JayB

My point is that in a country this rich and resource-hungry, expanding supply of certain resources can only supplicate demand temporarily. Expansion is the holy grail of a growing economy, but ceases to be an option once resources are limiting (which is what I meant by "static supply"). There will always be high demand for water, especially in a desert metropolis. The sooner they figure this out, the better, because no matter how many rivers they divert into Phoenix, even if the can afford to, they will always be short on water. They will have severely molested the environment in an attempt to escape this fact, and in the end, they will have to learn to conserve anyway. Might as well leave the rivers alone and figure it out sooner than later. The concept of "limiting resources" that are completely insensitive to the effects of price, substitutes, devices that increase efficiency, etc doesn't jive with reality terribly well. If the savings that result from using a particular resource more efficiently justify the costs, then it will happen, but not before then. The future is unpredictable, and making investments based on incorrect predictions about the scarcity and expense of a particular resource based on simple extrapolations from known data gets exponentially more difficult the further one moves from the present, and asset mis-allocations made on the basis of such predictions can be quite expensive. Someone who magically got their hands on stats that showed the total value of video game sales for the 1990-2006 time interval in 1982, then promptly ran out and invested their own life savings and $100k hard-money loan into Atari stock would likely have been rather disappointed with the return that their investment generated.

Yes, the moondance is a perfect icon for your fatuosity. The goods New England used to produce are being produced elsewhere in the world, and that production is polluting just as much it did when it was in America. Arguing over the $ value of manufacturing output is completely irrelevant to this argument unless you've suddenly decided you no longer need cloths. As for your "everywhere" argument - you wouldn't want to spend time on the industrial sites of Western New York. the "statehouse" has forced to deal with the burden of bankrupt companies who laid the burden of cleaning up their mess on the state. The younger western states aren't particularly caring about that - there's noway UT can deal with the water demands of it's population in the future, that hasn't stopped their growth plans. The percentage of the total tax-burden that's used to fund environmental clean-ups in this part of the country make up a miniscule portion of the total tab, and has little or nothing to do with either the fate of the plants that you are lamenting or the absence of anything to replace them.

The only places where pollution hasn't declined relative to output are the very same countries where decades of horrid mismanagement or repression are still working their magic. But - sure - manufacturing hasn't become more efficient anywhere, so it stands to reason that the amount of pollution generated per unit output hasn't changed a bit over time either.

Think JayB has never opened his eyes when driving through upstate new york. He could quickly see they've neither output nor employment in manufacturing. The same with textile plants in New England I've driven all over New England, and Upstate New York, while casting my gaze on an infinity of old mills and often paddle through the remains of dams once used to power the Mills there. If there's any lingering effective demand for whatever it is that they made, it's clear that someone somewhere else can make whatever they were making more efficiently or with better value for the consumer, or both. The real question is why both manufacturers and the people that they once employed have fled New England/Upstate like they were on fire, and I think that this has less to do with changes inside the Mill-House than it does with changes inside the Statehouse. Hooray for declining employment in the manufacturing sector. Weee.... I haven't seen the data set for manufacturing output from New England, but I'd be surprised to see an absolute decline, much less one that fell as precipitously as manufacturing employment, even after accounting for all of the micro-mill carnage.

Yes, obviously the population growth has equilibrated in the most developed countries. It is of course a clever insult to imply ignorance of this fact by reference to Malthus (whom I haven't read, but whose narrow models are obviously dated). While our population may be leveling off, we are still highly dependent on other forms of growth--supply, consumption, investment, interest, etc. The economy has functioned beautifully as a grand pyramid scheme, as long as broad economic growth is guaranteed. The limit to this is what I allude to by mention of zero-sum. What happens when there is no more 'free money?' Aren't we already ignoring this to the tune of 9 trillion? The 'tragedy of the commons' manifests in water usage when even a relatively small population manages to consume so much of the supply that it becomes scarce. The usage explodes to fill the limit of supply. Any increase in the supply results not in less scarcity, but in more consumption. The same model fits for many other resources. The basic assumption this allows is that at equilibrium, water will always be scarce. Any attempt to escape this equilibrium, such as the diversion of rivers to irrigate the growth potential of Phoenix, is deluded. Surely it is time to draw the line, and let the system of market principles that you mention go to work in the context of a static supply. Infinite cost-free resources as the sole driver of economic growth and a static set of resources that are completely insensitive to price, effective demand, etc in a single post. Bravo. Now, a moment of silence as I extinguish my whale-oil lamp in despair.

So there are no environmentalists in non-wealthy countries? That's a rather fatuous statement. Industrial pollution got substantially worse up until the mid 70s/80s when they oversea'd all of their jobs. Same with farming. The pollution just moved elsewhere. Until we can move production off-planet it's not a particularly relevant argument. There are doubtless people who care about their environment all over the world, but my contention is that their level of concern diminishes as their income approaches bare-subsistence or below-subsistence levels, and that their ability to effect positive environmental change is a function of many variables, virtually all of which change favorably with increasing prosperity. I think someone is confused by the difference between manufacturing output and manufacturing employment American Manufacturing Output

The only reason that those sites were even noticed, let alone investigated and dealt with is because the US had the wealth necessary to do so and a citizenry capable of taking effective action. It's quite difficult to argue that the condition of the environment in New York or New England has done anthing but improve since the late 19th century.

Yes - anyone who has read or heard of Malthus is familiar with these arguments. They've been around for a while. Neither population-growth nor resource consumption or production per-capita is a static variable that's insensitive to other inputs. Fertility is already at or below the replacement level throughout the developed world, and falling virtually everywhere else where the economy is expanding. As resources become more scarce, the price goes up, and people either change their habbits or use new technologies to reduce their consumption of them, or find substitutes. The only places where the environment gets trashed to the point where they can no longer support their population are those where the economy has been so hobbled by a combination of socialism and/or incompetence and corruption that they cannot produce enough to generate the revenues necessary to pay for food, clothing, etc - let alone generate the additional funds necessary to provide for drinking-water systems, sewage treatment, cooking fuel other than trees, food other than the local wildlife, etc.

In Colorado, it's illegal to collect water from your roof. I'd imagine that in Colorado this is a water rights issue more than anything else. I'm pretty sure that it would be easy to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the total surface area of all of the roofs in a given drainage and show that the effect of residential rainwater harvesting on total runoff would be negligible, but even in the event that it wasn't, some greywater recycling seems like it would be unaffected by those regs. Looks like commercial systems that allow drainwater from showers and washing machines for toilet-flushing run about $1200-$1500, plus probably $300 for shipping, and whatever installation costs - which is probably somewhere around $400-$600 I'd imagine. I don't have any idea what our water bill is, but as things stand now I can't imagine that installing one of these deals pencils out for most families, but I expect that would change in the event that water rates increased substantially. http://www.greenbuildingsupply.com/Public/Energy-WaterConservation/GreywaterSystems/index.cfm

Just imagine what'll happen when we can no longer light our homes with whale-oil lanterns, or heat our homes with timber, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. The end is nigh....

Once it gets scarce enough it'll make economic sense to install graywater and rain-catchment systems in homes, etc, etc, etc and people will start to use way less clean water, and recycle the water that they do use 2-3X before it hits the sewer. There'll also be plenty of incentive for agricultural and industrial users to conserve water when prices get high enough. Yawn.

This thread is just screaming out for a classic from yesteryear... M8pR1rZZHEs

Given the high odds of having all of your gear jacked while climbing in Squamish for the past several years, I'd say it's been an expensive thrill for a while.

My choices at this point: A) Go into deep debt by paying $250 per month for health insurance that would likely cover only 80% of major medical costs.. should something big happen. B) Go into deep debt (probably for life) by not paying $250 per month for health insurance that would likely cover only 80% of major medical costs.. should something big happen. C) Hope that.. nothing big happens.. til Im too old to give a fuck about things like debt. not much "control" there. Sounds to me like your best choice is A) plus either cutting back your expenses or getting a second job to cover the extra $250 per month in order to cover the cost of insurance without going into debt. I'm not sure where you live, but when I was between jobs in Washington I was paying ~$50 a month for a catastrophic plan with Blue-Cross/Blue Shield. Making a dramatic lifestyle change and/or working a second job in order to keep yourself covered may suck, and being in a situation where $250 a month is going to put you under is pretty rough, but if you are an able-bodied adult of working age I don't think that you're going to get a whole lot of sympathy from the general public.

It doesn't necessarily follow that the optimal solution is nationalizing all medical care. By the end of the year, Massachusetts will have everyone insured with a combination of free care for those too poor to pay for their own insurance, subsidies for those who qualify, and mandates for those who make enough money to purchase their own insurance - who can choose what kind of coverage they want.

I agree with your assessment, but am wondering how transferring control of the entire medical economy to the state would have affected your care. The odds are quite high that the state would not only determine whether or not you could even get the surgery, but also when, at what facility, and from whom you could get it. Other than the decision to seek treatment or not, it's not clear to me how one could take control of the situation in the manner that you advocate under a universal single payer-system.

I trust that you will continue to make it for me whenever the topics addressed in either of the articles, but especially the second of the two, come up for discussion. You seem happy in your world. I trust that you will continue to confine your reading to whatever has endowed you with your current perspective.

I think that a fair amount of the petro-dollars generated in the past few years, which have been far too numerous to invest productively in the Middle East, have been plowed into securities created by slicing and dicing all of the various exotic mortgages that have gone mainstream over the past few years, so if anything this resembles something more like a plot foisted on Islamists by drunks. Let us borrow that oil windfall for a moment so that we can entrust it to a sub-600 FICO borrower who wants to plow it into a home selling for 10X his yearly-gross.... How do you say "Reset Schedule" in Arabic? Might get a bit tougher to compete for the petro-dollars now that they've started issuing "Sharia Compliant" bonds in London, though.

Sorry. I was drunk when I posted that...

Hey MindDoc: I wish you well in your study, and hope that you'll share the results here when it's complete. When I was just getting into climbing, I had this idea that whenever I found myself in a stressful situation in my day-to-day life, be it a job interview or what have you, I'd be able to look back to one of the leads that had my at my physical, mental, and emotional limits - and whatever I was facing at that moment would seem less dire and consequential. Unfortunately, despite some persistent effort on my part, this state of climber-zen never materialized. Ultimately I found that other than the relationships and memories forged in that environment, the overwhelming majority of the joys and benefits of climbing are contained within the act of climbing itself. Moreover, rather than deliberately reflecting on climbing as a means of coping with the petty hassles and everyday stresses that I confront in the course of my day-to-day routine, I found that the primary psychological benefit that I've derived from climbing or any other risky activity comes from the moments of pure focus that they demand, which leave no room for reflecting on or worrying about anything outside of that particular instant. In many ways, climbing and activities like it seem like a way of escaping from the stresses of everyday life, and perhaps alleviating the affects of the same, rather than dealing with it directly at the time and place where it's encountered. I'd have to say that on the whole, there almost seems to be an inverse relationship between one's accomplishments as a climber and the condition of one's personal and professional life. This isn't a hard and fast rule, and there are plenty of people out there who do amazing things on the rock and ice without their devotion to the sport having any adverse effect on their life outside of climbing, but on the whole I'd say that beyond a certain point - the devotion to the self and the sheer amount of time and effort that climbing at a certain standard often demands can undermine quite a few important things that lie outside of the activity.

It's because I frequently read The Guardian and other publications like it that I mock the Left. It's quite a shame that LeMonde would never deign to publish an english edition....