Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
- Joined
- October 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
Owning as many things as possible is also a way of consuming, if I buy 100 pair of wrist watches I do not need, it needs material and power to produce them, and probably I would just throw them away later, not all parts could be recycled and even the parts that could be recycled would cost power and resources to recycle them. Private persons who own a lot, will use what they own to consume in different ways, and if a private person do not consume, the wheels of the capitalism system comes to a stop as we have seen??? so society is now trying to make people to start spending again to get the wheels spinning ? Yes we could think as you are, we have to consume now so the system can start spinning and we could by research make it possible to keep consuming without our earth going under. Did I get your right on that??? that is how I understood your writing.
Kinda, sorta, but not really. What we need to do is start *producing* again -- i.e., working. Unless, of course, we can find some way to deal with mass unemployment in a way that everybody's happy, including the unemployed and those who provide the resources they use to stay alive and happy, which IMO is a bit of a tall order. Thing is, to produce, we need to consume. Which brings us back to the big question -- consume *what,* exactly. Nobody says that we have to consume wristwatches, four-wheel-drives, tanks, big-screen TV's, or gasoline. We could just as well consume massages, haircuts, computer games, tailormade clothes, or ecologically, locally grown fresh produce. But either way, we have to produce and consume.
The problem is that shifting to an ecologically sustainable mode of consumption and production takes time and resources. If the economy is in a slump, we're short on resources. So the first thing we need to do is get the economy out of the slump. That means temporarily restarting our consumption patterns, and then immediately getting to work to get them on an ecologically sustainable basis. Fortunately, these two goals aren't necessarily at odds: even if consumers don't change their consumption patterns much to start with, the government stimulus we need can be used, for example, to build 'green' infrastructure that will kick in about when the economy starts up again.
If we raise the tax on gas, and the companies is out to earn money, they will find another less obvious way ( producing ethanol from corn, which is worse than driving on gas for example ) which destorys the environment, since their goal is to earn money to benefit the private person ( the individual ), not to preserve the environment.
But that's the government's job (unless better mechanisms are found): to price in the externalities. Private enterprise isn't going to corn ethanol by itself; it's going to corn ethanol because government has given corn ethanol a totally wrong-headed tax break while raising taxes on gasoline. Private enterprise and profit maximization isn't at fault here; the problem is perverse incentives.
What we need to do is (1) figure out which of the technologies currently available are ecologically the most sustainable, (2) create incentives for people and private enterprises to prefer these technologies over less ecological ones, e.g. by taxing the less eco-friendly things more, (3) figure out which future technologies are the likeliest candidates for even greater sustainability, and (4) create incentives (or directly research) them.
I think you will argue that the fault is that the tax is on gas, rather CO2 emmitans? but another thing like cutting down the rain forest to produce sugar cane's you cannot directly say it is CO2 emmitans, but it still has a great affect.
IOW, the government of Brazil should put a price on every acre of rain forest cut down, based on the calculated long-term cost to Brazil and the world, and then charge the plantation owners that tax. If this was done, I'm fairly certain they'd find creative ways to use the land they've already cleared more effectively.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2006
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- 8,540