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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (20024)	2/3/2008 2:50:36 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 36917

Worrying about this global warming stuff is hurting us. I'm curious why you say that. AFAIK, pretty much any activity that captures the human imagination and causes us to go off and study science and work on better technology, ends up boosting our economies. In fact, I'd say it is true of most endeavors, even if they don't involve significant advances in both science and technology, but it is better if they do. Economic activity is largely driven by people getting off their butts and doing something, the motivation for getting them off their butts being rather secondary to the actual economic impact that their efforts have, and in many cases the actual efforts they are engaged in are also tangential to the resulting economic improvement. For example, I'm pretty sure that the some total of Religion's impact on the planet's human economy is significant, but one could argue that it has no better basis than Astrology. One might say the same about Sports I suppose. If you came from a country that had no sports, it would be interesting to try and convince you of the economic utility of dressing people up in uniforms, having them engage in convoluted exercises usually with balls, all while millions of other people watched the proceedings. Surely such a practice is an enormously counterproductive economic effect you would say. Yet sports has a pretty long economic tail in our society. Even activity, which has a somewhat or largely destructive bent, such as military/weapons, is most likely a net positive economically. I'm quite happy to admit that there is most likely efficiency differences between the above. I suspect that building schools and office parks, etc has net higher efficiency in the economy then building bombs, churches and sports stadiums, but I think they are all net positive. Dropping bombs most likely gets you into net negative territory, but that may or may not be the case depending on the overall aspects of the associated war. So I'm pretty sure that the economic impact of efforts dealing with environmental issues is also net positive. Seems to be a somewhat universal result of increased human activity. With the caveat that some human activity is not good for other humans, or for other life, or sometimes even for oneself. For example real estate flipping, which surely got lots of people off their butts, has kind of had some problems. One needs to be careful about excess.