@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
We regulate traffic on the streets, roads and highways, to assure people's safety. We regulate traffic on waterways, to assure people's safety. We regulate air traffic to assure people's safety. We have known for many, many decades that lead is poisonous, even in the early 1960s, people were warned about the hazards of lead in paint, and not to let their children eat paint chips. Why were people warned? Because corporations really don't like paying off lawsuits.
They also don't like changing things that bring in profits, and they don't like to re-tool and find new ways to make their products--the only thing they like is the bottom line, which they like to be big. So in other arenas, they did nothing about lead pollution until government regulated them. Lead was not removed from paint until the 1970s, lead was not removed from gasoline until the early 1980s, and it was not removed from the solder of canned goods until the 1990s, for dog's sake.
LL first, just likes to argue, but second, and more importantly, wallows in ignorance and right-wing shibboleths. She should change her screen name to LalaLand, because that's where she lives.
For some things, like lead paint, it might work; but for CO2 and climate change, the government only stimulates more economic activity with everything they do to 'solve' the climate. If you want real sustainability reform, you have to stop greenwashing socialism and start combining fiscal conservatism with environmental/economic reforms. That means allowing the gap between rich and poor to grow while preventing those with money from spending it in ways that waste resources.
You can't keep satisfying the public will to socialism, because they just want more money to spend on things that use energy and resources. They need to make and spend less money, not more. How can austere people waste resources and cause climate change? What socialists dream of is a green economy where people can have their cake and eat it too by making it using renewable energy, etc. but in reality 'reduce' is the most important part of the mantra, 'reduce, reuse, and recycle.'
Reusing is secondary and recycling is less wasteful than dumping trash and mining new materials to replace them, but recycling actually uses a lot of energy and materials degrade each time they are recycled. Re-using things uses less energy and, ultimately, gentle use makes things last longer and thus reduces the need for new production as well as waste-dumping.
Stop greenwashing socialism and realize people just need to reduce and re-use more while cutting their energy use and driving by switching to alternative transportation and only heating/cooling a single, small, well-insulated area of their homes. Then restore tree growth to all the paved areas you can and whenever you renovate/re-build a building, fragment the ground-floor into smaller footprints with trees growing in between. That way you are basically reforesting deforested areas of land without eliminating humans altogether.
None of these sustainability reforms cost more money, though. They actually work by people making and spending less and doing more manual labor instead of operating machines running on external power sources.
