Mother Jones - Comments for "Financing the Future"

Hansen the idealist

John,

You are a slave to your ideals. You demonstrate the backwards thinking process - the declaration first that your conclusions are true, and then your perceptions are warped to fit your conclusion. I know it is hard to see this when one is in the grips of it, even though one can clearly see such a thing in others. I also know that this is not just a conservative problem, it is possible for leftists and other people to fall into the very same trap.

Kevin makes a very good realistic point. In our given capitalistic culture money is power, and to get anything done one must use monetary power. Your ideals state that the pursuit of money not only drives our system, it also somehow gives us the best possible direction in which to go.

This is where our philosophies differ. You state over and over, in many different ways, your basic premise, that optimizing the creation of wealth will always be the best and only answer to the questions of what we should do and where we should go. I maintain that there are well known problems with simply optimizing for the creation of wealth - corruption, the market breakdowns that happen when wealth inevitably accumulates, the tragedy of the commons, and the pursuit of short term gain at a long term cost.

I think it is possible to craft a capitalistic society while also avoiding many of these problems. I am not a slave to any idealism. I believe in stating a goal and then making attempts to achieve that goal, learning from failures and building on success along the way. I believe in incremental change. In addition, I beleive our societal goals need to be periodically discussed and reassessed along the way.

Tripp

Its the perfect liberal con

Its the perfect liberal con game. Rather than use the abundant cheap energy available, government decides which approaches to push. Since government decides where the money goes, it does not go to the most promising or the most profitable, it goes to the business that can sell an influential member of congress to set up a mutually beneficial cycle.

Contracts for "green" energy development to the business, campaign cash back to the congressman. Overall you end up with less innovation then you should have gotten if you had a free society.

That's the way it works.

Its the perfect liberal con

Contracts for "green" energy development to the business, campaign cash back to the congressman. Overall you end up with less innovation then you should have gotten if you had a free society.

That's the way it works.

...And another thing...

...although conservation and increased efficiency are key (probably the key) components of any effort to curb global warming...

Not to get too pessimistic, but Jevon's Paradox says not so much. Something's got to be done about capping consumption because efficiency alone will just stimulate demand.