies like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and enforced by investment firms that manage ESG funds. One such firm is Blackrock, whose CEO Larry Fink is a leading champion of both ESG and SASB.

In December, Reuters published a report titled “How 2021 became the year of ESG investing” which stated that, “ESG funds now account for 10% of worldwide fund assets.”

And in April, Bloomberg reported that ESG, “by some estimates represents more than $40 trillion in assets. According to Morningstar, genuine ESG funds held about $2.7 trillion in managed assets at the end of the fourth quarter.”

To access any of that capital, it is no longer enough for a business to offer a good return on investment (or, sometimes, any at all). It must also report “environmental” and “social” metrics that meet ESG standards.

Is that a welcome development? Will the general public as non-owning “stakeholders” of these businesses be better off thanks to the implementation of ESG standards? Is stakeholder capitalism beginning to reform shareholder capitalism by widening its perspective and curing it of its narrow-minded fixation on profit uber alles?

Capitalism Is for Consumers

To answer that, some clarification is in order. First of all, “shareholder capitalism” is a misleading term for laissez-faire capitalism. It is true that, as Milton Friedman wrote in his 1970 critique of the “social responsibility of business” rhetoric of the time:

In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

Since the owners of a publicly traded corporation are its shareholders, it is true that they are and ought to be the “bosses” of a corporation’s employees—including its management. It is also true that corporate executives properly have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise profits for their shareholders.

But that does not mean that shareholders reign supreme under capitalism. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained in his book Human Action:

The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs [which, according to Mises’s technical definition includes shareholding investors]. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders. The captain is the consumer.

The “sovereign consumers,” as Mises calls them, issue their orders through “their buying and their abstention from buying.” Those orders are transmitted throughout the entire economy via the price system. Entrepreneurs and investors who correctly anticipate those orders and direct production accordingly are rewarded with profits. But if one, as Mises says, “does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.”

Under laissez-faire capitalism therefore, the principal "stakeholders" whose preferences reign supreme are not not shareholders, but consumers. And (as Mises wrote in his paper “Profit and Loss”) shareholder profit is a measure of—and motivating reward for—success “in adjusting the course of production activities to the most urgent demand of the consumers.” 

What this means for the “stakeholder capitalism” discussion is that, to the extent that the profit-and-loss metric is discounted for the sake of competing objectives (like serving other “stakeholders”), the sovereign consumers are dethroned, disregarded, and relatively impoverished.

Now it’s at least conceivable that ESG standards are not competing, but rather complementary to the profit-and-loss metric and thus serving consumers. In fact, that’s a big part of the ESG sales pitch: that corporations who adopt and adhere to ESG standards will enjoy higher long-term profits, because breaking free of their fixation on short-term shareholder returns will enable them to embrace more “sustainable” business practices.

In a free unhampered market, whether that promise would be fulfilled or not would be for the sovereign consumers to decide, and ESG would rise or fall on its own merits.

Who Complies Wins

Unfortunately, our market economy is far from free or unhampered. The State has instead rigged capital markets for the benefit of its elite lackeys in the financial industry: like those “Who Cares Wins” fat cats who started the ESG ball rolling in 2004 under the auspices of the United Nations.

One of the prime ways the State rigs markets is through central bank policy.

The prodigious amount of newly created money that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have pumped into financial institutions in recent years has transferred vast amounts of real wealth to those institutions from the general public. As a result, those institutions—big banks and investment companies—are now much more beholden to the State and much less beholden to consumers for their wealth.

As they say, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” So it’s no surprise that these institutions are stumbling over themselves to get on board the State’s ESG bandwagon. 

And that means that if non-financial corporations want access to the Fed’s money tap, and thus to the stream of counterfeit capital gushing out, they too have to get with the ESG program. Especially as the average consumer becomes increasingly impoverished by disastrous economic policies, the incentive for corporations to earn market profit by pleasing consumers is being progressively superseded by the incentive to gain access to the Fed’s flow of loot by meeting the State’s “social” standards.

By increasingly controlling capital flows, the State is gaining ever more control over the entire economy.

This may explain the recent willingness of so many corporations to alienate customers and sacrifice profits on the altar of “green” and “woke” politics. It's not necessarily that they embrace the nonsense themselves (though many do); it's that the governments and their well-rewarded agents have rigged businesses' financial incentives that way.

