Friday, January 01, 2010

Here's a cogent, passionate, and lucid argument in favor of Copenhagen Consensus-style environmental action. That is, actions which have an effect today, not in the indefinite, distant, phatasmal future; actions which *directly* benefit the poor and disadvantaged; actions which work with gravity - in which a dollar buys at least a dollar's worth of benefit, if not more.

The common trait of current "alternative energy" schemes from the corporatist center and energy taxation plans from the anti-capitalist left is their economic malignity, wherein two dollars buys a dollar's benefit, or worse, a hundred dollars buys an IOU for a hundred dollars in a hundred years. Furthermore, the schemes of the corporatist center and the anti-capitalist left both privilige elites with superior information flows and access for rent-seeking activity, which reducing the absolute global availability of resources; that combination of elite empowerment and negative-sum wealth reductions is guaranteed to lead to impoverishment and pauperization of disadvantaged populations.

No comments: