Is the world being destroyed?

Now, if you can find an objective calculus to compare the level of uncertainty...

Thank you Walter. That's exactly the point I am trying to make.

We have already established that Clugston is a nutcase.

2) If you are claiming that humans have more uncertainty in general, then we disagree.

A certain amount of uncertainty is something we always live with. The uncertainties of today are different from pre-industrial uncertainties but the quality of uncertainty itself remains the same. It's not a quantitative phenomenon. Uncertainty over the effects of climate change is increasing today because we are now able to see more of them affecting our neighbors and ourselves. What was an abstraction in the '80s has become all too concrete. That's why I have so many of these articles, studies, and stories to post here.

To transition away from fossil fuels, unprecedented volumes of minerals (battery minerals in particular) will be needed. Demand for such minerals will spike all over the world, making them much more valuable. The existing approach to do this, which has served us well over the previous 200 years, is going to become increasingly ineffective. At a fundamental level, without a cheap abundant energy source, extracting mineral resources will become increasingly expensive and as time passes, will become harder to prevent decreased production rates. For the industrial ecosystem to return to how it operated when the Internal Combustion Engine technology supported infrastructure was constructed, a method to develop the production of refined petroleum at a sale price of less than $20 USD a barrel (Michaux 2019). As the quality of oil reserves have been declining for some time, this is highly unlikely to happen.

The World runs on Economics You might not think this is fair, or good or just... but it is reality.

To stop the use of fossil fuels, we need to change the economic incentives.

Corporations who develop clean energy need to get rich. That is world works, wealth is its own incentive

- You need to accept the costs. Gas prices will go up. Electricity prices will go up. This will hurt normal people, while corporations are profiting. But that is reality, and if you want to change the planet, that is what will happen.

Your conspiracy theories about rare minerals are probably mostly alarmist crap.

This idea that we can't have fossil fuels and we can't have renewable energy and we can't have wind power (because it hurts the birds) and we can't have nuclear power.

Liberal outrage gets awfully silly.

Climate change is a real problem, we are going to have to accept a solution

You are being silly.

Corporations should get rich by producing technology that will save the planet (i.e. renewable energy). If you remove that incentive, you hamper research and development on the technologies we need.

If countries don't choose to promote clean energy and continue to burn fossil fuels instead, corporations who develop clean energy won't get rich.

The IPCC and Paris agreement are indirectly setting the incentives, that then must be implemented by governments.

Governments and corporations alike are acting (maybe not as dramatically as you would like, but they are acting).

Your defense of conspiracy theories made me chuckle.... no I can't disprove the conspiracy theories you are promoting.

I also can't disprove that "Bush did 9/11" or that the moon landings were staged.

If Biden, and Congress, had a plan to double the cost of energy. This means that gas prices would be $6/gallon. Your electricity bill would double, as well as the cost to heat your house.

I don't know what you have against the Finnish Geological Survey.

He is not a scientist.

He is not backed by any reputable scientific organization.

You do understand that raising prices on food will mean that people who can't afford it will die of starvation, right?

The food crisis also illustrates what some have called the globalisation of market failure. Globalisation involves opening markets and bringing things that are produced in different parts of the world into direct competition. The assumption - and the integrity of the economic theory hinges on such assumptions - is that those markets work; that prices actually reflect the real values of what's being traded. In agriculture, the assumption is that efficiency equals high yield, which means low price, which reflects the actual value of what's produced. When it doesn't, economists call it a market failure. Agriculture is rife with market failures. You can see it in the Mexico-US trade in corn.

Environmental costs are one of the key areas where the market fails to adequately value both costs and benefits. The US specialises in environmental costs. Corn is one of the most polluting US crops of all. Excessive water and chemical use, run-off of fertilisers into waterways, the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico: all are examples of high environmental costs from US corn production. Producers and traders pay virtually none of the costs of those damages, and the price of corn when it goes across the border into Mexico does not reflect these environmental costs.

What happens on the Mexican side? Well, the smaller producers are maintaining great biodiversity - both wild and in corn varieties - with low-input systems. These positive contributions go unrewarded by the market. Corn biodiversity has virtually no value in the global marketplace, yet these corn seeds are the building block for future varieties of corn: ones we will need to withstand climate change, deal with pesticide resistance, and so on. The price of Mexican corn does not reflect these contributions to the common good.

When you globalise trade, you also globalise market failure. You get under-priced US corn coming into direct competition with under-valued Mexican corn. Mexican corn loses that competition, but not because it's less 'efficient'. A Mexican farmer once said, "We've been producing corn in Mexico for 8,000 years. If we don't have a comparative advantage in corn, where do we have a comparative advantage?" He's right. The problem is that comparative advantage as defined by the global marketplace doesn't value the advantage that Mexican corn offers. And in the deregulated marketplace, the only value is how cheap something is.

The globalisation of market failure gives us a worsening environment, increasing poverty among food producers, increasing food dependence, and hunger. That is why one of the main culprits of the food crisis is our blind pursuit of cheap food.

Raising the cost of food production means that poor people die of starvation. Is that really what we want?

1) We have drastically lowered the cost of producing food.

2) We have drastically reduced the number of people dying of starvation globally.

3) Agriculture produces global warming gases.

For decades, U.S. agricultural policy hasn’t been based on health. It’s really been based on the idea of producing more … of a few commodity crops — things like corn and wheat and soybeans. … These were easy to grow and store and then ship by rail without refrigeration.

An after-the-fact priority was the recognition that a lot of people who joined the military during World War II were undernourished. There was a kind of simplistic thought that if we just ramped up the production of calories from those [commodity crops] we were already growing so well, we could give people enough calories — and they’d be healthier.

Science has shown, obviously, that it’s not as simple as that. The quality of the calories matters a lot. What we’ve done is create a generation of kids who are both overweight and undernourished because the calories they’re getting are not good ones.

The talk is about Mexican corn which was a big issue with the American far left fighting NAFTA.

What happens on the Mexican side? Well, the smaller producers are maintaining great biodiversity - both wild and in corn varieties - with low-input systems. These positive contributions go unrewarded by the market. Corn biodiversity has virtually no value in the global marketplace, yet these corn seeds are the building block for future varieties of corn: ones we will need to withstand climate change, deal with pesticide resistance, and so on. The price of Mexican corn does not reflect these contributions to the common good.

Chris Clugston is a nutcase.

maxdancona wrote:

Raising the cost of food production means that poor people die of starvation. Is that really what we want?

Here in Europe, it's climate change what raises food prices enormously,
Raising the food production, however, is something what farmers want, especially those who still produce conventionally: