Sorry for the late response, didn’t see your post there.
Please name a city that existed in 5000 B.C.
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I point out that pollution is getting better, and your response is “compared to when, what about pre-history?”. That is utterly irrelevant, the market-environmentalist argument only requires that pollution is declining since 1800 or 1900, not 5000 BC.
We are “stuck” with the Industrial Age?
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Unless you want 98% of the worlds population to starve, a hunter-gatherer economy is not an option.
I don’t think so, but how is that relevant?
LOL, wut? Look at the tags of all of the clothing you are wearing right now. What do they say?
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Well, third world countries don’t really produce much of anything. The ones you mention are recently liberalized countries. It might seem as though they produce a lot, but they are specialized in consumption goods that are more visible. Who produced the machine that makes the clothing? Who designed it? Who researched the alloy that sits inside the machine? Wealth is a function of productivity, that’s kind of how economics works.
LOL, wut? So, I guess bankers must be the most productive people on the planet!
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No, that does not follow, “if they were productive they would be rich” does not imply “they are rich so they must be productive”. Bankers are rich because they own and manipulate a monopolized money supply, which has nothing to do with our debate on international wealth distribution.
Exploitation theory is obsolete 19th century Marxist economics based on objective value theories that were refuted by modern economics over a century ago.
Ooh, those high Taiwanese wages we’ve all heard so much about… And try and find me something in your immediate are that was made in Japan. They are kind of like the USA these days.
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It’s not perfect, but Taiwanese per capita GDP was twenty times as high as on mainland China in 1978 (when they started getting market liberalization). My point remains.
WHAAA??? You don’t actually believe this, do you? Here’s a well known chemical in my area:
Although it is found in the poop of many people (because they were contaminated), it is an industrial chemical prevalent in many rivers and other waterways in southern New England.
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And how many people did PCB kill? Tens of people? The stuff that was in the drinking water two centuries ago caused abhorrent infant mortality rates and life expectancies of like thirty. It’s always amazing how environmentalists ignore facts. Even though the factual evidence tells us that pollution is going down, they simply ignore that and claim that pollution is getting worse using anecdotal evidence.
They aren’t clean. They just aren’t open sewers anymore.
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They are cleaner, which is all my argument requires.
You make it sound so easy, but if people could ‘just’ quit using their rivers as open sewers, people all over the world wouldn’t have to wash their clothing in shit. This is an extraordinary achievement of a few market economies. And it has way greater health benefits than anything modern environmentalism ever did, which is all about theoretical problems that don’t actually affect anyone.
Assertion. Also nonsense.
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Responding that something is “an assertion” is not an argument. That’s like saying that my sentences are made up of words, it’s just eluding rhetoric. I suspect you do that because you can’t really argue with my statements, because they all directly follow from generally agreed upon facts:
Or would you truly dispute that environmental protection relies on wealth? If so, can you name a single country that was better able to protect it’s environment when it was half as rich? Can you name a poor country that is better able to protect it’s environment than a rich country? Or can you make any theoretical economic argument to the effect that environmental protection does not become easier when a society is richer?
Do you dispute that markets produce wealth? If so you need a little economics lesson.
Or do you dispute that environmentalists want to stifle markets? Because that’s pretty much what it means by definition.
People die from pollution all the time.
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Exactly. They died from pollution all the time, now they don’t. Which means that - see if you can follow me here - pollution has decreased.
No, they don’t.
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Yes, they do. You claim that the environmental movement was a response to growing discomfort, I claim that it was a claim to growing wealth and leisure. To support your theory, the dada should show growing discomfort up to the beginnings of the environmental movement, to support my theory there would have to be declining discomfort. There is declining discomfort, ergo the data confirms my theory and contradicts yours.
What does this even mean?
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It means that you can’t create wealth if you can’t own stuff.
If the state had to respect property rights, it would just be another competitive company.
It doesn’t, because it’s a fallacy.
Which is inferior why?
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As to why socialist economic performance is inferior, I refer you to the economic sucess of the Soviet union.
Maybe they use natural gas because it is a scarce, concentrated resource, making it easier to centralize, and control.
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So humanities choice of resources is like some huge conspiracy? It has nothing to do with, like, physical properties and cost? How do they manage to get all the inventors and engineers on board?
And actually from the point of view of the ruling class oil and natural gas are a problem because they are too abundant. They can’t really keep a lid on it, which is why the environmental socialist movement comes in handy.
Like what?
If plankton is truly this important then it is ‘marketable’ in the sense that you and likeminded people will care about voluntarily protecting it.
But your argument was that market-environmentalism wouldn’t save non-marketable species. To that I responded that it shouldn’t, because there are opportunity costs to saving species. It would be a good thing to let useless species go, because there are more valuable things we could do with those resources, like saving children with leukemia. Are you really saying that there should be no cost-accounting when it comes to environmental protection? This good should be purchased without thought or discretion?
For how long? What happens when China and India want to start living like Americans? Technology better hurry up and save us.
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If Chinese and Indians produced as many resources as Americans, they would be a lot more abundant.
Blind faith?
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Aren’t we told that the default response in the absence of evidence is supposed to be disbelief? We don’t know of any flying spaghetti monsters, hence we should not believe in them. We don’t know of any limits to growth, hence we should not believe in them. The thing is that you are saying that even though we have no evidence of any limits to growth, we should just assume there is one somewhere, since that’s kinda plausible.
The funny thing is that this line of thought has been wrong over and over again. In the 60’s Paul Ehrlich and his ilk told us that the world would be starving by the 80’s, and in the 80’s they told us it would be starving by the 2000’s. The end of oil has been predicted literally every decade since it’s commercialization, yet reserves only grow. How often does a theory have to be disproven before people stop believing it? And you’re the one accusing me of blid faith?
Ok, to keep providing the same standard of living we would need to constantly raise resource input. (But it is not a problem, since the resource base is not meaningfully finite and input can just grow indefinitely.) And this is not the same as “capitalism needs growth to exist”. For one this applies to any form of production, especially “sustainable” production, as we have to maintain an exponentially growing amount of inefficient wind-turbines. (Where will the food come from when most of the land is used for transition lines?) But also capitalism doesn’t ‘require’ growth because if there aren’t any more resources then there just wouldn’t be any growth, it wouldn’t somehow crash the system.