This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 14, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

The good vibes associated with going green may be the only benefits.

Green fads can make us feel good, but often they're more signaling than environmental protection.

Todd Myers is author of the new book EcoFads. We spoke last week.

I worked very briefly in television news and as I tell people TV news is not there to

inform you it's there to make you feel informed yeah

and you say that in your book that public policy operates in a similar fashion and

I think that's clear to a lot of people

in some regards but you say particularly an environmental policy.

Right so the way that we make environmental policy these days is primarily about making politicians look good and making people feel good about themselves.

And when given a choice between policies that actually help the environment and those that make somebody feel like they're helping the environment.

People and politicians tend to choose the one that make them feel good.

And when it turns out that the policies that they've chosen don't actually help the environment,

rather than going back and saying,

okay, we need to change these because they don't help the environment.

What people will say is, well, it helps the environment if we just do more of it, because they don't want to give up all the social benefits that they've received by appearing green all that time and they don't want to admit that they were suckers.

And that's more important to them than actually helping the environment.

And in some cases there are subsidy implications to admitting defeat with regard to a certain

policy.

Yeah, no question. even Al Gore admitted that corn-based

ethanol was a bad idea and yet we've only finally now gotten rid of it but we

haven't gotten rid of ethanol subsidies altogether.

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