When doing something is worse than doing nothing

[tvashtarkatena]

LaRouche? Bridge across the Arctic?

[kevbone]

McCain called his wife a CUNT.....you gonna vote for him?

 

Nope

 

Then why are you defending him?

 

I'm not, cock sheath.

 

Oh yeah

 

 

Obama may jerk off to "An Inconvenient Truth" but that doesn't mean he will get it done. I have seen not one idea how he is going to impliment his plan in Iraq (the most important issue to the American public). This leads me to believe two things:

 

1) He doens't give a fuck about the American public.

 

2) He is all talk and can have the biggest hard-on for mother nature since Showgirls;

 

If you are not for Obama.....then you are are against him......

[akhalteke]

Betchyer god damned titties skin smoker.

[kevbone]

Thats what I thought.....

[KaskadskyjKozak]

that doesn't correlate into energy independance anymore than Kev or Prole posing a picture of Pam Anderson makes them straight.

 

 

[pink]

McCain called his wife a CUNT.....you gonna vote for him?

 

 

would you vote for obama if he called his wife a cunt?

[JayB]

It's absurd that the right's critique of Obama is the lack of a plan when for the last thirty years it's been the right's platform to simply leave such things to the "free-market" and corporate decision-making. Anything that has remotely resembled a plan from health-care to energy involving oversight or regulation has either been dismissed as a pipedream or Socialist. The bloated "defense" budget gets a free pass as do any other pet-projects on the right's agenda. Given FW and Kojak's rhetorical track record with regard to big-guvermint, suggesting that it's to be tasked with handling nuclear waste, conducting wars, or come up with a plan for saving the planet (and allow Americans to live in the manner they've grown accustomed to) is hypocritical to say the least.

 

Before I address this point, I'll start by saying that I found myself agreeing with one of Tvash's earlier posts. When it comes to conservation - there is a lot of low hanging fruit that we could harvest in terms of personal conservation, most of which comes down to priorities and choices. Take shorter showers, use the cold cycle when you wash, wear warm clothes all winter, get rid of drafts, etc. Easy and inexpensive.

 

It's certainly also possible to make an investment in conservation technology these days, and realize savings in that manner - but at the current price structure, many of them don't pencil out. "How far out is the break-even point? How does my return thereafter compare with the return I'd get if I put the money in a short-term government bond fund? More importantly - how likely is it that I'll be in the same house in ten years?" Most people are understandably reluctant to make an investment that someone else stands to profit from, or that will yield less than putting the same money in a stable, low-risk asset. It'd be possible to reduce this risk with a different tax/incentive structure than we have at the moment, and while my preference would be to eliminate all subsidies for home ownership - given that there's not a chance in hell that'll ever happen - the best course might to try to modify the incentives so that instead of encouraging people to take on the largest loan that they can handle, they're encouraged to make investments in greater energy efficiency.

 

Speaking of incentives - and this gets to Prole's riff on planning - there's a world of difference between the government establishing a legal/regulatory/incentive structure that leaves people free to make their own choices and allocating their own resources as they see fit, and a "plan" that involves the government making the choices and allocating their resources for them. Not only is the latter model incompatible with a free society, it always results in a massive misallocation of resources that ends up doing more harm than good. The corn-ethanol fiasco is just the latest example.

 

When it comes minimizing the negative impacts that humans have on the environment, in the end, outcomes are the only things that matter - and it's quite easy to see how dramatic policy initiatives could actually bring about more destruction and human suffering than the environmental damage it was intended to avert. When you enter in to the realm where you are talking about imposing massive, precipitous changes on the global economy - it's especially important to keep this in mind, as the current escalation in food and commodity prices should make quite clear. In a global marketplace, when your neighbor can't afford to commute to work in his diesel F350 anymore, there's a good chance this means that a few hundred million desperately poor people can't afford to eat.

 

Like it or not - we need energy to live - and when you raise the price of energy inputs without a corresponding increase in efficiency - the end result is a reduction in outputs. When the resources required for the inputs equal the resources generated as outputs - the result is a slow decline in the standard of living, even when population growth is zero. Net output growth equal to population growth equals a stagnant standard of living. When outputs fall below inputs - and consumption exceeds production - once the accumulated savings are gone, you are looking at a fairly rapid descent into accelerating poverty and misery, especially for the people who start out with the least. Something to think about before deliberately increasing the price of energy. There may be smart ways to mitigate these effects, but first you have to be aware of them.

 

Bad policy responses to real problems *are* often worse than doing nothing (War on drugs, anyone?), and I'm glad that FW has brought this reality into the ongoing debate over energy/environmental policy here on cc.com. I personally hope that we'll be hearing more voices like his in the broader debate, but I'm not optimistic.

 

Any policy that

 

 

[akhalteke]

Thats what I thought.....

 

So what was your hypothesis then kid?

[prole]

I would support a tax on Funyuns. I don't care where the money goes.