It is no coincidence that Klaus Schaub, the preeminent champion of the “Great Reset” also co-authored a book titled Stakeholder Capitalism. The upshot of "stakeholder capitalism" is that consumer is supplanted as the economy's supreme stakeholder by The State. The sick joke of stakeholder capitalism therefore is that it “reforms” capitalism by transforming it into a form of socialism. Lenin would be laughing up his sleeve.

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), editor-in-chief of FEE.org, and writer for (among others) The Mission, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, David Stockman’s Contra Corner, and many other popular web sites. He wrote a weekly column for Antiwar.com.
At the Mises Institute, Dan was editor of Mises.org and launched the Mises Academy, the first ever free-market economics online learning platform.
Dan has delivered speeches for FEE, Praxis, the Mises Institute, Liberty on the Rocks, America’s Future Foundation, and more.

A version of his post first appeared at FEE.Org.

"Those who believe in the ideal of human non-impact tend to endow nature with godlike status..."

"Those who believe in the ideal of human non-impact tend to endow nature with godlike status, as an entity that nurtures us if only we will live in harmony with the other species and not demand so much for ourselves.
    "But nature gives us very few directly useable machine energy resources. Resources are not taken from nature, but created from nature. What applies to the raw materials of coal, oil and gas also applies to every raw material in nature -- they are all potential resources, with unlimited potential to be rendered valuable by the human mind.
    "Ultimately, a resource is just matter and energy transformed via human ingenuity to meet human needs. Well, the planet we live on is 100% matter and energy, 100% potential resource for energy and anything else we would want. To say we've only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet's potential we've unlocked. We already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands and thousands of years, and by then, hopefully, we'll have fusion (a potential, far superior form of nuclear power) or even some hyper-efficient form of solar power.
    "The amount of raw matter and energy on this planet is so incomprehensibly vast that it is nonsensical to speculate about running out of it. Telling us that there is only so much matter and energy to create resources from is like telling us that there is only so much galaxy to visit for the first time. True, but irrelevant."

          ~ Alex Epstein, from his 2016 post 'The Truth About Sustainability' [bold added]

What's the real meaning of the anti-concept, "unsustainable"? In this guest post Joakim Book explores the original meaning of the term, how it is being corrupted today to mean zero impact on nature, and how "zero impact" as an ideal is incompatible with human life -- making the idea of "sustainability," at least insofar as human life is concerned, rationally unusable as a guide to action ...

“Sustainability” is unsustainable

Guest post by Joakim Book

It’s winter here in the Northern Hemisphere – a season when environmental concerns seem most strange*.

Yet at a time of year when my Swedish ancestors would have remained in bed to conserve calories and body heat, or hunkered down around the fire to stay warm, I am sitting inside completely carefree. My refrigerator is full; the temperature in my apartment is a toasty 25 degrees C (77°F); my usually cold fingers can type without getting frostbite; and I have no worries that I will run out of food or the modern equivalent of firewood any time soon.

One of the strange words to which our symbolic-minded age is addicted is ‘sustainable.’ It hardly means what its proponents use it for. Starting with a dictionary description, ‘sustainable’ is something that is “able to continue over a period of time.” If a process or action is ‘sustainable,’ the object or person doing it can keep doing it for the foreseeable future. They can sustain it.

Almost nothing about human life however is sustainable, over even short time periods: running, typing, procreating, lifting weights, or eating chocolate cakes. Ultimately even our lungs breathing or hearts beating are unsustainable activities as one day either will stop and we will die.

Think again about winter in the Northern Hemisphere. As I’m writing this, it’s -10° Celsius outside; for somebody to simply step outside – even padded up with layers, gloves, beanies, and scarves – means a slow decay towards frostbite, hypothermia, and ultimately death. Stepping outside on a day like this is by textbook definition unsustainable: I cannot “continue at the same rate” lest I freeze to death.

Thankfully, I have access to several layers of wool clothing, thick winter jackets, gloves and other equipment that slows down this inevitable process of dying. When I either reach my destination or have had enough of the cold, I can return to a comfortably heated home and yet again escape death. By giving me access to better equipment to withstand our inhospitable nature, human society has slowed down the process by which nature kills me. By expanding capitalist markets, distribution chains, innovative profit-seekers, and hyper-specialised division of labour, we have made an unsustainable activity last longer – in effect making life more sustainable, not less.

