okie wrote: Read his book, I've heard its in there about the internal combustion engine. If drastic things are about to happen, I would think logic would tell you drastic measures need to be taken instead of piddly token political programs that accomplish little or nothing.
"I've heard it's in there." Nothing like forming an opinion based on rumor. You say that drastic measures need to be taken but you advocate taking no measures. Interesting.
Quote:My side's solution is fixing the car. Your side is saying abandon the car, park it, and trust in some pie in the sky technology that is neither proven to work for sure at the present time, or it is not feasible economically. Simply have confidence in American ingenuity and the free market. This has worked in the past, and will again. It is working now. Example, new wind farms springing up around the country, just one of many examples of alternative energy becoming a reality.
Just because you have a side doesn't mean I do. My solution is to acknowledge the problem and address it. It's fine with me if businesses take it upon themselves to do it, but if they don't, then we should encourage them to and not reward them for contributing to the problem. Your side's solution appears to be to pretend the problem doesn't exist. Isn't that the whole point of pretending that global warming is something made up by kooky environmentalist commies?
My position is I am not at all convinced the problem is anywhere near as serious as painted by Gore. Climates change and cycles occur. If there is a slight warming trend, it is neglible and will not have the catastrophic effects claimed. Not only that, if those that believe as Gore does, we are near the tipping point, if you look at their own solutions, they are too little too late anyway. Its a big todo about nothing. Environmentalism is an idealogy with political idealogies embedded within it, and it even borders on a pseudo religion. I simply don't swallow the hogwash. Scientific data that is well founded, I am willing to consider, but so far it isn't very convincing on several fronts. Conclusion, Gore is a kook.
Would you mind sharing how you came to that conclusion?
okie, you clearly make stuff up to fit your argument.
Carter was laughed at by your ilk for drawing attention to our addiction to foreign oil, and he managed to cut imports significantly. Of course, they shot back up again under Reagan who repealed everything Carter had done.
You should be ashamed for writing such rubbish...
To put this kind of idea into conservatives is a dangerous thing. If the economy suddenly tanks, they're gonna blame it on Gore.
D'artagnan wrote:In answer to the conservative know-it-all who earlier questioned what Gore did re global warming as VP:
The US agreed to the Kyoto Protocols under Clinton (and Gore). You're probably glad Bush withdrew from the agreement, but to say Gore is only now concerned about global warming is out-and-out BS.
Now, Bush, on the other hand, with his new-found awareness of "our addiction to oil"--that's a profound case of a "D-oh!"moment...
No, the US did not agree, the president signed it against the wishes of Congress and, yes, I am glad Bush withdrew from it.
So, after Gore's illustrious career in congress and as VP all he accomplished was having his boss sign a treaty that was later done away with.
WOW! What an environmentalist he is! Oh, and he made a movie too!
I gave an example, McG, not Gore's cv.
Besides, why prove to you something you would dismiss as useless, anyhow? Those of us who give a rat's ass about the environment know where the politicians stand...
D'artagnan wrote:I gave an example, McG, not Gore's cv.
Besides, why prove to you something you would dismiss as useless, anyhow? Those of us who give a rat's ass about the environment know where the politicians stand...
Wasn't much of an example demonstrating one's love of the environment. Perhaps you could tout his book he wrote?
What did Gore do to decrease CO2 emissions while he was VP? What policy did he write to decrease our nations addiction to oil while he was VP? What part of the Clinton energy policy helped clean the environment and reduce greenhouse emissions?
You can't prove he did squat, so you write some lame BS like "Besides, why prove to you something you would dismiss as useless, anyhow?"
What a wussy answer.
When Gore heeds his own advice, he could be taken more seriously. As of now, he is nothing more than a political curiosity. His own personal lifestyle probably puts us all to shame in terms of energy consumption and inherent disregard for the environment, according to his own philosophy. In other words he needs to practice what he preaches. Otherwise, his words are totally hollow.
Has the economy been destroyed yet? Are we all beggared yet? I'm on pins and needles . . . oh, what will we do, what will we do?
The sky is falling ! ! ! The sky is falling ! ! !
-- Fox News
okie wrote:The question was: "If people buy into [Al Gore’s] global warming hysteria, will it put him in the White House and our economy on the skids?” Steve Forbes answered yes, and called Gore’s new movie “a real recipe for more socialist regulation.”
I happen to agree with the obviously correct answer by Steve Forbes. Fortunately, the term "if" was at the head of the question, and I don't think very many people buy into Gore's stupidity, but "if" they did in great enough numbers and acted accordingly, it is obviously a recipe for tanking the ecomomy and more socialism, because what Gore is really saying is that the free market is not providing the correct course, the government must intervene and steer us toward much costlier and more uneconomical ways of life, which requires socialistic regulation.
