-paulrdorasil@hotmail.com

My post was something of a mixed bag, but it consisted mainly of a critique of the free market – in which you have so much faith – which imo hasn’t reached a state of self-organizationis sufficient to allow it to act as a purposeful entity capable of dealing with any global issue.

I also indicate that when the free market does reach the state of self-organization that makes it is capable of purposeful action, that more evolved free market will necessarily be anti-democratic.

The ‘restoration of democracy’ comment may seem a little non-sequitur and, as a solution, a tad too tangential to be of any relevance to the CO2 situation, but I see the over-all problem as a matter of the source of power; humanity’s interests are unlikely to be served by a system to which the people have no access, except as individual consumers.

I know that you don’t regard Nathan Lewis as an authority, but he made sense to me, and that’s the most substantial thing I have to go on at the moment. Watch the video and tell us where he’s wrong.

I do think that there’s a good chance that the system as it is will come up with a technical fix, but with so much at stake, I’d like more assurance that we’re doing all we’re capable of – and that would involve input from a benign, people-friendly government.

Regards

Dear Sisyphus,

I don’t have an energy breakthrough myself and I guess that you don’t have it either, so your suggestions that you are “active” can only mean that you are an active crackpot or charlatan.

Billions of dollars are spent for such things both at the commercial as well as governmental level. If you think that “activists” who are ignorant about everything and who think that it’s very useful if they just push something in a particular direction are misguided and counter-productive simpletons.

Best
Lubos

The earth is 12,756 km in diameter. 90% of our atmosphere is contained within the first 53 km of the surface of the earth, so we’ll use 53 km as a good rough estimate of the depth of the atmosphere. Therefore the ratio of the depth of the atmosphere to the diameter of the earth is roughly 0.00416.

Imagine a very large globe of the earth sitting on your desk, say 1 meter in diameter. The depth of the atmosphere on that globe would therefore only be 4.16 mm !!!

Now imagine all of those cars and trucks belching gas at rush hour all over the US, Europe, and China; all the dirty smokestacks in Texas and the Midwest and in China; and all of those two cycle scooters and charcoal stoves and ovens belching smoke day in and day out all over Indian and China. Imagine flying around the world in a plane in the dark. Remember the almost unending carpet of lights down there flying over the US and Europe? And if it’s dimmer over parts of India and China, you can be sure that those charcoal stoves are still cooking down there.

Re. “..universal interest..” – reification isn’t always a bad thing, given that abstract entities can manifest in effects equivalent to behaviors, but I admit it was a sloppy sentence.

#62: “the free market will take care of everything” is ok; again, personifications of abstractions work for abstractions that have effects readable in the ‘real’ world.

The market itself does not care one way or another.
Free people will take care of their problems and issues and will provide products and services for others if they are allowed to keep the profits from those products and services.
As for accounting, I would think this board (struggling to comprehend the basic concepts of market economies) is the wrong place to discuss such issues
PS: Apologies for my typos, e.g. “democracy” etc.

. A big reason that GM has gotten into such trouble is that the pension and health care commitments it made to employees decades ago seemed to be a free lunch.

The accounting rules of the time did not require these obligations to show up on GM’s balance sheets.

I have no doubt that the free-market is a great optimizer – but it produces results only as good as the meta-rules that apply. If we do not correctly account for all of the costs of doing business, eventually reality catches up. Accounting is not entirely tied to reality, some of it is based on convention; but market decisions are made based on this convention.

The same holds with pollution and the environment and non-renewable resources – are we correctly accounting for all the costs that our economy incurs? If we are not, our market decisions are made based on incorrect information, and sooner or later reality catches up.

That the free market will take care of everything is predicated entirely on a correct accounting of costs and benefits. And I don’t see anyone here that advocates central planning, but rather a change in the way we account for things.

> the free market’s only universal interest is profit
This is simply wrong.
Your and my interest is profit. The market itself does not care about it.

Your approach is wait-and-see; it’s too passive. We can’t entrust the future to an undemocratic, unsympathetic free market; the free market’s only universal interest is profit – hardly reassuring. Survival, of course, is also of basic interest to the participants in the new economic order, but in its current state of self-organization, the free market is incapable of dealing wih global concerns.

When the free market is sufficiently self-organized to deal with these global issues, democracy can be declared officially very, very dead, having been entirely replaced by global plutocracy.

The alternative is not communism; the alternative is the restoration of democracy. In a democracy the power is vested in the people. The ‘free’ world is now a plutocracy; the ascendency to policy status of Hayek’s irresponsibly laissez-faire economics is just a symptom of the corruption of democracy by the insidious logic of money.

http://www.bized.ac.uk/current/mind/2003_4/271003.htm

At any rate, the energy market is not free in the US. It is already manipulated by government policy. From a recent Discover article:

http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-06/features/energizer/?page=2

If everything competed solely on merit, wind energy in the United States would be a lot better off. It gets subsidized less than its competitors, and its subsidies are temporary, while its competitors’ are permanent. In other words, the fossil and nuclear subsidies—nuclear being the biggest—are permanent, while renewable subsidies are temporary.

Congress’s brief and irregular renewals of the tax credit for wind power have several times bankrupted wind-turbine manufacturers in the United States. Similar misguided policies have diminished the solar-cell industry. Half of the solar cells sold in the United States a decade ago were domestically made. Now that figure is only 8 percent.

At least in this case it seems that freer markets can actually help the environment, but this isn’t expected to be the case generally (see first link).