The sustainability crowd has managed to make this word mean a lot more things than that. So much so that the same Cambridge Dictionary lists a secondary meaning for ‘sustainable:’ “Causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time”(emphasis added). The secondary meaning of its opposite, ‘unsustainable,’ is similarly bonkers: “causing damage to the environment by using more of something than can be replaced naturally.”

Lots of things are wrong with these seemingly innocent lines, and I’ll focus on three: 

1. the environment as a friendly sentient being, 
2. the causal chain between environmental damage and sustainability, and 
3. the replacement rate of resources. 

Nature Is Not Nice

If it weren’t clear already from the chilling pain of sub-zero temperatures for months on end, nature is not a hospitable all-providing place for humans. In the past, I’ve referred to this as the “Bambi syndrome” – thinking that nature is nice, harmless, and providing. That nature is a Garden of Eden devoid of dangers, threats, or pain.

After being exposed to the cold winter air for about ten minutes, my fingers go numb. Without the protection of gloves and clothes that I could never have made myself, I would die in a couple of hours. The “climate” or “the environment” wouldn’t care, as my body simply becomes food for some other organism, returning me to dust. Unless we subscribe to some religious naturalism or equate nature with God, “the” environment isn’t an active moral agent at all but a passive background process.

What many climate catastrophists seem to overlook is what physics professor Adrian Bejan at Duke University eloquently describes: that life means movement; it means 

getting the environment out of the way. […] Life means impact. Life means movement and movement means impact. All these things about eliminating environmental impact is not only against life, it just won’t happen.”

Human beings are the organism that has been the most successful at removing nature’s obstacles from our path, the most successful at protecting ourselves from its damaging forces. Even though there are six billion more of us today than in 1900, fewer people die at the hand of nature’s powers. That’s us impacting the environment and it is cause for celebration. Impact away!

Causing No Harm

Importantly, when “the environment” is damaged – a sentiment that has no actual meaning to human morality – nobody is harmed. The Cambridge definition for sustainability causally connects environmental damage to what it means for something to go on for a long time. The thing is, however, that the labels “damage” and “long time” are sufficiently wide for us to place almost anything in there.

Taking something from nature, or impacting nature in any way (Bejan’s “getting the environment out of the way”) is what it means to be alive. This is the problem for a deep enough environmentalist believer: that any human activity is morally impermissible at all. For that position, no arguments or actions are sufficient: the precondition for moral reasoning is to be alive, but for life to be alive it must alter nature, and so this argument defeats itself.

Sensible environmentalism moderates this position and places harm with the moral agents that can feel it: humans. When one human or a group of humans do something that changes how some process of nature operates that in turn harms other humans, we have a conflict – a moral trade-off between one person’s benefit and another person’s costs. This is standard externality reasoning. As such, they have solutions -- most of them involving property rights "or something formally like it." If the benefit is sufficiently valuable, we can negotiate the damages; we can redistribute the costs and we can reimburse those negatively affected if we can tie the environmental damage to others’ actions.

The thing is, climate gases (primarily CO2) linger in the atmosphere for a very long time: the vast majority of these gases were emitted by people who are already dead and couldn’t have known the impact of their actions. Even if by waving a wand we could cease CO2 emissions tomorrow, grand changes to a number of climate indicators (sea level, glacier melts, temperature rise) are already baked into the system. Unless we figure out a cost-effective way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (which we are and should be doing), the only way to prevent harm to other humans is to ensure that they have the same revolutionary access to protective measures that I can enjoy in mid-winter.

How is it that I have those? Because growth, trade, economic well-being and yes, fossil fuels are the best protection we have from a nature that isn’t nice – so in the name of sustainability, let’s have more of those things.

Replacing Resources

This part of the ‘unsustainability’ definition (“causing damage to the environment by using more of something than can be replaced naturally”) is most odd, and feeds into the resource scare that returns every generation. Fossil fuels like oil are made by decaying plants and life over millions of years; gold and other precious metals arrived when this planet was bombarded with meteorites. There is in other words no way that humans can use any of these objects and not fall prey to the “unsustainable” label. That makes the label meaningless. 

Besides, we have ingenious mechanisms to make sure that we never run out of any of them.

In 1944, we had access to something like 51 billion barrels of oil. Whereas, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, at the end of 2019 we had a massive 1,733 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves – and that’s after having used quite a lot in the 75 years in between. The same holds for gold and other raw materials, of which we have loads. With better technology, and higher prices to justify their extraction if and when they run low, we can always find more. As long as oil or raw materials have a market price that makes digging for them worthwhile, we will never run out.

