From: Christian Szegedy (szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de)
Date: Thu Jul 25 2002 - 08:29:53 MDT
CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
> Anybody from a coastal region would have an obvious tort against
> companies in the fossil fuel business. Given the frightening litigiousness
> of American society and the eagerness of juries to make awards far exceeding
> reasonable compensation (which would actually be huge even by fair
> standards),
> fossil fuel production and use would be forced to completely shut down. It
> really wouldn't get very far. Just a few inches and the FF business would
> be paying for all storm damage on the coast at least and that would put
> a monster effective tax on fossil fuels.
First of all, I don't think that the American juries would really decide for
such compensations.
OTOH, global warming was just one example. The real question is whether the
mechanism of free market could solve such (environmental) problems. A lot
of liberal people would say yes. I think it is fairly clear that the
market works only in those cases in which the marketed products have an overall
positive effect. If the production of some profitable product has negative global
side-effects, then you can't count on the market, since nothing will prevent
the locally profitable production of globally harmful thing. Of course you
could argue, that the negative side effects would result in a negative publicity
and therefore lead to the decrease or eliminataion of the consumption of
those products.
OK. but with this argument, you agree, that the "ecological doomsayers" perform
an important role in market-regulation: namely trying to influence the
publicity of some product with known negative global effects.
But this is maybe not enough. As catastrophe-theory shows, that there are physical
and environmantal processes, where the process goes on whithout noticable effects,
and then comes to a point with huge changes. There are a lot of processes in
the nature (e.g. the boiling of water...) showing such behaviour. If nagative
side effects of the production of some products can lead to such processes, then
the negative pulicity would have its effect only after it's too late. So I think
that some regulation based on scientific analysis is really necessary then.
Best regards, Christian
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