From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jul 25 2002 - 00:20:34 MDT
On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 02:11:40PM -0600, Doctor Logic wrote:
>
> [quote from: Mike on 2002-07-22 at 14:31:24]
> As resources get scarcer, their market value rises, thus the market
> incentivises conservation technologies and techniques. The market will
> signal
> the appropriate amount of capital to direct at such solutions as they become
> economically feasible. Pushing fiat money at non-problems when they are not
> cost effective wastes more resources than they save.
>
>
> When high sea levels put most coastal cities under water, are we suddenly
> going to stop burning fossil fuels? Of course not. There's no constituency
> for this, and no vendor who will provide a fix for global warming.
>
> If sea levels rise, we'll throw up our hands and say, "Darn!". We'll blame
> the politicians that stood by and did nothing, but there's no one who will
> be
> able to sell us a global warming antidote that we will realistically pay
> for.
Aha! Business opportunity! I think that if global warming gets bad I
will buy up all available supergun mortars and large amounts of
fine-grained reflective dust. According to the calculations in Martyn
Fogg's _Terraforming_ it seems quite doable to reduce solar incidence
this way to ameliorate the problem (sure, I would like to use a solar
shade at L1, but it is not as cost-effective). Then I would convince
rich, low-lying countries like Denmark and the Netherlands to pay for
the project.
Seriously, I think you have a point about supply-demand not solving
second order interactions. If activity A causes effect B which raises
costs for some people then there won't be an automatic negative feedback
causing A to lessen or people to develop new tech to do A better; in
fact people might go for fixing B - which in some cases might be a
better idea! Cars are actually a quite good idea, so the solution to
exhausts isn't to remove the cars but to build non-polluting cars. Takes
time and is not always feasible, of course.
> So a free market approach doesn't prevent global warming. It raises the
> rent/property values in areas that are unaffected by global warming. It
> makes
> alternative civil engineering practices possible by raising the price of
> conventional practices.
As others have pointed out, the problem is that under the current
non-free market handling of the atmosphere you can pollute for free as
long as you are friends with the local kleptocrat.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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