well, im sure your personal experience in manufacturing is just fine and dandy. but the eia tells me that co2 emissions form energy and industry in 2008 were less than 1% lower than what they were in 2000 and 14% higher than what they were in 1990.
is that 180 degree turn you were talking about over the last 2 decades?
anyways, i will concede that people are not adequately convinced that climate change is an important issue. but i don’t think the comparison is silly at all. it is a very real possibility that a meteor could be headed for earth right now. yet, we would have no idea because only a very small percentage of the sky is being tracked due to lack of funding. i’m sure you can guess why i think that is the case (externalities. why should the u.s. pay for it when if france or some other country does it we would get the benefits too).
Libertarianism doesn’t rely on selfishness. Where did you come up with this ridiculous assumption? Have you ever even read The Virtue of Selfishness, or anything else by Ayn Rand for that matter? Ayn Rand explicitly stated that she was not a libertarian - though her philosophy of Objectivism proposed a somewhat libertarian “night watchman” state. Rand - being a minarchist - would have relied on government to solve this problem. Many libertarian thinkers - e.g. Rothbard - don’t buy Rand’s egoist philosophy.
But it would most likely be done by pooling capital together, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and various other super rich people would put large sums of money towards stopping the meteor, because, even they will be better off if its stopped than if it isnt…
Even if everyone stopped emitting CO2, including breathing, would that accomplish anything in stopping global warming, if it really is going to be catastrophic, at this point?
A) Why do you assume it will just be walmart? Perhaps Walmart, Exxon Mobile, and Sprint will all donate on a single project. You know how major sports events have multiple sponsors?
B) Can you really put all your hope in an organization that has never proven its competency in that situation? What happens if they fail? Are there other alternatives readily prepared?(Likely not if it’s state run. The follow solutions are only second best, where on the market every person pushing a solution thinks his/her solution is the best)
C) Your going to force massive taxation over the global populous over a hunch that there might be a meteorite?
This is the most backwards libertarian position I can imagine.
In choosing between a firm that might have some competency in the issue and a firm thats never had any, I’d rather have a firm that MIGHT succeed be the one I support. In addition I’d like to see competing alternatives. In the market should one solution fail there are immediate alternatives competing to win historic positive reputation paramount to any brand, good, service.
Furthermore if you truely believe that the state is the best solution in this situation then why do you believe the market is a better solution at delivering milk? Why do you believe in the state on the one hand then contridict yourself on the other? If the state can better save us from astroids then they should also just as well be better at providing our milk, food, healthcare, vehicles, our everything.
As I said before you’ve failed to convince the masses that this is the cause of global warming. At best most people just superifically go along with it just to keep some type of social status quo. Either way Its hard to tell whether global warming would stop, even if we did stop our carbon emmision output. Global warming, and the 1970’s global cooling is more likely a statistical phenomena and less likely a concern that humans have any control over.
Well I suppose we should all stop what were doing and starve ourselves in preperation of what might happen. Fear mongering at it’s finest. A discipline held by both the right and the left.
With the right it’s terrorists, drugs, and crime. With the left it’s all kidns of environmental disasters. People eat this garbage up.
you were the one that said that people would act differently toward the threat of a killer meteor than they do toward climate change. i was just pointing out that they don’t.
of course, you’re hopping arguments like a frog with a fever blister on its behind. so im not sure where to go from here.
i think eugene makes a good point. positive externalities would prevent us from dealing with asteroids, just like it prevents us from dealing with climate change.
“man you’re crazy!! look around you!! industry has seen an environtal 180 over the past 2 decades!!”
no they havnt, here’s evidence
“yah, well, why are we talking about global warming, people would act differently toward an asteroid!”
i don’t think so. here’s evidence.
“haha so now you’re saying we should starve ourselves to protect ourselves from asteroid!! wow you left wing wackos!!”
i dont think i ever said externalities only influence consumers or producers. seems to me they can influence governments as well. but it is good to see you are keeping up.
Other people caring less about something than you feel they should is not an externality.
I could be mauled to death by a lion tomorrow morning and I haven’t bothered to protect myself from the possibility. Hell, I’m pretty sure if a bunch of lions got loose in my town than nobody would be adequately prepared. Oh no!
Is there an externality in there somewhere? I don’t think so. edit: And if there is, then I think externalities cease being particularly interesting since they would describe basically anything uncertain.
Eugene made an assertion. Did he prove that we are prevented by positive externalities?
Did Eugene prove that an imaginary anarchist society is prevented from defeating an imaginary asteroid from frickin space because of hypothesized positive externalities?
i treat people the way they want to be treated. you ask silly questions, you get treated like a silly person.
unless you think one can “prove” how an imaginery society that has never existed will act one way or another. if you really think that then i may have to treat you like another type of person all together…