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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy
Toby Reiter <str4552@OBERLIN.EDU> wrote:
:
>> >On 10 Dec 1996 06:04:21 GMT, sync@inforamp.net (J McGinnis) wrote:
>> >>Comparing our current situation to the past may show us some areas of
>> >>improvement, but it also shows us that at no time have we had the
>> >>destructive potential that we do now. And that we're not putting that
>> >>potential to much better use than we ever have.
dlj wrote:
>> This just isn't true. This may seem like a small point: our
>> destructive potential was far greater ten years ago than it is today.
>> In that decade the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world has
>> declined by perhaps as much as 40%. All the major powers, including
>> France and China, have ratified and come under the aegis of the
>> nuclear test ban treaty. The Union of South Africa has given up its
>> nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapons programs of Iraq, Egypt and
>> North Korea have been halted.
<snips>
>> Not bad. We haven't gone far, but we're going in the right direction.
>> Going slowly in the right direction is far better than going wrong at
>> great speed.
>Because we have not chosen to shift the economy towards an understanding
>of a Greater Economy (Wendel Berry) or Ultimate ends (Herman Daly), it
>must continue to create a system in which we become more potentially
>lethal than previous generations.
Having seen me destroy McGinnis's claims ("another beautiful theory
murdered by an ugly little fact") Reiter chooses to repeat it, but
assigning a different bunch of authors to the same load of bollocks.
> Simply saying that nuclear weapons are
>being dismantled does not discount the fact that these weapons are still
>terrible biophysically hazardous.
Or at least would be -- were it not that we entrust their disposal to
a bunch of extremely caeful and expert people.
> In addition, economic choices made
>today which have poor environmental ramifications will have much more
>devastating effects in the near future (e.g. China, a country of over a
>billion, fueling all of its industrial needs with coal).
Love it! These guys can always come up with an unlimited supply of
horrible predictions about the future. This is to be expected, since
they have done such a horrible job of predicting in the past.
-dlj.
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