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

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (29203)	6/13/2010 6:32:25 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

But you think it is when Al Gore and the other beneficiaries of the Global Warming cash flow, status, and women, talk it up: <Poly sci isn't science. > In this context, political science is science used for political gain, not the so-called 'science' of political processes. It seems we agree on something. Amazing. Mqurice

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (29203)	6/16/2010 2:30:13 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 36917

First, they point to the impossibility of perpetual economic growth. Since the economy is a subset of the environment, it cannot grow larger than that environment. That doesn't make a lot of sense. The economy and the environment do not have sizes that can be reasonably compared to each other. Also if your talking about indefinite seemingly perpetual growth (actually perpetual growth is apparently impossible), your talking about an environment more along the lines of the galaxy than the Earth. Even limited to the Earth the amount of available energy and materials from all possible sources, is vast compared to our current use. We simply cannot process more material than is contained in the entire biosphere. Sure we can. Unless you define the biosphere as equal to the universe. Even if you define it as just the Earth, we tap a tiny, even insignificant amount of the resources potentially available on Earth. Second, efficiency in resource use has only led to greater consumption, a counterintuitive outcome known as the Jevons Paradox. That's true, but not very relevant in the context of discovering limits to growth based on limited resources. Since if we actually approach such limits increased efficency doesn't increase consumption, and under any circumstances increased efficiency results in more production per unit of resources used. Third, substitution requires time. Because industrial society is entirely dependent on the continuous functioning of its machine infrastructure, disruption resulting from the failure to find a substitute for a critical input such as, say, fossil fuels, in a timely fashion risks the collapse of that system. Not really. Rundowns and higher prices of important resources can cause local economic problems or even world wide recessions, but even the Great Depression, or something worse than it, can't really be considered a collapse of the system when we are looking at things at this scale. The universe is moving inexorable toward a state of higher entropy. True, and in a mindboggingly high number of years the universe may in many ways run down (stars burn out, energy and matter spread across an every larger universe with lower density and less and less extractable energy, local density concentrations becoming black holes, then even the black holes evaporating, protons decaying, etc), but when your talking about events happening billions, or far more than billions of years in the future, I wouldn't worry about them all that much. Once fossil fuels are transformed from low entropy states (coal, oil, natural gas) to a high entropy state (carbon dioxide and heat), they cannot be reused. But other resources and methods can be substituted once either fossil fuel depletion, or advances in other methods, results in a situation where they make economic sense. Some have therefore referred to neoclassical economics as "faith-based" since it assumes that energy prices will behave in ways that encourage a smooth transition. If your going to apply "faith-based" that broadly, then any other response or way of looking at the situation is likely to be similarly faith based. Faith that the government will make better decisions than the market, would be a faith with less historical or other forms of backing. Even belief that "its not going to work and we are going to have a massively horrible and very durable to permanent economic collapse", would be "faith based", just a rather negative form of faith.