Each summer FREE organizes and hosts a series of small academic conferences in the Bozeman area. In addition to academics and professional environmentalists, we work with opinion leaders and decision makers throughout America. Our arena is public policy focused on environmental issues viewed broadly. We foster understanding and are non-partisan.

FREE has involved Article III federal judges in its programs since its founding in 1985, and has hosted judges’ conferences since 1992. We are pleased to have had well over 500 federal judge visits to our various programs. In 2007, at the suggestion of federal judges, we started including state supreme court justices. We also initiated a program for religious leaders in 2007.

Given their influence and intelligence, judges are obvious candidates for FREE’s programs. Academics and environmental professionals qualify on substantive grounds.

An observation by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan indicates why environmental policy programs are important for religious leaders. Moynihan explained that the central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

While judges operate in the political arena, determining what actions are permitted and what are proscribed, ministers and other religious leaders guide behavior and influence culture. And culture in turn affects politics and law in complex, profound ways.

Why is it important for religious leaders concerned with environmental issues to understand the fundamentals of economics and policy analysis? Aren’t the right answers obvious and ethically compelling?

Alas they are neither—and often the best answers are counter-intuitive. Environmental issues are complex and carry heavy emotional baggage, ingredients for error and acrimony. Economics offers analytic leverage to unpack these policy problems. Economics helps us identify the benefits and liabilities of policies; in biblical terms, to separate the sheep from the goats.

Take recycling—isn’t it always good to recycle? Not necessarily. It is categorically good only if considered a worthy act of contrition for excessive consumption. Simple policy analysis explains why.

Recycling avoids or postpones the problem of disposal in landfills. While recycling may provide unguent for the soul, from a material perspective it may be neutral or even environmentally costly. Compare glass, aluminum, and plastic.

It takes labor, capital, and energy to collect, ship, and reprocess glass, plastic, and aluminum. The activities necessary for recycling consume valuable resources and preclude opportunities to do other meaningful things. Considering these factors, how can we find guidelines for recycling?

Consider prices. Prices offer incomplete but condensed information on the value of recycled materials. Scrap glass has no buyers unless made available by the ton. In contrast, scrap aluminum fetches from forty cents to over a dollar per pound and buyers court suppliers. The high price reflects the scrap’s contribution to the production of new products. There are wide differences among plastics depending on chemical composition, but most have a zero, or negative, value in the chain of material supply.

What about alternative energy? Here the economics of public choice is especially useful. This perspective cautions us to be alert to stationary bandits, those who opportunistically exploit crises. They employ political guile and campaign bribes, rigging the game to benefit special interests.

Consider corn ethanol. In a hungry world, under what circumstances does it make sense to convert food into fuel, especially when the net energy gain is zero or negative and the environmental benefits trivial or worse?

The explanation involves not BTUs but rather political IOUs. In 2005, Congress mandated that 7.5 billion gallons of corn ethanol be mixed into our gasoline by 2012, 36 billion gallons by 2022.

Ethanol received 76 percent of all federal renewable energy tax credits in 2007 and subsidies rise each year. It is projected to cost taxpayers more than $5 billion in 2010. This is more than the U.S. Department of Agriculture contributes to soil protection projects and wildlife habitat combined. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), Friends of Earth, FREE, and all other conservative and libertarian groups oppose ethanol requirements.

FREE works where ethics, ecology, entrepreneurship, and economics intersect—and we help explore other timely and fascinating topics including terrorism, nanotechnology, and social change. Leading FREE and building support for its work is an exciting challenge.