Quote:
Originally Posted by Pastiche
I hate this kind of simplistic thinking. I work as an economist and I couldn't disagree with you more. Yes relatively to a business as usual scenario output wont be as high under a carbon constrained economy in the short and medium term. But the difference is between one and two percentage points in growth each year, it is not disastrous.
Factor in our reliance on natural capital for both wealth and welfare and there are very strong economic arguments to address climage change in a thoughtful and methodical manner. Does that mean stopping all emissions and growth immediately? No. It means making carbon intensive production expensive and engineering an economic restructuring. We have done that before. For example, there were loud arguments against abolishing slavery because of our economic growth. Dealing with climate change is not necessarily a moral issue like slavery, infact it's much more important.
In my mind your type of opinion is blind and dangerous. It's this idea that economic growth trumps all considerations in policy debates. Sure growth is important, but so are our natural life support systems like biodiversity.
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You're an economist? Well no wonder people don't listen to economists anymore.
I don't have time right now to look for the latest data, but in May International Herald Tribune wrote:
The economies of the developed world turned in their worst quarterly showing ever in the first three months of 2009, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Monday.
The combined gross domestic products (GDP) of the 30 countries in the organization fell by 2.1% in the January-March period from the previous quarter. If that preliminary estimate holds, it would be the largest drop since 1960, when records were first kept. The GDP of member countries fell 2% in the last quarter of 2008.
Compared with the first three months of 2008, the OECD economies—which accounted for 71% of world GDP in 2007, according to the World Bank—shrank 4.2% in the first quarter. The US contributed 0.9 percentage point of that decline, while Japan contributed 1 percentage point, the 13 largest euro area countries 1.3 percentage points, and the remaining member countries 1 percentage point.
Yet you nonchalantly write about 1 or 2 per cent drop, like it's nothing. Well, for people with productive jobs it's a lot.
OECD as it is is self-restricting as it is (just like Cow said), many countries nearing bankruptcy (Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Spain in a lot of trouble) yet we're supposed to hand out free money just because politicians wants to collect points for "saving the world"?
What they are doing is saving their bank accounts:
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's cohead of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.
The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...bble_machine/7
And the crazy thing is that the global carbon trade is in full swing already.
Personally, I want the government out of green business. Everything they touched turned into a disaster where only a handful of people are rolling in cash (the farce that is biofuel is just one example out of many).
Crippling ourselves economically while pouring subsidies into shady corporations and foreign governements who also refuse to allow control over "green money" given to them at the expense of taxpayers is what's dangerous.