All of this is totally obvious to people that understand the free market and how the economy works.
Since it has escaped your attention, we are a nation of laws. The government exists in large part--through the enactment of laws--to provide for the common welfare of the people. The "free market" is not "free" to do whatever it wants in the name of profit.
Although it may be far more profitable for would-be polluters to pollute our skies or dump their deadly chemicals, waste, etc., into our rivers or bury them in places where the toxins can seep into the water table, the people--through their elected legislative representatives--have determined that profit does not trump the health, safety, and welfare of the people. Accordingly, regulations are enacted to protect the environment in which we live.
The "free market" system does not reign supreme--it is subject to governmental regulation. All of this is totally obvious to people who understand the purpose of government and how it works.
Nobody denies that. But hopefully government regulation to the total exclusion of the free market does not reign supreme. History shows that to be an utter failure both economically and environmentally.
Nobody has suggested that, Okie, at all.
Cycloptichorn
okie wrote:Nobody denies that. But hopefully government regulation to the total exclusion of the free market does not reign supreme. History shows that to be an utter failure both economically and environmentally.
What a lame remark. Total made up hysterical bull$hit. Explain for the rest of us with real world examples how the US government regulates to the
total exclusion of the free market. The only truly free market is the black market and one can assume by your remarks you are pissed off that we have drug laws that prevent 12 year olds from being
legally allowed to drive a spike full of heroin into their arms.
everytime a newbie drunk on Ayn Rand arrives here I have to post this.
Quote:"The normal and proper aim of the corporate community is to make money for its managers and for the owners of business all the better if its members also contribute to the general prosperity. However, business acts on the prevailing business philosophy, which claims that corporate self-interest eventually produces the general interest. This comfortable belief rests on misinterpretation of the theory of market rationality proposed by Adam Smith.
"He would have found the market primitivism of the current day unrecognizable. He saw the necessity for public intervention to create or sustain the public interest, and took for granted the existence of a government responsible to the community as a whole, providing the structure within which the economy functions.
"Classical political thought says that the purpose of government is to do justice for its citizens. part of this obligation is to foster conditions in which wealth is produced. the obligation is not met by substituting the wealth-producer for the government.
"Business looks after the interests of businessmen and corporation stockholders. Stark and selfish self-interest obviously is not what motivates most American businessmen and -women, but it is the doctrine of the contemporary corporation and of the modern American business school."
"It does not automatically serve the general interest, as any 18th century rationalist would acknowledge - or any 21st century realist."
William Pfaff
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0126-01.htm
Could earth warming destroy our economy?
Quote:Deserts may be creeping closer to cities By ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer
Deserts in the American Southwest and around the globe are creeping toward heavily populated areas as the jet streams shift, researchers reported Thursday.
The result: Areas already stressed by drought may get even drier.
Satellite measurements made from 1979 to 2005 show that the atmosphere in the subtropical regions both north and south of the equator is heating up. As the atmosphere warms, it bulges out at the altitudes where the northern and southern jet streams slip past like swift and massive rivers of air. That bulging has pushed both jet streams about 70 miles closer to the Earth's poles.
Since the jet streams mark the edge of the tropics, in essence framing the hot zone that hugs the equator, their outward movement has allowed the tropics to grow wider by about 140 miles. That means the relatively drier subtropics move as well, pushing closer to places like Salt Lake City, where Thomas Reichler, co-author of the new study, teaches meteorology.
"One of the immediate consequences one can think of is those deserts and dry areas are moving poleward," said Reichler, of the University of Utah. Details appear in Friday in the journal Science.
The movement has allowed the subtropics to edge toward populated areas, including the American Southwest, southern Australia and the Mediterranean basin. In those places, the lack of precipitation already is a worry.
Additional creep could move Africa's Sahara Desert farther north, worsening drought conditions that are already a serious problem on that continent and bringing drier weather to the countries that ring the Mediterranean Sea.
"The Mediterranean is one region that models consistently show drying in the future. That could be very much related to this pattern that we are seeing in the atmosphere," said Isaac Held, a senior research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He was not connected with the research.
A shift in where subtropical dry zones lie could make climate change locally noticeable for more people, said Karen Rosenlof, a NOAA research meteorologist also unconnected to the study.
"It is a plausible thing that could be happening, and the people who are going to see its effects earliest are the ones who live closer to the tropics, like southern Australia," said Rosenlof. Her own work suggests the tropics have actually compressed since 2000, after growing wider over the previous 20 years.