'How can that be?' asks everyone from a bemused David Attenborough to a confused Greta Thunberg. Simple answer: we’ll dig up the wells and deposits we already know exist – and then [as long as Jacinda lets us - Ed.] we’ll go search for more! Nobody thinks we’ve already found all there is.

Another aspect of this problem is the timescale involved. If I cut down a tree, the hours I spend doing that is, by all means, unsustainable; a similar tree would take decades to grow back, not hours. If I keep chopping trees faster than the rate at which they grow back, I can still keep doing that until they run out. The boundary is not the replacement rate as the definition implies – but zero (or the minimum amount required for it to grow back).

Example: Britain’s forested area today is almost as large as it was in 1086 – before kings “unsustainably” ravaged the land and the fiery pits of industry “unsustainably” consumed every natural resource in its path. Over a millennium-long time frame, then, forestry in Britain looks perfectly sustainable: Brits burned, cleared, and chopped their verdant forests for a while until they stopped, and then let the forests regrow. At any point during decades and centuries of heavy deforestation, one could have cried “unsustainable” since what they did could not have continued indefinitely. But continuing indefinitely was not what happened; we know that when societies get richer, they divest from chopping down trees and can afford to keep more of nature intact.

This historical illustration has great implications for today’s deforesters, where the Brazilian Amazon is the go-to example. Yes, the rate at which loggers – legal and illegal – cut that pristine forest is unsustainable, but so what? They won’t do it forever, and there is a mind-bogglingly large amount of it still standing. (If you worry about climate feedback loops and loss of biodiversity and other highly privileged things to worry about, however, you should begin by cutting loggers and farmers a cheque).

So what?

Cold, dark, and biting winters illustrate more than anything else that nature is not nice. We should thank our lucky stars – or more properly the profit-seeking innovators and capitalists around the world – for the wool gloves and fossil fuels and heated homes that protect us from the elements. Not to mention the productive economies that let us purchase them by fewer and fewer of our labor hours.

By standard definitions, what we are doing is “unsustainable,” but most human activities are. Over some time period every activity is unsustainable, but that’s not an indictment, practically or morally, of doing them. When the environment is harming humans (the default position of life), we should offer those humans the best available protection against that – with or without a worsening climate.

In winter, when our technological capacities and global distribution lines save us from freezing and starving to death, this should be more clear than ever.

* * * * 

* And no, I’m not talking about cold winters providing evidence against global warming, for they are not: Climate is the long-term sum of volatile short-term weather patterns, patterns that themselves can be extreme from one year to the next without indicating a particular climate direction

Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor on all things money, finance and financial history. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and has been a visiting scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and 2019.
    His work has been featured in the Financial Times, FT Alphaville, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Svenska Dagbladet, Zero Hedge, The Property Chronicle, and many other outlets. He is a regular contributor and co-founder of the Swedish liberty site Cospaia.se, and a frequent writer at CapX, NotesOnLiberty, and HumanProgress.org.

    This post first appeared on the American Institute for Economic Research blog. It has been lightly edited. [Hat tip Gus Van Horn, whose summary appears at the head of the post.]

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"Poverty is 'sustainable,' prosperity is progressive." #QotD

"Poverty is 'sustainable,' prosperity is progressive...
    "Sustainability" is not a good way to think about things. "'Sustainability' implies that our goal should be repetition: that we want to do something that can be repeated over and over and over.
    "But I think of life in terms of evolution or progress. We don't want to do the same thing over and over and over, we want to find better and better ways of doing things...
If people are free, and they are free to use energy and to use technology, they can have really good lives even in places with naturally inhospitable climates.
    "Is it sustainable [for a society] to live in poverty for 10,000 years? Well, yeah, that's sustainable, but it's not progressive. So I want to be progressive, not sustainable."
          ~ Alex Epstein, from his post 'Poverty is 'sustainable,' prosperity is progressive'
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Quote of the Day: On sports cars, subsidies and so-called sustainability [updated]

