Wouldn't it be the right thing to do for the advanced countries to move quickly on these matters, thus creating a ready supply of technology with lower mass-production prices?
These would then be ready for the emerging countries to buy without their committing more limited resources to development.
Bush has always been against meaningful action. Canada's 30%-prime minister, Harper, is just a drone-like follower.
I'm not totally convinced myself that human activity is generating warming, but moving towards better technologies is itself worthwhile.
Just one example of many. Were we all using compact fluorescent bulbs, the need for new central power plants would be greatly reduced.
The mass production and gradual improvement of solar cells might eliminate the need altogether.
Similar benefits from improved storage batteries, low-resistance transmission lines, and new forms of heat pump.
If warming is generated by human activity, I remain a skeptic that we will be able to rise to the challenge. Our political institutions seem incapable of offering real leadership, except where war and killing are concerned. Then there’s always plenty of chest-thumpers like Bush and plenty of followers ready to pick up clubs.
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John Powers,
The sense of your words is extremely naive, that of rather blow-hard Right Wingers who do not actually understand much economics beyond Economics 101 telling them about supply-and-demand and self-correcting markets.
There are many issues involved here involving market externalities, market imperfections, imperfect competition, social costs, social benefits, and the “free” cost of many resources used by industry.
Surely, even you recognize that America doesn’t have a huge nuclear industry only because of the day-to-day operations of the market.
Indeed, it doesn’t have a high-tech airplane industry for only that reason either.
It wasn’t the free market that built the Interstate Highway System.
Or Hoover Dam.
Or the airports and control systems that guide international air traffic.
Or thousands of other technologies and institutions affecting our lives everyday.
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“before making an all-to-common deranged attack on President Bush…”
Well, if it was deranged, why would you bother to answer?
Do you go about, Mr. Powers, answering the mumblings of the streetpeople on city streets?
That makes just about as much sense as your words directed at me if indeed you truly believe what you say.
But I’m sure you don’t. You are simply name-calling, rather than analyzing or contributing comments, just the sort of thing one might expect from a loyalist to America’s most incompetent president.
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John Powers,
"The lack of grade school level calculation skills infects everyone from Al Gore to Joseph Stiglitz to the windbags (including both Sen. Obama and Sen McCain) now filling the airwaves with condemnation of Phil Gramm."
Don't laugh, but I'm interested in nominating you for the Nobel Prize in economics.
Nomination is a demanding undertaking, but I do feel that, in view of your remarkable native abilities, that it is is worthwhile.
You've obviously found flaws in the thinking of one of the world's most eminent economists, Mr. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner, former World Bank Chief Economist and professor at Columbia.
As many readers will understand, this is an unprecedented achievement on your part, a little like a Sunday School Teacher in Mud Flats, Mississippi, finding errors in Darwin.
But I am a little puzzled by the reference to Phil Gramm.
It does appear to come from nowhere, much like a cloud suddenly drifting across the sun, something having no logical connection with the main subject here.
So before I start filling in the forms, perhaps you would like to expand upon this mysterious reference.
I have no doubt there are deep thoughts involved, but their nature eludes me completely.