Reichler suspects global warming is the root cause of the shift, but said he can't be certain. Other possibilities include variability and destruction of the ozone layer. However, he and his colleagues have noted similar behavior in climate models that suggest global warming plays a role.
Moving the jet streams farther from the equator could disrupt storm patterns, as well as intensify individual storms on the poleward side of the jet streams, said lead author Qiang Fu, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist.
In Europe, for example, that shift could mean less snow falling on the Alps in winter. That would be bad news for skiers, as well as for farmers and others who rely on rivers fed by snowmelt.
"This definitely favors or enhances the frequency of droughts," Fu said of such a shift.
Apart from the example of a "black market" which has been pointed out, "free market" economies have never existed in legal terms. The English have always been fond of touting their "free market" policies. However, the reality was always quite different than the disingenuous theory which was propounded. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the merchants of the City proposed the elimination of all import duties, in the belief that that could be used to get reciprocal elimination of duties in countries with which the English traded. They were confident that they could then defeat the competition by introducing cheap goods produced by economies of scale, knocking out the domestic competition in the countries into which they traded. A good example of the implications of the cheap goods produced in England and France being poured into another economy is the constant struggle in the United States before the American civil war between southern states who opposed the tariff, and northern states who wanted a tariff to protect domestic manufacture.
Even in England, there was not true "free trade." The Corn Laws (for our American readers it is well to remember that in the rest of the English-speaking world, corn refers to grain, wheat or rye) which were in force from 1804. During the Napoleonic wars, corn (i.e., wheat and rye) could not be imported from the continent, and grain farming expanded dramatically. Even imports from the United States, where production was relatively small, could not make up the short fall. Enclosure acts from the 16th century onward had tended to destroy the small farmer in England, and when wheat and rye became large cash crops, members of the landed gentry took advantage of the situation to put millions of acres in grain. Fearing a glut of continental grain with the end of hostilities, the first, tentative Corn Law was passed in 1804. Wheat and rye were sold in "quarters," which is eight bushels. In 1812, a quarter of wheat fetched six pounds, six shillings six pence per quarter. Three years later, with the end of the wars and a continental harvest ready to export to England, the price plummeted to three pounds, five shillings seven pence the quarter. The 1815 Corn Law created an import duty which raised the price of imported wheat to four pounds, five shillings the quarter. Wheat could only be imported duty free when domestic wheat rose to a price of 80 shillings (four pounds sterling) per quarter. The efficacy of "free markets" has often been touted by English economists by referring the "stable" price of wheat in England for more than a century--but only by studiously ignoring the Corn Law and its effect.
One major effect of the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars was to loosen the grip of the Spanish on their overseas empire. In particular, the English had always wanted to get into Central and South American markets--but they were legally exclued. Smuggling thrived from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, but smuggling is a "value added" exercise, and the English could not take advantage of the economies of scale which allowed them to manufacture goods more cheaply than their competitors, especially with the absence of French competition. (French goods were historically of a better quality than the English goods, but more expensive. Indians in North America preferred to trade their furs and beaver pelts with the French, because they got a better quality of goods than could be had from the Hudson's Bay Company, and the French would also trade brandy, while the English typcially sought to exlude alcohol from trade goods destined for the Indians.) With the collapse of the Spanish monarchy, the English were free to trade into Central and South America, and were already well positioned to do so, with colonies in the Antilles and in what is now Belize, as well as Guyana on the South American coast. Their trade prospered enormously, and help to partially make up for the loss in export growth which resulted from Napoleon's continental system of exclusion of British goods.
With the end of those wars, and the successful revolutions throughout Latin America, the English estalished a large and profitable trade with Latin America. After the collapse of the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1830, the French re-entered the market in a big way. There was room for them along side the English: the French tended to export high-end manufactured goods, and high-end textiles (silk, satin, velvet) while the English went for volume with cheap manufactured goods and cheap textiles (cotton and linen). English and French citizens trading in and based in those countries often made loans to one side or another in the constant political and military struggles of Latin American nations (notably in Mexico, a market larger than all others combined), seeking to profit from the instability of the governments. Newly erected regimes, of course, repudiated the debts of their predecessors, and the English and French agents on the scene howled. No longer content with dumping of cheap goods in those markets, the French and English took to seizing customs houses in those nations to get the repayment of debts to their citizens--they had abandoned the theory that no duties would encourage other nations to the same policy, since duties would allow them to collect the debts of their citizens.
When the United States Navy arrived off Vera Cruz for Winfield Scott's invasion of Mexico, the Royal Navy and the French Navy were off the coast--they had seized the customs house at Vera Cruz in order to collect debts for their citizens. The arrival of the United States Navy in force convinced them that they had better things to do elsewhere. When the Army of the Reform finally defeated the Mexican conservatives at Vera Cruz in 1859, the Royal Navy and the French Navy arrived once again to seize the customs house to collect debts alleged by their citizens. The Royal Navy pulled out, though, when it became apparent that Napoleon III intended to invade Mexico and set up an Emperor. Theodore Roosevelt as President got into an "eyeball to eyeball" staring match with the Royal Navy over the customs houses in Venezuela. In 1905, Lord Salisbury and Theodore Roosevelt narrowly avoided a nasty little war in the region during a border dispute between Venezuela and Bristish Guyana (now simply the nation of Guyana). The United States seized the customs house at Vera Cruz in 1913.
"Free trade" has never existed, it's a myth. When nations use their navies to collect the debts of their citizens, and impose import duties on goods entering other nations in order to collect the alleged debts of their citizens, the notion of "free trade" is ludicrous. Lord Palmerston, who long held the portfolio as Foreign Minister in England, invented "gunboat diplomacy," and was notorious for bullying smaller nations with the Royal Navy. In the most notorious incident, he sent the Royal Navy to force the Greek government to pay an alleged debt to a Greek gentleman who also happened to be a British subject.
Once again, "free markets" are a myth.
okie wrote:The question was: "If people buy into [Al Gore's] global warming hysteria, will it put him in the White House and our economy on the skids?" Steve Forbes answered yes, and called Gore's new movie "a real recipe for more socialist regulation."
I happen to agree with the obviously correct answer by Steve Forbes. Fortunately, the term "if" was at the head of the question, and I don't think very many people buy into Gore's stupidity, but "if" they did in great enough numbers and acted accordingly, it is obviously a recipe for tanking the ecomomy and more socialism, because what Gore is really saying is that the free market is not providing the correct course, the government must intervene and steer us toward much costlier and more uneconomical ways of life, which requires socialistic regulation.
All of this is totally obvious to people that understand the free market and how the economy works.
What's the value of money? Nothing. Money has no value. It is a symbol of value or commodities THAT COME FROM THE PLANET.
The commodity that money is based on is gold.
What happens when the resources or the "commodities" begin to go away?
Are we goin to eat, breath, and drink gold and papper money??
--------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_fundamentalism
Market fundamentalism
It refers to the idea that the free market is always beneficial to society, that the common good is always best served by market forces. Critics argue that markets sometimes produce beneficial results, sometimes negative results. They argue that where the market works for the public interest, it should be allowed to do so, and where markets work against the public interest, state regulation should step in.
---------------------------------------------------
"where markets work against the public interest, state regulation should step in."!!!!
What we have now is a free market with the usual regulation, constraints, and influences upon it. Just because a horse has a bridle on it does not mean it isn't a horse. We don't get to where we want to go as efficiently by abandoning the horse and walking.
Gore doesn't advocate walking, but the results of an Al Gore policy is to load down the horse, not only slowing its progress but possibly even stopping it in its tracks or killing it, at which point walking would be his next option.
The rider in my analogy is our society and how we govern ourselves.
okie wrote:What we have now is a free market with the usual regulation, constraints, and influences upon it.
In which case, it is not a free market.
Quote:Just because a horse has a bridle on it does not mean it isn't a horse.
It is, however, no longer a free horse.
Quote:We don't get to where we want to go as efficiently by abandoning the horse and walking.
This analogy fails because it assumes that there ever was a free market to be abandoned. You have provided no evidence that this is the case.
Quote:Gore doesn't advocate walking, but the results of an Al Gore policy is to load down the horse, not only slowing its progress but possibly even stopping it in its tracks or killing it, at which point walking would be his next option.
This is an unfounded assertion. The same types of claims were advanced in opposition to a minimum wage, a ceiling on hours, the end of piece work by women and children, unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, and a host of other programs which have made Americans healthy, wealthy and wise. It's the oldest (false) argument against government restraints in the book, and it's a silly now as it ever has been.
Quote:The rider in my analogy is our society and how we govern ourselves.
The rider in your analoby needs to be able to control the horse, hence the bridle, and therefore, the horse is no longer free.
okie wrote:We don't get to where we want to go as efficiently by abandoning the horse and walking.
No, but abandoning the horse for an automobile...
Quote:Gore doesn't advocate walking, but the results of an Al Gore policy is to load down the horse, not only slowing its progress but possibly even stopping it in its tracks or killing it, at which point walking would be his next option.
Do you actually know what Gore is advocating?