"The Tesla, in effect, is a beautifully engineered toy for the conspicuous-consumption market, accessible to millionaires but beyond the reach of the commercial market. Neither it nor most other electric vehicles have any place in a competitive, free-market environment. As an indication of how economically injurious these playthings are to society on the whole, the U.K.’s National Grid estimated that Britain would need to increase its peak generating capacity by 50 per cent to meet the government’s plans for electric vehicles, the equivalent of building 10 new nuclear plants.
      "The driver of the electric-vehicle industry — government fixation on global warming — has spurred even larger fake industries, led by wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells. Neither they nor the many other anti-carbon inventions such as carbon sequestration plants are in any business sense ‘real.' The global renewable-energy industry, having squandered trillions of dollars building economically unjustifiable infrastructure, represents the greatest loss of wealth in the history of commerce….”
    ~ Lawrence Solomon, on ‘How Elon Musk Became the Master of Fake Business'

UPDATE: Commenter Mark T. tells me “the ‘10 new nuclear power stations was an extreme worst case scenario, and the mid-range estimate and most likely estimate was nowhere near that.”

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Even a sunburnt country can’t make solar sustainable

If you’re in Melbourne and you want to read about global warming and how man is allegedly trashing the planet, then you need to read The Age -- which, like the BBC, never saw a scare story about global warming it didn’t like.

Readers of The Age yesterday morning however would have choked on their muesli when they turned to page 6.

If there’s any place in the world that could make a success of solar, you would think that place would be the vast sunburnt land of Australia. What the story revealed however is that “the cost of installing and maintaining more than 1 million household solar power systems has outweighed their benefit by more than $9 billion.”

That is not  a typo.

$9 billion!

Ouch.

And by the time generous federal and state government subsidies run out, households without solar will have subsidised those that have made the switch to the tune of $14 billion.

That is not an insignificant number.

The Grattan Institute report, to be published Monday, says government incentives and rebates that have encouraged the uptake of household solar have "created a policy mess that should never be repeated" …
    The report calculates that the capital cost of installing and maintaining household solar systems since 2009 has been $18 billion, while their benefit in terms of greenhouse gas abatement and reduced conventional electricity generation has been $9 billion….

In other words, it’s cost $18 billion to generate $9 billion.

    The report finds that households that have installed rooftop solar have still benefited greatly in financial terms "because the incentives offered by state and federal governments have made an uneconomic decision financially viable." …
    Households with solar have also benefited from the fixed structure of electricity tariffs the report says, which has resulted in homes that don't have solar power effectively subsidising network use by those that do.

As I’ve said many time, so-called “renewable” energy may be defined as energy that is not economically sustainable without subsidies, grants or tax breaks.  In other words, it absorbs more value than it produces. It’s a fantasy. As Alex Epstein says, “It’s not really renewable, and it’s not really energy.”

If a country with more solar radiation than almost any other can’t make solar sustainable, and no-one anywhere else has either,  then perhaps it’s time it made the discard pile.

[Pic and caption by Fairfax]

A ‘Minarchist’ Environmentalism

Guest post by Nick Sorrentino from the blog Against Crony Capitalism

This essay has little (directly) to do with crony capitalism, however I wanted to post it here for our readers’ consideration. People who read Against Crony Capitalism regularly know that we care about the environment. We love the ocean, and hiking, and clear skies on a moonless night. We are saddened by the clear cutting of rain forest, (usually due to a wilful lack of property rights) and by plastic floating in our seas; we care about “sustainability” generally.

However we despise the command and control methods which have traditionally been the weapons of choice for the environmentalist movement. This general disposition toward control has muddied the water on environmental issues. For many outside of the environmentalist movement the perception now is that “environmentalism” is not actually the end. A clean planet is not the end. Instead, the actual end is state domination and regulation of every single aspect of life which is . Indeed that “green” is the new “red.”

I think one can be “green” and pro-market. In fact being “green” and pro-market is not some quaint contrarian position, but the way forward.

State-owned companies in the REAL world

Via Dim Post:

Solid Energy is at a crisis point, with a Government bailout almost inevitable, mine closures possible and further job cuts likely in another restructure to try to salvage the debt-ridden coal mining company.
    The state-owned enterprise yesterday revealed it was in talks with its banks and the Government over its future after its debt rose to $389 million and a further “significant loss” would be in its half-year result.
    The company posted a $40 million loss last year…
     Solid Energy’s financial condition has deteriorated over the past two years, a slump it attributed to a 40 per cent fall in coal prices and low returns on investment attempts in areas such as biofuels.

