Hi again Taikun. I'm not too worried at all about oil running out. Apart from there being alternatives, so it's not really as though the world will run out of vehicle propellant, it wouldn't especially upset me if everyone had to make do without vehicles.
There are feet, bicycles, buses, taxis, cyberphones, delivery trucks, trains and don't forget that cute little Segway device.
People don't need to live in Escondido and roar in a dirty great SUV down a dirty great freeway for an hour to San Diego to work, then go back again. They could move next door to work and walk across to the office.
That won't happen because there are many ways to fuel a vehicle at $50 a barrel oil equivalent prices.
I wouldn't say the system "misallocates the world's resources" because that idea supposes that there is a proper allocation. I'm inclined to the view that vast reservoirs of oil shouldn't really belong to those who happen to find themselves sitting on top of them and similarly, ownership of ocean resources shouldn't necessarily be restricted to those countries with a coast-line. But that's the geopolitical way of the world.
The way allocation of resources has been handled for the past billion years is that the toughest monkey gets the crop. That's still how it goes. The Saudis have the oil and the Bin Ladens would like to have it. Osama will get it if he can. Saddam had it for a while. Now Putin has got it instead of the Czar. King George II has the Alamo and the Mexicans are trying to get it back [and might yet succeed]. fredoneverything.net
The Atlantic conveyer isn't going to conk out. It survived the end of the big melt 10,000 years ago and the mini ice-age.
Chicken flu converted to a catastrophic virus is a big worry. That IS something to worry about and in a big way. Rising tides and terrorists are trivial compared with that.
Photovoltaics are almost competitive for mainstream power at $50 a barrel and oil isn't far from that, so unless you are planning a short life-time, you might see the Sahara [or at least Death Valley] covered sooner than you think.
What's wrong with sifting through the plant world to find pharmaceuticals? Plants have been in a life and death struggle with animals, insects and bugs for a billion years and they have produced a huge range of toxins and things which might help us out of a jam.
Penicillin for example kills bugs but not us, thanks to that war-zone where that toxin was developed to protect the fungi from attack by bugs.
The consumer is quite right not to worry about the effect of the Prius on their grandchildren. If the grandchildren want a car, they can get a job and buy one. A Prius is a waste of the world's resources - they cost a fortune for negligible benefit compared with alternatives, and that's my definition of a waste of resources.
If the Prius is good, it would be cheaper than alternatives.
It would be better for a do-gooder to buy two new cheap petrol-powered vehicles, give one to somebody driving a smokey old heap which could go to the scrap yard, and that would reduce total emissions and fuel consumption and make more people happy too.
Digging for gold seems a misallocation of resources to me too, but I play golf and so I don't want to criticize other people's peculiar wasteful and misallocative efforts. Jay likes to ogle gold. Who am I to tell him it's better to chase golf balls than dig in gold mines?
You say humans are not making individual and collective good choices, but who says your, or my, ideas on re-allocation are the right ones? I think it's more sensible to leave people to each decide for themselves how they allocate their resources and governments to protect the common grounds against pollution, or charge money to do so.
Our resources are effectively infinite. Replacements are easy. The replacements have a price and the price isn't very high. Oil has nearly priced itself off the markets.
I drive my car without insurance because it's cheaper than paying for the insurer's staff, government taxes, bad drivers, rip-off claims, wastefulness, other's expensive cars. It seems silly to bet with somebody that I'll crash my car and they bet that I won't, with me paying them to take the bet. Of course they charge such an idiot a lot of money. I find it better to drive well and not have accidents than to pay for cleaning up the mess. I've been driving now for 40 years, since the day I turned 15, so I have saved a LOT of money. I can afford to have a multiple car crash and still be ahead of the game.
My invested insurance premiums over the decades have returned me a fortune.
Mqurice |
