OK, let me try to explain it again. All engineers are familiar with the concept that you pay out the wazoo for that last little bit of performance, whether you are building a racing engine or trying to get the last microscopic bit of contaminant out of water, for example. But it is a fundamental law of medicine that dosage is critical. Something in a large dose may be deadly, but in a small dose harmless. Your body can tolerate it. Now put this together. Our water supply is pretty clean. Of ocurse there are problems here and there, and they should be dealt with. Ditto the air. It's not pristine everywhere but it is far better than it used to be 35 years ago. Does it make sense to spend enormous amounts of money to make them even cleaner if healthwise, we'll never notice the difference? That is the basic question. Resources are limited. The environmentalists tend to take an all or nothing approach, one that this thread exemplifies. Anything less than environmental perfection is equated with being for pollution. To say that Bush is for pollution or in favor of destroying the planet is ridiculous. These issues are painted in many shades of gray. They are not the simplistic black and white that activists seem to imagine. Of course businesses want to avoid costs. Put too many costs on them and they move to some developing country where there are minimal standards. Does that help the environment? Does it help the public if they lose their jobs and their health care? Some environmental costs and standards are absolutely necessary and reasonable, but I'm not convinced that everything that activists and the EPA can dream up is essential.
I understood what you said about diminishing returns the first time. I'm glad you recognize that resources are limited. I'll take that to mean you are referring to financial resources. Let me ask you this, when it takes more dollars than are available to produce the next barrel of oil will you then see the need to curtail exploration? Any extractive activity, by its very nature, destroys part of the environment. I understand that the planet can bear a good bit of this activity before the consequences overrun our ability to contain them or to fix them with technology. However, industrial society is dependent upon oil for its very existence. There is no alternative that can be used to fuel the industrial engine as efficiently as oil. When the oil is gone, so is the industrial society which depended upon it. Do you understand this is as good as it gets? Decisions taken now will determine the extent to which mankind will suffer or prosper in the future. If we ignore or refuse to effectively deal with the planet's ability to absorb pollution, then we are only hastening the inevitable and insuring a hard crash rather than a "soft landing". I am not trying to dream up new ways to curtail industrial activity. What I am trying to do is understand the consequences of continuing to pursue a strategy that has worked well since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that of prosperity through economic growth. Civilization, in the last 250 years has acted just like air being forced into a balloon. We are growing and dumping our wastes into a finite space, the Earth. We cannot continue to grow as we have because we are running out of space. It becomes harder and harder to get oil efficiently. Deeper wells must be dug, creating more waste which adds to the environmental toll being taken on the planet's ability to recycle it's air and water. Does any of this make a difference to your reasoning or understanding of the problem?
Irrationality. When we build airplanes, we overengineer for safety as accidents happen. When we build bridgtes, we overengineer for safety as we know accidents and natural disasters happen. When we design cars we build them to exceed normal safety requirements, as we know accidents happen. However when it comes to the environment, many people seem to have this attitude that we should underengineer for safety, that mother nature will always compensate for our abuse of nature and our lack of forward looking thought. What I discover from reading this thread is that most people who responded don't care if GW does go down as the worst president ever on environmental issues, as long as their lifestyle doesn't have to change. So much for future generations.
possible people want to do something but most don't know what to do. After all these are bigger problems than we expected or are sometimes willing to deal with, especially when it is our own families who will be involved in living with the consequences. In that light and in the spirit of fostering education and problem-solving through cooperation, here are some links. Even looking at them may be difficult and confrontational for people but the more willing a person is to see the other side of the coin in terms of lifestyle choices the easier it is to make choices which enhance one's ability to live. These are some older links and you can tell from reading the context that changes have taken place since they were written. Unfortunately, Donella Meadows has died since writing the article posted below but she helped produce some of the early work acquainting decision-makers with the problems associated with resource depletion and environmental catastrophe. Anyhow, here are some things that we can all strive to do to make the world a little better place to live: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC26/Meadows.htm http://buncombe.main.nc.us/~gwilcox/complicated.html
It's a good point, but a constant exemplified in this thread is that the free market tends to not punish pollution but rather rewards it. Pollution is an inevitable byproduct of industry, but it need not always be. Let the free market continue to create cleaner fuels, cleaner industrial processes, cleaner agriculture, etc., but some government oversight and resource management is probably necessary through the process. For a person recognizing the various shades of gray, the question "Does it help the public if they lose jobs and healthcare?" frames the issue in black and white. It's good to have a job and healthcare, but bad to miss work because you are getting your chemo treatment that day.
Maverick has no idea what he is talking about, especially when it comes to California and Air Quality: http://www.cleanairprogress.org/top_20/index.asp http://www.arb.ca.gov/adam/cgi-bin/db2www/polltrends.d2w/Branch
Hey Waggie! Get a grip man. All I said was California was the SUV capital of the world. Do all liberals take everything out of context or just the long hair hippes from the 60's liberals from Berkley like you?
We seem to be mixing two issues here. One is the idea that environmentalists don't accept the diminishing returns concept. The other is your concern with diminishing resources. I would be more concerned about the latter if I had not heard it all before in the '70's. We were all going to run out of oil, starve and freeze to death (back then the big worry was global cooling, not warming). Somehow we pulled through. There are more oil reserves now than we knew about then. You are certainly right that resources get depleted, and that there can be synergy in slowing their use and curtailing the pollution their use and extraction produces. Our political system has not done a very good job of harnessing this synergy. We have other competing values, such as consumer freedom. We also give disproportionate weight to irrational fears generated by activists, such as the fear of nuke power.
Hey Maverick, I can see that you still have a difficult time spelling! By the way, the University of California at Berkeley ranks FIRST NATIONALLY when it comes to the number of Graduate programs in the Top 10 in their fields. In fact, 97% of Berkeley's programs made the National Top 10 List. Furthermore, this past summer the Princeton Review ranked CAL tied with Virginia as the #1 Public University in the Nation! While your intellect can frequently be found on these boards using all sorts of STEREOTYPES and and ignorant cultural profiles to express yourself in ways that are far from factual or accurate, I must say that as a 4th generation Californian and graduate from the University of California at Berkeley I am extremely proud to have experienced an institution that has a very deep tradition in academic achievement and excellence, especially in the Sciences! And by the way, last time I checked, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory OPERATED by the University of California. http://www.llnl.gov/# http://www.lbl.gov/LBL-PID/LBL-Overview.html
Thank you. You just demonstrated that arrogant elitist I'm better then you liberal attitude that 95% of the people in this country can't stand. Now do you know why middle america can't stand liberals? Just re-read your post until you get it.