Why Obama will sink the economy - the ecological perspective

Economics Economics Questions
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21

cap and trade as indulgences. what a great analogy

Thanks

It is absolutely true - as a “rich” westerner, I “offset” my “consumption” through the purchasing of “Carbon Offsets”

seeing as the measurement of the amount of carbon that is produced in the consumption of goods and services = how much I care about the “planet” “gaia” “whatever”

So as I reduce my “carbon footprint” I become more earth friendly.

it allows the rich and famous to continue their extravagant lifestyles free from guilt by “offsetting” their enourmous consumption.

Whereas the poor are virtuous already. And only need stay poor to maintain their connection with mother earth.

After all, “the meek shall inherit the earth”

22

“Who are the poor”: that was what I expected

I feel a remarkable lack of motivation to convince anyone here of the use of the ecological footprint. Some of the problems you point out (“apples and bananas”) where already mentioned by me.

For me the concept remains usefull for the following three reasons:

A) If high living standards are the only thing attacked by that concept this would indeed not be useful. However the ecological footprint can detect resource inefficiencies. See what happens to Russia after it was liberalized:

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/trends/russia/

I accidentally know this graph before that organisation took out the pre-liberalisation part. The ecological impact of full-fledged communism was even higher because some liberalisation measures predated the official break down of the UDDSSR (by the way if anybody ever stumbles over the uncensored version/whole curve, send it to me.)

So by that logic the US could have a high ecological footprint either because it has high living standards or because it’s economy is now approaching the inefficiency of the UDDSSR.

B) “Environmental Impact” suggests “change”, hence measures like EF will have to make an estimate what is the impact of a certain action. The environment is a complex system and anyone who is familiar with complex system theory knows that it is absolutely impossible to predict the next state of such systems exactly. If you ask absolute results and certainties from the investigation of ecosystem (like those which can be found in pure logic) you have defined the problem away.

C) I found a mathematicall way to turn apples into bananas :slight_smile: That is land use, energy use and environmental impact can all be compared to each other if the main measure is entropy.

The essence of my writings:

For logical reasons someone who accepts the value of ecological footprint at face value (an environmentalist) can not be in favour of redistribution without contradicting himself.

23

A rise in Energy consumption is not exactly what the environmentalist want.

Redmond: That is the key statement - greens want us to be poor.

So Redmond assume that wealth automatically derives from higher energy consumption. If this is true than the UDDSSR was richer before liberalisation.

24

Convincing people

I think this discussion is pretty much closed but I noticed something in discussion style what I would call “over-simplification.”

For example

  1. If I ask you to conserve energy and consume less than this means that I am asking you to be poor.

Answer: While there is a connection between wealth and energy this is not straightforward as your sentence suggests. More exactly I was asking you to save more and hence invest more. I am not sure that this will make you poorer in the long run.

  1. Before I ask anybody in the forum to reduce his/her consumption I shall reduce my own consumption.

Well, that it is exactly what I am doing. Secondly I use this arguments myself whenever somebody attacks capitalism – only I do it more diplomatic. Unluckily in this forum I was asked to go down to the consumption of somebody from Bangladesh. One problem with this is minimum wages. If I for example could choose to use either a cap or a pedicap this is a good opportunity to reduce my ecological footprint. I could think of a galore of ways to help the environment if wages where low. But as long as my government is determined to keep wages artificial high I am to some degree limited by the inefficiency of the system.

So this kind of halftruth will get you approval and even laughter from those folks which are already on your side. However I don’t want to make fun of people I want to convince them. People who are not yet convinced will sense that there is something fishy about leaving out the details.