Drop the Napkins, Punk!

“You have to be kidding me,” a student wrote in an e-mail to Throptalk, Winthrop House’s list. The Resource Efficiency Program, an offshoot of the Office for Sustainability, had announced it was removing all but one napkin dispenser from each table in the dining hall to reduce waste. In response, some students saw red: “If I need a napkin, I’m going to use one. Now, I’m going to have to have three people touch it with their dirty hands before it gets to me,” the e-mailer griped.

Others saw green: “If you are so messy and so concerned about other people touching your napkins, stockpile a few before you sit down to eat your meal and stop whining,” another e-mailer jibed. When students objected that they had not been consulted before the decision, a third replied, “Decisions that benefit everyone don’t need to be put up to ridiculous and useless debate.”

That’s debatable. Environmentalism inconveniences people more than necessary, and this flap over napkins is the latest example.

Let’s be fair to the REP. OFS plans to limit dispensers in all dining halls eventually; Winthrop merely jumped ahead. We also have an administration that stops hot breakfast to balance budgets. It will do anything for a buck—except fire a dean. Two years ago, REP was encouraged to track temperatures in rooms for the manager of building systems so he could see which were too warm and then lower their heat—and save money. When students shivered, REP got the blame. The administration may again be using REP as a front man for its cuts.

And REP does much good. For instance, it offers students signs for their drop boxes so they can opt out of receiving flyers. It also collects lost dishware so Harvard University Dining Services does not have to buy new supplies. REP is right that waste should be a common enemy.

Unfortunately, environmentalists’ definition of “waste” is all-inclusive. If you use less of something after it becomes less convenient, you must have been using too much of it before. One example is Kirkland House, which has only a few dispensers in the entire dining hall and whose students, miraculously, use fewer napkins. The administration calls this phenomenon a decrease in waste. But students use fewer napkins because fewer napkins are available; we don’t know for certain that the change eliminated superfluous napkins.

True, the inconvenience of fewer dispensers is small, but so is the environmental impact. And this decision promotes an attitude that treats needless burdens as essential elements of conservation: trayless dining, reusable mugs, “efficient” showerheads that just spray less water.

Yes, we’re not significantly worse off for having them, but are we really better off?

The evidence suggests not. “Global warming caused by human beings is real but overblown because it has been over-forecast by our computer models,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finds that the United Nations’s computer models overestimated warming roughly by a factor of three. “The warming of the twenty-first century is going to be modest and frankly there’s really not much that’s going to be done about it,” Michaels said.

But say you accept environmentalists’ position. How would their policies affect our standard of living? The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which the House of Representatives passed in June, requires Americans to lower their carbon dioxide emissions by 83 percent below 2005 levels in 40 years. “That means when you are 61, you will be allowed the average per capita emissions of an American in 1867,” Michaels said. He added that if every country under the Kyoto treaty adopted similar measures, we would prevent just seven percent of the warming that the UN predicts will occur.

Global warming is less dire than some scientists predict, and people have less of an effect on it than they think. Must we eat without trays to avoid impeding doom? No. Motel 6 can still leave the lights on for you. And you can take that extra napkin.

Besides, if students were serious about combating global warming, they would have elected Roger G. Waite ’10 president of the Undergraduate Council last year. Waite promised to decrease our carbon footprint by using green technology—specifically, oxen. His platform sounded similar to those “Go Green” tips on the back of party registration forms.

If only he had won.

Brian J. Bolduc ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.