Global Warming

[Borodog]

Do you understand what I mean by "crippling the world economically"? I mean coercively reducing world productivity drasticaly, increasing world poverty by a commensurate amount.

Freedom never lowers productivity.

Luckily the strength of capitalism is not just in morality. It also produces by far the best results economically.

[HLMencken]

[ QUOTE ]
Do you understand what I mean by "crippling the world economically"? I mean coercively reducing world productivity drasticaly, increasing world poverty by a commensurate amount.

Freedom never lowers productivity.

Luckily the strength of capitalism is not just in morality. It also produces by far the best results economically.

[/ QUOTE ]

Then argue in terms of freedom. What's good for the economy is just incidental. "Because it would hurt the economy" should never be the means that a libertarian or ACer should advocate policy. F--k the economy, I'd rather have no obtrusive government and grow a garden, ride a bike, and live a simple, free life.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Do you understand what I mean by "crippling the world economically"? I mean coercively reducing world productivity drasticaly, increasing world poverty by a commensurate amount.

Freedom never lowers productivity.

Luckily the strength of capitalism is not just in morality. It also produces by far the best results economically.

[/ QUOTE ]

Then argue in terms of freedom. What's good for the economy is just incidental. "Because it would hurt the economy" should never be the means that a libertarian or ACer should advocate policy. F--k the economy, I'd rather have no obtrusive government and grow a garden, ride a bike, and live a simple, free life.

[/ QUOTE ]

A) Chill out.

B) I didn't say "because it would hurt the economy". I said because it would cripple the world economically, which if I didn't make already clear, would kill hundreds of millions of people. More capitalism, i.e. more freedom, raises people out of poverty, whereas less capitalism, i.e. less freedom, does the opposite. That might not be important to you, but it is to me. And quite frankly, pie-in-the-sky morality arguments are unconvincing to those who don't understand economics. How can you convince someone by talking about freedom when they believe freedom leads to "exploitation"? What's good for the economy is not incidental. Freedom is good for the economy, and I personally think that's the best thing it has going for it.

[timotheeeee]

[ QUOTE ]
I was a technical analyst and strategic planner for the EPA's National Environmental Supercomputing Center (NESC) and Office of Research and Development (ORD).

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Jesus. F*cking. H. Christ.

Can you help me get a decent job?

By the way, I fill snack trays and printers all day.

[Borodog]

Heh. I'm in real estate now. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[HLMencken]

[ QUOTE ]
What's good for the economy is not incidental. Freedom is good for the economy, and I personally think that's the best thing it has going for it.

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I think the best thing going for freedom is freedom, the economic benefits are secondary. If communism produced more wealth, I would still be vehemently opposed to it.

Incidentally, if you want to argue that reducing greenhouses gases will lead directly to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, I suggest that *you* chill out.

[Borodog]

The only way of cutting world greenhouse emissions that does not rely on technologies that don't exist yet is to cut productivity. Cutting productivity lowers standards of living. Lowering standards of living in much of the world means lowering it below subsistence level. That means people die, and lots of them. A 2% decrease in the planet's population is 120 million people dead.

Government environmental interventions have already killed of order a hundred million people in the DDT/malaria case alone.

Poverty kills. Stossel has an excellent point in his book where he shows how many days are taken off the average American life by various risks. So many days for car accidents, so many months for alcoholism, 4 years or something for smoking. The largest, by far and not even close, was being poor. Which took a whopping decade off the average poor American's life. Can you imagine how many decades are lost annually to poverty in the third world where there is no capitalism to raise the standard of living?

[timotheeeee]

[ QUOTE ]
I was a technical analyst and strategic planner for the EPA's National Environmental Supercomputing Center (NESC) and Office of Research and Development (ORD).

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Heh. I'm in real estate now. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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Let me see if I've got this right. Being a technical analyst and strategic planner for just about anything other than a game of tic-tac-toe is pretty impressive, and I don't even know what the hell a National Environment Supercomputing Center is, but it sounds like some magical station located directly underneath rainbows that shower gold coins onto grandmothers with epilepsy, which is also impressive. Your knowledge of economics is greater than my knowledge of myself. And now you're in real estate.

Teach me.

[HLMencken]

[ QUOTE ]
The only way of cutting world greenhouse emissions that does not rely on technologies that don't exist yet is to cut productivity. Cutting productivity lowers standards of living. Lowering standards of living in much of the world means lowering it below subsistence level. That means people die, and lots of them. A 2% decrease in the planet's population is 120 million people dead.

[/ QUOTE ]

I call b.s.

Let's use one atmospheric pollutant--carbon monoxide--as a representative case.

Based on EPA data, total national emissions (total, not per capita) of carbon monoxide decreased by 31% from 1970 to 1998. [Report (big file, see Fig. 3-1)]. You know what? The world economy didn't collapse over this time, in fact it has boomed--and hundreds of millions haven't died either, in fact, standard of living has improved on the whole.

Your doomsday scenarios regarding GHG control are completely overblown.

[Borodog]

Dude. So many fallacies. The level of emissions going down does not cause economic collapse. Please read carefully. Carbon monoxide is not carbon dioxide. People are talking about drastically cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The technologies to do this economically do not exist. So the only way to do it is to coercively cut productivity. Period.

Furthermore, what caused the drop in carbon monoxide emissions? How do you know how many more or less people would or would not have died in those 30 years under different circumstances? It's counterfactual, and I seriously doubt you've done the research to be able to say anything meaningful about it. I daresay that if capitalism weren't shackled and the division of labor interrupted for most of the last century, world standard of living would be far higher right now, and hundreds of millions of people would not have died.