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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy





On 12 Dec 1996, David Lloyd-Jones wrote:

>  Toby Reiter <str4552@OBERLIN.EDU> wrote:
> >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.

Actually, I just entered this thread. No the world is not going to get 
better until people start realizing that our world will not be killed in 
an instant but in a century or two. Humans, in general, are too 
short-sighted to sense long term suicide. In order to make humans more 
aware of impact on earth, immediate feedbacks need to be given. The 
perfect case of instant feedback is a counter in the Baltimore aquarium 
which ticks off acres of rainforest being destroyed each second.  Even 
better would be a label on each product "the creation of this product 
caused x and y lethal chemicals to be dumped in nature. It led to the 
destruction of x acres of rainforest", etc. Until people realize that 
current levels and methods of production and consumption are leading us 
to certain death, we cannot afford to act indifferent about the future.


> >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.

Even the best experts in the world can't overcome the fact that nuclear 
fission should never have occurred within the biosphere. Sure nuclear 
energy is good for some things, like sunlight, but genuine radioactive 
uranium really doesn't have much place outside of the ground.

> >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.
This is not a prediction, this is a fact. If you have a country of over a 
billion inhabitants trying to raise its industrial and living standards 
to that of the U.S. and then fueling that drive on coal energy, you are 
talking huge amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfates in the air--global 
warming and acid rain.



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