So state-owned Solid Energy geared itself for debt which it used to pay massive salaries to its executives and boost dividends to the state. Now it’s collapsed and the taxpayer will bail it out.

Good old long-suffering taxpayer.

I guess that’s the advantage of having your companies state-owned: they bring the benefit of government monopolies and freedom from commercial imperatives to bear on steadily and progressively diminishing the value of the assets they oversee—transforming their capital over time from assets into dead losses.  And all the losses they make every year are socialised.

Good old long-suffering taxpayer, who loses twice over—once in the blundering mismanagement of assets ever-dwindling in value; twice in the losses for which he is always and every time on the hook.

Meanwhile, dullards scream for more companies like this, the lietmotif of all such entities being that they produce fewer resources than they consume.

And this is supposed to be an era that values “sustainability.”

[Hat tip, sort of, to Dim Post’s post]

Progressive energy vs “sustainable” energy

We hear a lot from the likes of Gareth Hughes—the energy spokesman opposed to energy—about so called “sustainable energy.” As if one particular form of energy could be used and generated perpetually, like the ancients’ dream of a perpetual motion machine.

This is about as sensible as a belief in alchemy, but is one of two primary reasons the likes of young Gareth is so violently opposed to oil. Alex Epstein from the Center for Industrial Progress points out the very concept of “sustainability”

is a relic of centuries when human beings repeated the same lifestyle over and over–instead of finding better and better ways to do things.

Epstein argues the non-concept should be replaced by the concept of progressive energy:

Progressive energy: The ideal source of energy is not some “sustainable”–i.e., endlessly repeatable–form, but the best, cheapest, ever-improving form human ingenuity can devise. As long as human beings are free, they will continue to develop new resources from previously useless raw materials (such as shale oil). An oil industry is ideal in the same way the iPhone is an ideal for so many. It may not be the best forever, but it is the best for now and we should be grateful to have it.

Can I get an amen?

Helen Clark: “Western Nations 'Don't Need More Cars, More TV, Whatever'”

Happy with her own lot, our former Aunty Helen thinks “we,” i.e., everyone else, could do with less.

Attending the eco-gathering in Rio in her new guise as United Nations Development Programme head, Aunty Helen told media

frankly human development in the West -- we don't need more cars, more TVs, more whatever. Our needs are by and large satisfied, although the recession has put a lot of strains on that.

It sure has. As have earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, bushfires, and bullshit from the likes of her. Tell someone in Christchurch East or elsewhere struggling to make ends meet or to find affordable housing—or to pay their eco-inflated power bills—that they don’t need more “whatever.”

Clark and her fellow would-be world leaders are meeting in Rio to devise new eco-ways by which to bankrupt us, both Clark and her boss Ban Ki-moon saying “moving toward a green economy can be a source of growth, much-needed jobs, investment and export.” Yeah right.

It’s easy to dismiss the eco-fest (sucking in squillions of tons of the earth’s resources) as “cheap New Age green mysticism,” especially when the you read the public “final draft document” for the conference, released not at the end of the conference when you’d expect it but just as the conference is starting (another absurdity in a conference full of them).

Read the final draft document of the Rio+20 conference. You will be astonished by its utter vacuity. It is 49 pages of pap, expressing nothing but platitudes and mawkish sentimentality, with a dose of health-spa green religion. The only thing to interrupt the droning is the occasional vigorous shake of the collection tin for the United Nations and its army of bureaucrats. And prime ministers are sitting there, nodding, clapping and signing this drivel?

Yes, they are.  And because they do think it’s just cheap vote-buying drivel, they’re signing up to much more as well. Which is not just drivel:

It is known that the Rio text includes several items dropped from the Durban text, including proposals for the UN to levy a 2% tax on all financial transactions worldwide, which would cripple the financial markets by imposing costs many times the profits on each transaction…[and other] strange proposals in the Durban text – which gave “Mother Earth” the right to sue Western nations in a new “International Climate Court”, and suggested that CO2 concentration should be halved (which would wipe out most plant and animal species on Earth).

So the figleaf* of “sustainable development” is still with us, even if “a good portion of the activists attending this time are not at all happy with the concept of sustainable development anymore,” and even if the claims for calamity—the desperate pleas for urgency repeated at this conference’s opening yesterday by Wellington teenager and green shill Brittany Tilford—all of which were so prominent at the first Rio Summit 20 years ago have all been proven moot by their non-arrival. Largely absent from the conference this time, for example, is widespread fear-mongering about global warming.

