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the market will solve the problem the way it already solves pollution problems (when it is permitted to).
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All major pollution indices were on their way down after WWII prior to the passage of any major anti-pollution legislation or regulation.
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Do you have proof of this?
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It was an article I read 5 or 6 years ago. I spent about a half hour googling and can't find data either way. I can't spend any more time on it, so I'll concede the point. My argument stands without it.
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Why? In a nutshell, because consumers are all powerful under capitalism, and they don't like pollution. If consumers don't like CO2 emissions or the possibility of anthropogenic global warming, they will drive the market to ever cleaner technologies.
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If that is the case, why isn't this happening now?
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It is.
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A large portion of the population would like and would pay for pollution free cars, if they were a viable alternative. The money to be made here is astronomical. Yet, the market has been very slow to solve the problem. Neither the Japanese or the Germans or the Americans have produced large quantities of pollution free cars that people want to buy. Are you going to argue that's the government's fault?
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Are you trying to argue that cars are not actually getting cleaner every year? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] The reason that most people have not adopted "extremely green" cars is precisely because they are
not viable alternatives yet. You can't wave a magic wand and make technologies develop overnight.
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The problem has always been that a) governments are the largest set of polluters
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Do you have proof of this assertion?
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FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POLLUTION
Congressional Record Online
Hon Paul Ryan of Wisconsin in the House of Representatives
Saturday, October 28, 2000
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Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit for the Record an article written by former Senator Robert W. Kasten, Jr. The Honorable Bob Kasten served in both the House of Representatives (1975-81) and the Senate (1981-93).
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Mr. Kasten writes to remind us of the fact that the Federal Government is the largest polluter in the United States. He brings to our attention anecdotes from the states, which illustrate the states' difficulties enforcing local environmental laws on the federal government. He writes about the federal government's lack of accountability in cleaning up its own toxic waste sites and its attempts to push cleanup responsibility and costs to local levels of government and to private landowners.
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According to a Boston Globe article last year, ''federal agencies have contaminated more than 60,000 sites across the country and the cost of cleaning up the worst sites is officially expected to approach $300 billion, nearly five times the price of similar destruction caused by private companies.'' In contrast, private Superfund site clean up is estimated at a fraction of the federal government at $57 billion. The article goes on to say that the EPA Inspector General has found that, federal agencies are increasingly violating the law, with 27 percent of all government facilities out of compliance in 1996, the latest year figures available, compared to 10 percent in 1992.
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Department of Energy and Department of Defense environmental clean up budgets are routinely last priorities in the appropriations processes. For example, this year I worked to cut construction funding in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill for the doe's National Ignition Facility (NIF)--a bottomless money pit that the GAO has determined to be mired in waste and technological difficulties—and suggested that this funding be transferred to the doe's waste management account, where I believe the money could be put to better use.
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The final appropriations bill increased the Defense Environmental Restoration and Waste Management fund by $490 million dollars. In comparison, the NIF project, which is 100 percent over budget and 6 years behind schedule, was appropriated $130 million for FY 2001. The NIF boondoggle was granted nearly one-third of the total increase of the environmental clean up budget. Clearly the federal government has other agendas than the environment.
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We need to look more closely at Federal Government's own environmental problems. The State and Federal Government can work together to modernize environmental laws, streamline the bureaucratic process, and focus less on punishment and more on figuring out the best way to reach high environmental standards and compliance.
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Senator Kasten's article
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Also, it will be the accumulated future capital that will be created under the free market that will allow the technologies that could actually *do* something about "the problem" anyway. Why in the world would you want to reduce it?
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So your argument is that technological innovation will increase greatly without a government, enough to solve our environmental problems. Again, what do you base this on? Do you have historical evidence of this?
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Are you levelling me?
The history of capitalism is the history of technological development to solve problems.