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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (347954)	8/22/2007 12:41:28 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574489

The return would be the beneficial parts of the investment I mentioned, to the extent its mere replacement (recognizing additional lifetime for a newer investment as an additional benefit and not just replacement) it isn't real economic growth. Also while there will be real benefits beyond mere replacement you can't just take those and consider 100% of it to be a benefit of the new situation. If the money wasn't invested in new energy sources it would have been invested somewhere else and that also would likely have had a positive rate of return. Or to look at it another way, take the real return, adjust for the lost value of previous infrastructure that would otherwise have still been valuable, than compare the rate of returns in other areas. Its pretty hard to get a positive net economic result from that. Of course the result can still be positive when you adjust for the potential benefits of avoiding or reducing global warming (assuming the changes are necessary and sufficient to do that, and assuming that there is a net benefit, mild warming at a slower rate than currently predicted could actually be more of a benefit than a cost). But such benefits don't represent decreasing the cost of the response to global warming, they are the benefits that you are paying the costs to get. To the extent that the benefits exceed the costs (including costs of lost investments in other areas) the effort makes sense (at least if there wasn't a better easier way to get the desired benefits or something like them, such as the giant lens in space, or iron seeding the oceans or other actions other than CO2 reduction). If you count them both as a reduction in cost and as a benefit your double counting the positives, while at most single counting the negatives of the effort.