Perhaps because they’ve realised, like former warmist and green religionist James Lovelock, that these fears like all the other fears are just meaningless green drivel.

But dangerous drivel.

* * * * *

* "Sustainability" Chris Trotter reminds us is not just a meaningless feel-good buzzword, it has "revolutionary social and economic implications": It means, he says “that private enterprise must acknowledge the need for restraint: for regulations that are no longer light-fingered but heavy-handed. Sustainability," he concludes, " isn't just a fast track to re-election, it's a clarion call for revolution.”

Earth Day vs human ingenuity

Apparently some folk turned their lights off voluntarily on Saturday night in an attempt to emulate the plight of the dirt-poor North Koreans.

North Koreans endure the darkness due to their devotion to Marxism and to the death-worshipping dictatoriat  of the Kim family.  Which means, for most North Koreans, they have no direct choice about living in darkness.

But the fools turning their lights off on Saturday night were doing it by choice. They were doing it in the name of “sustainability.” Which as Craig Biddle points out, is fatuous nonsense.

The idea behind so-called sustainability is that if we humans consume too many raw materials (or “natural resources”) we will reach a point of unsustainability, where there is not enough left for us or for future generations and thus we or they will die. Accordingly, the argument goes, we must stop people from using so many “natural resources”; we must curb our predilection to consume; we must embrace a policy of “sustainability.” Hence the various drives: We must periodically “turn out the lights” or “use less gas” or in some other way make do with less.
    This notion, however, is nonsense, and we can see that it is if we identify the context that the environmentalists drop in order to get people to buy in to their nonsense.
    The notion that we need a policy of “sustainability” assumes that man is merely a consumer and that raw materials are “limited.” But neither of these assumptions is true.
    Man is not merely a consumer; he is also, and more fundamentally, a thinker and a producer who can take raw materials from nature—whether dirt, berries, petroleum, or atoms—and transform them into the requirements of his life—bricks, food, energy, and weapons. And when man is free to act on his judgment, he can continually discover and implement new ways to use raw materials for his benefit.
    Nor are raw materials “limited”—at least not in any meaningful sense of the term. Of course there is a finite amount of aluminium, petroleum, and the like in the earth. But Earth is nothing but raw materials—of which we’ve tapped only a minuscule fraction of a infinitesimal portion—and the rest of the universe is nothing but a whole lot more. Petroleum used to be just goo you didn’t want to get on your feet or crops; now man uses it to fuel industrial civilization, to make heart valves, to manufacture Kindles, and so on. Sand used to be good for nothing but sunbathing and sandcastles; now man uses it to make eyeglasses and fiber-optic cables. Uranium used to be just a toxic metal you’d want nothing to do with; now man uses it to create inexpensive electricity... And on and on. There is no telling what uses man will discover for other raw materials in the future.

The point to grasp here is that resources are not so much found as they are discovered; and not so much discovered as they are created—created by human ingenuity applied to human needs: identifying stuff within the infinity of the universe that can be made to meet that need and to be gainfully brought into a causal connection with that need.   So as long as we remain free to create and produce new resources, the only limit to “our” resources is our ingenuity.

As long as we do remain free to produce. Which is precisely what the Luddites wish to shut down.

What would 'Party X' do about the environment? - PART 3: Small Consents

IMAGINE A ‘PARTY X’ that was actually committed to opposing statism ,and to advocating for free enterprise. Imagine such a party had a cabinet committing to rolling back the state, and an environment minister brimming over with ideas to do that.
    Here, in several parts, are the sort of environmental policies such a party (and such a minister) could advocate. Seven simple policies using present-day political realities to roll back the state without introducing any new coercion along the way.

No serious environmental policy can avoid the elephant in the room that is the Resource Management Act (RMA).
Today, I present for your consideration a simple solution for removing RMA pain from the little guy, and a step towards making more affordable housing.

“When the productive have to ask permission from the unproductive in order to produce,” said Ayn Rand, “then you may know that your culture is doomed.”

That’s true.

Just ask anyone who has waited in line for a resource consent.

But although it’s practical to remove the RMA overnight, it’s not yet politically possible.  So here’s one way to get that particular ball rolling using political pressures that presently exist.

