Jim P. (4/17/2013)
Thats not obviously my final conclusions, there could be real downsides to the topics this seems to address, but my first impression is that its a net drive for positive change on a world level.
world level being the operative words. But at a local level they are doing things such as forcing the property owner to permanently deed restrict their development rights on at least 50 percent or more of their land.
I couldn't draw a direct link from the UN initiative to this case. I also don't agree with the mechanisms of that local action. But in a general case, we can't privatize the entire planet, or we'll get all the poor outcomes that the environmentalists do describe.
Law of big numbers of course. One lightbulb saving energy means little, and I'll let you extrapolate the rest on your own.
Yes, the laws of big numbers as annotated here
I didn't see any description of what I'm talking about, so I guess you weren't able to extrapolate what I was talking about, so let me put a bit more effort into it. One lightbulb has little effect. When you mulitply the effect of one lightbulb by the instances of its expected use by the population of anticipated users, this is where you make changes, and thats the intent of the laws.
Back to what you did reference, you won't get new lightbulbs out of nowhere, they actually do come from industry, so I do agree with that part.
These I do give you. However its not unheard of that governments have taken risky investments when driving change, look at the arpanet etc... Also, its expected that the earlier the efforts are in the processes of change, the riskier they are. Do we give up?
No. But the government shouldn't be involved unless there is a true national stake. And even then it should either be done with regulation or incentives. Not with your or my money.
Government is fundamentally funded by your and my money. And we don't live on independent planets, we share one. Collectivism is truly a dirty word, but unfortunately, we don't own our own little planets, so this really is a national issue as well as a world issue.
The government should set the CAFE standards and let industry get to compliance. As far a the first computer -- ENIAC was built as the computer industry replying to a bid for a reprogrammable computer. The primary purpose was ballistic charts. But your cell phone is now more powerful than all the computers in 1963.
I agree, regulating industry is a big part of environmentalism.
Change isn't free. Neither is staying in place. Absolutely agree however that there's money in green energy and this does (and rightly should) motivate these efforts. None of this seems to fit as a reasonable motivation or reason against these efforts, the first computers were tremendously expensive, flight was pretty inefficient, heck the first steam engine to lift water out of mines was absolutely pathetic, and one should expect failures when searching for change, sort of the nature of the thing.
What is or was the incentive prior to to the GW starting. But look at the advent of HDTV. When the first flat screen TV's they cost thousands of dollars. But the incentive of the consumer market brought the price down. I've been looking at 50" flat screens. The cost was over $1000 18 months ago and are now getting to the $500 range. The reason is because of willing adoption by consumers. If consumers thought solar or wind was better, they would be asking for more of it. There isn't any incentive there for popular adoption.
Well if industry and the free market would help with environmental causes, the environmental lobby wouldn't have any basis for what they're pushing for. But honestly much of industry tends toward externalizing environmental costs if they can get away with it rather than managing them as a cost of doing business.
Theres no doubt we've developed into a resource hungry world society. I guess the bottom line is whether we're simply doomed to outgrow the carrying capacity of our world, or rather as a species able to manage what resources we have in a sustainable fashion. Maybe there are those who believe we could never outgrow our environment and that GW is actually a hoax, to be honest I have to include that possibility.