The case for recycling

[Borodog]

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When people here say that landfilling is "less efficient" than recycling, what they really mean is cheaper. It doesn't account for all of the negative environmental externalities that people here like to pretend don't exist.

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Elaborate. Exactly what "negative environmental landfilling externalities" are you talking about?

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Take plastic recycling. People complaining about "peak oil" aren't exactly wrong: oil is likely to become more scarce over time,

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The price of oil, which is a direct measure of it's real scarcity, has been (more or less) falling in real terms for 160 years. There is nothing on the horizon that remotely looks like it will change this trend.

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which will impact our current auto driven economy. It would be nice to think ahead to that day and try to cut our petroleum consumption.

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The price system does this automatically. If entrepreneurs believe that prices will increase dramatically in the future, they will buy up supplies now, bidding up the current price and forcing conservation by consumers, smoothing out prices in time, extending the availability of supply into the future, and incentivizing substitution and the development of alternatives. All of this information is *already* built into the current price.

There is a current artificial inflation in the price of oil that will probably collapse within the next few years just like prior collapses, driven by peak-oil type hysteria and the huge market uncertainty created by the US's policy of perpetual Middle Eastern war. Government might be able to prevent this collapse in the price of oil, by things like "excess profit" taxes, artificially limiting supplies, etc. This would be gigantically wasteful, of course. Literally wasteful of tremendous amounts of real, physical resources. How this is supposed to be in the name of "conservation" is never quite made clear.