For all the high-profile RMA horror stories that hit the news, as former Federated Farmers president Charlie Pederson observed, "it's little, not large, that suffers most RMA pain." So let’s start there. Let’s start by freeing up the little guy so he doesn’t have to stand around cap in hand waiting for a pimply-faced graduate of some planning school to decide if your carport extension is “a sustainable use of the earth’s resources”—which is exactly what happens now.  And let’s start in the place that will have the most impact on making new New Zealand houses affordable: by removing the delays and uncertainties involved in smaller more affordable projects.

Here’s how it could be done.

FIRST, ENACT A CODIFICATION of basic common law principles such as the Coming to the Nuisance Doctrine and rights to light and air and the like.

Second, register on all land titles (as voluntary restrictive covenants) the basic “no bullshit” provisions of District Plans (stuff like height-to-boundary rules, density requirements and the like).

Next, and this will take a little more time, insist that councils set up a ‘Small Consents Tribunals’ for projects of a value less than $300,000 to consider issues presently covered by the RMA and by their District Plans. These Consents Tribunal should function in a similarly informal fashion as Small Claims Tribunals do now, with the power to make instant decisions.

This would mean that instead of talking to a planner about your carport, about which he couldn’t give a rat’s fat backside, you decide for yourself.  And, if your carport would violate one of the covenants, you then talk about it to your neighbour—with whom you and he would have plenty of negotiating room.  And once you (and your neighbour if necessary) have made your mind up, The Consents Tribunals would consider your small project on the basis of the codified common law principles, the voluntary restrictive covenants on your title, and the agreements (if necessary) you’ve negotiated with your neighbour(s). Simple really.

You should be able to reach agreement in an afternoon, and have your title amended the next day.

So instead of cluttering up the Environment Court with minor projects that only add to the already lengthy delays there, a ‘Party X’ keen to roll back the state could start by freeing up the huge number of small projects that are either in long delay, or are stillborn due to the expense and delay of the presently unpermissive environment.

Setting up such tribunals should be sensible, relatively simple, and politically achievable. And at a stroke you’ve made lower-cost housing easier and more attractive to build.

And at some point it should become clear to most land owners that these restrictive covenants on their titles are not vague prescriptions coercively mandated by statute, but instead are ‘voluntary’ in the sense that (as with basic common law principles) they are covenants in favour of neighbouring landowners–i.e., covenants that protect your neighbours’ legitimate rights.

Furthermore, these are things over which you don’t need to go cap in hand to a planner to change. Instead you may negotiate with your neighbours to add to them, amend them, or remove all or any of them--making any reciprocal deals you may imagine. (And you’re negotiating with people whose business it really is.)

Here’s how these examples could work out in practice.  If for example you like my tree, and I like my view over a particular corner of your section, then we can negotiate at our leisure and have these interests registered on our titles as a covenant and an easement respectively. That’s how the whole process starts. With simple voluntary agreements like this.

Over time we should slowly see emerging a network of reciprocal covenants built up between neighbouring properties reflecting the voluntary agreements over land that neighbours have freely negotiated—a network reflecting not a planners’ commands, but a network of legitimate rights, interests and values.  And in time, as more of these agreements are negotiated between neighbours, the former District Plan provisions(stuff like height-to-boundary rules, density requirements and the like) would become increasingly unimportant, and it will be these voluntary agreements on which the Small Consents Tribunals will be adjudicating.

NOW AT A STROKE these Small Consents Tribunals will make affordable housing more affordable, and encourage more interest in projects at this end of the market.

At a stroke too it should free up the Environment Court and council offices for more important projects than these small ones, and depoliticise many neighbourhood disputes. Everyone kicks a goal.

Who could possibly object?

As the success of these Small Consents Tribunals becomes more evident, as I'm confident they would be, and as their own sophistication in common law increases, then public pressure should build up to raise the financial value of projects accepted by the Tribunal first to $400k, then to $500k and beyond, and eventually there should be sufficient public pressure and political will built up to abolish the RMA altogether in favour of common law protections.

That’s the secret of good judo: using simple means to rid yourself of a large opponent.

[Tune in tomorrow for policy proposal number four: “Iwi then Kiwi - a unique kind of privatisation.”]

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THE SERIES SO FAR:
INTRO: 'What Would 'Party X' Do About the Environment?'
PART ONE: Un-taxes
PART TWO: 'A Nuisance and a BOR.'
THE SERIES IS BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE DEVELOPED HERE: 'Transitions to Freedom: Shall We Kill Them in Their Beds?'