To put it another way:
The larger the government, the more strain it puts on our resources, meaning a large government is bad for the environment.
There are several reasons why I say this.
Construction and the Environment
First of all, when you expand and make larger the size of government, it requires buildings and roads and other infrastructure. Think about all the energy that’s put into creating all that.
Think about the massive amounts of concrete needed for all those construction projects. The gravel needed to make that concrete had to be dug out of the ground from what usually is an open gravel pit. The calcium and other ingredients used to make the cement, usually Portland Cement, for binding the aggregate materials together in concrete, usually comes from extracting limestone out of the ground, in other open pits. If you’re an environmentalist who doesn’t like the unsightly open pits, but thinks they are scars on the landscape, then you shouldn’t want a big government because, when you do, you’re encouraging the creation of more of those open pits. And then there’s the fact that cement manufacturing is energy-intensive and emissions-intensive, both of which can arguably be bad for the environment.
Think about the steel that goes into these construction projects. That means extracting more iron ore, and other metals that are part of that alloy, which leave a scar on the landscape. The process of making steel is very energy-intensive, and can create pollution. All of this is bad for the environment, right?
Then there is all the machinery that needs to be made, such as trucks and trailers, to haul all of these materials to the construction sites, which means were using more of our limited resources to make this equipment. And there’s the massive amounts of fuel needed to run this equipment needed to haul these materials and power the construction equipment.
The Bureaucrats
After construction is finished and the buildings and infrastructure are complete, then bureaucrats are hired to work in those new departments of government just created. All of those people have to get to and from work, and usually do it by car – all those cars require fuel, which causes pollution, to operate and get their driver to and from work.
All of those workers require office equipment, including desks and chairs, which requires wood, cut down from forests, foam padding and cushions for the chairs, which, from my understanding, isn’t good for the environment, and plastic and metal parts to make those things complete, all of which uses our resources.
Then there’s environmental controls. This means heating those government buildings in the cold winter months, and cooling them during the hot summer months, which takes tremendous amounts of energy. And the larger the building, the more energy needed for environmental controls. And the more buildings there are, the more energy needed.
Government Inefficiency and the Environment
There’s also another element to all this, that has everything to do with the environment and use of our resources, that many of you reading this didn’t consider, and that element has to do with how government bureaucracies work, and get money allocated to them by the government. You see, they can’t be efficient with their resources, and minimize resource usage, the way private, for-profit businesses would who are trying to reduce costs to maximize their profits. If they were efficient with their resources, government would “reward” them by allocating less money to them, and they don’t want that – they want more money allocated to them to operate, so they can grow bigger.
And how do they do that? Government does it by artificially making themselves more inefficient. The idea is that if the government agency appears like it doesn’t have enough money to properly operate and do the job it’s supposed to be doing, it can get the government budget office to allocate more money to it. In other words, in government bureaucracies, there is a strong incentive to be wasteful with their resources rather than efficient with their resources, which is bad for the environment.
This process of making the bureaucracy more inefficient usually means, among other things, creating new procedures and rules to make doing things more difficult and complex. That means more paper needed, in fact, massive amounts of paper needed, to print all those procedure manuals for those ever-increasing number of government bureaucrats, all those government forms that keep increasing at an exponential rate, all those legal manuals needed by lawyers and judges all over the country to make sure they are applying all the rules and regulations properly within the law, and all those regulatory manuals for businesses and business people all over the country to make sure they are staying within the bounds of the ever-more-complex laws and regulations of the land. Whole forests have to be downed to have the paper to print all of this. And all of the material covered in these printings goes obsolete very quickly as the regulations and procedural rules change, evolve, and expand, almost on a yearly basis – which means downing ever-larger forests every year to cover the government’s paper needs.
Even if everything went paperless and electronic, it would still require ever-larger server farms to store all this information, which requires ever-larger amounts of energy to run them. (And more electronic equipment usually means more rare-earth metals and minerals are needed that seem, many times, to be extracted from places in Africa that are controlled by gangs and warlords, who wreak havoc and enslave local populations, are environmentally destructive, cause bloody and violent conflicts, and leave millions of people living in fear who try to escape such a situation – at my church in Indiana are some refugees from the Congo that escaped those terrible conditions. So, there’s also that to think about.)
Making the government more inefficient doesn’t just take a toll on our forests, it means hiring more and more and more bureaucrats to do the same job that less bureaucrats did before deliberately making things more inefficient and hiring all those new people. And the ever-increasing number of bureaucrats means more people driving to and from work, more office space needs to be constructed, and more energy needed for environmental controls, all of which puts more and more strain on our resources and environment.
If you believe that we need to protect the environment, and combat climate change, and you’re pushing for an ever-larger government, then you’re working against yourself. But that’s not all, folks. There’s yet another way that a larger government negatively effects the environment.
Effect on the Private Sector
As government expands more and more, it requires ever-higher taxes to pay for it, and these ever-higher taxes means that a person’s income doesn’t go as far as it used to, because more and more of it gets deducted to pay for these taxes to pay for bigger government. The bigger government and higher taxes to pay for it put more burden on the economy, and the people within that economy that are supporting that ever-increasing burden.
This means that people have to work longer, or find a second job, side work, or some side hustle, to be able to pay their bills, etc. All of this means more energy is used, just to make ends meet, which means even more of an impact on the environment.
In Summary
So, what’s the lesson here?
Put all of these things together, and it means that the larger the government is, the more strain on our resources it makes, the more energy is used, and the more it contributes to global warming and climate change.
It’s interesting to note that the same people on the political left, such as the democratic socialists, who want us, as a nation, to go all-out, to tackle climate change and fix the environment, partly by changing the label so that it’s now called a “climate emergency,” are also the same people who want to do so by massively increasing the size of government, and the amount of control that the government has over our lives, a process that can correctly be described as enslavement. And by massively increasing the size of government, as if it’s not way too big already, we’re only going to do even more harm to the environment, and bring about climate change even faster. They seem to not know this, because if they did they would soon realize that they’re really working against themselves.
