How can anyone put issues like climate change into the hands of the government and not the free market?
The government caters to special interests. They do not care about us.
You would be stupid to think politicians genuinely care about climate change. It is just another excuse to tax.
For free market start with yourself. Give up the car and ride a bike everywhere switch light bulbs to low wattage CFL’s and only use one a time, buy a solar oven for cooking, etc. etc. In other words reduce your household energy bill to say $20 a month. If you did this and got everyone you know to do this and they got everyone they know to do it also, then the free market would follow and adapt. Otherwise the only way to force people to conserve is by law, or by imposing ridiculous taxes. The only reason big SUV’s lost popularity is $4 a gallon for gas, make it 8-10 and a prius won’t be good enough everyone will buy electrics and install solar panels and wind turbines. Ahh the free market in action.
Well, what if there’s no profit to be made out of mitigating climate change? How can the ‘free market’ have any positive influence in that case? The trouble is, fossil fuels are so rich in energy (coal has 4 times as much energy as TNT, I read somewhere) that it’s very hard for any other source of energy to be competitive.
The Big Picture: Its the climate. The powerful force of nature. The climate WILL eventlually change, i.e. The Ice Age. People have a problem because you could always slow it down, but never stop it. Keep in mind that 1 forest fire, say natural, or volcanic eruption emits more pollution than years of exhaust from motor vehicles. You shouldn’t depend on anyone to change things, If the government is trying to reverse the climate change, it’s not free and neither is the technology. But overall, the climate WILL change. Its just a matter of time.
At what point do you thing private enterprise cares about you and doesn’t cater to special interest?
EVERY SINGLE private enterprise strives to make profit, in order to do that they are forced to cater to special interests in the name of customers, and care very little about people when they get in the way of profit.
There is a reason why the epa is FORCED to take companies to court to get them to clean up the environmental disasters they create, and its not because private industry is empathetic or caring for people.
The right wing has done a wonderful job of brainwashing hayseeds into thinking that private industry is benevolent, completely ignoring all they GOVERNMENT laws that force them into behaving properly.
The cost of climate change isn’t necessarily born in the short term by any individual business.
Look up ‘externality’ in any elementary economics textbook (Pindyck & Rubinfeld’s Microeconomics devotes a chapter to this. Ch18 I think).
One of our lecturers used to talk about what he called the ‘fallacy of composites’ in macroeconomics – which is how a rational series of self interested choices to maximise utility don’t deliver the best result for society or the economy.
Without government enforcement, self interested businesses have little or nothing to gain from cleaning up their act.
The basic difference is what kind of government will be in control. The left wants a centralized Ubber government like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany running things by decree of the great leader with a strong secret police to enforce his decrees. The center and right want a localized disbursed government with the ones responsible subject to the direct vote of the citizens. They also want the federal government returned to is limited constitutional role instead of its current expanded form that the constitution say is not legal. Also the anti trust laws put into place by Teddy Roosevelt should be restored to full strength. They were made ineffective through presidential decrees by LBJ, Carter and Clinton to reward their billionaire corporate sponsors!
I agree with you. The government does not care about global warming. They only care about ebing able to tax and impose new regulations that occur due to global warming. All politicians suck. However, I also think the free market could care less about us as well. They are in it for the money as well.
Cap-and-trade is a free market solution. First, the public has to claim our right to an unpolluted atmosphere, just as we claim rights to water and land. Once we do that, the free market will find the most efficient ways to produce goods making efficient use of all resources.
"Free market" means free to make decisions and transactions. It does not mean anybody gets free resources. Just as it takes governmental enforcement to protect your private land and to protect sources of public drinking water, it takes government enforcement to protect your air. There is no such thing as a free market anywhere without public protection of private rights.
Let’s say there are two companies that operate coal powerplants. One company has scrubbers, uses low sulfur coal, and otherwise tries to minimize pollution. The other company uses the cheapest and dirtiest coal it can find and just operates in the dirtiest mode possible. The clean company has more expenses so in a free market it will go broke and everyone will be stuck getting power from the dirty company.