Comments dlondonx has made

  • short term and long term trends

    In the short run, I see Oil going past the $50/barrel point, making Venezuela the big cat with all the oil, once its Tar Sands get enomically viable to exploit.  This will prompt Washington to move ire from the Middle East to South America.  Here is where it might be useful to follow Tom's advice and promote better realtionships between the Southern N. American Countries by reducing our bloated Farm Subsidies, and maybe even fostering economic development there to promote consumption of US goods.
    In the long run, I see the demand for Ag Energy land outstripping the demand for Ag Food land, making the sustainable ag practices that Tom writes about and practices a necessity for providing the nations food supply.On How environmentalists can recast the terms of debate around immigration. posted 3 years, 7 months ago 25 Responses

  • fear breeds Fascism as well as Apathy

    I agree with the post.  Fear-mongering tends to be counterproductive because it engenders despair in both the powerless, AND the powerful. When the powerless become afraid, they just hide their heads in the sand.  But when the powerful become afraid, they start to find ways of using the law to protect themselves, leading to fascism.  This, I think, could very well be a spiraling, self-perpetuating cycle.  The environmental experts proclaim more reasons to fear the coming apocolypse, causing the powerful to do more to protect themselves, become more greedy, leading to more environmental problems. The only way out of the cycle is to get wealthy people to have hope that they can preserve their wealth and power, even increase it,  by protecting the environment.  This battle has been going on for centuries.  Whigs promote the hope of liberal ideas, Tories promote the interests of the wealthy and powerful.  Liberal advancement has only been achieved when Whigs could convince the wealthy and powerful (or at least a substantial portion of those not in the top 1%) that their interests were, in fact, not being served by the Tories, but could be served better with liberalisation.On Hope: the new fear posted 3 years, 7 months ago 12 Responses

  • which privaleged group enforces the rules

    I still want to know what the difference is between 'a strict one child/family policy' and 'a group of people deciding who gets to reproduce and who doesnt'.  Governments are, by definition, a group of people who implement laws. Just because you have a fair (sounding) rule, doesnt mean it gets implemented fairly.  And, again, the rule may make sense for us westerners, but it would be devastating to the pre-industrial societies with high infant mortality rates.  But wait, maybe the government could make special rules for these people to have more children in order to have an 'average' of one/family.  But this would be a loophole.  Thats the problem with any population control policy. There are only three ways to implement it.  You could propose a lottery (something like 'The Lottery in Babalon' by Borges :) ).  Winners would be able to have a child, losers would not. Or you could use your idea of a government setting up carrots and sticks to promote less breeding.  Or you could just let the invisible hand of the market work.  The problem with either of the first two is the potential for powerful people to game the system, leading to such nasty things as genocide, widespread infanticide, etc).  Any system which works well enough to reduce the population by what you might think is reasonable will be powerful enough for the privelaged groups to manipulate in unsavory ways.  Any system which prevents this type of manipulation probably wont reduce population by any appreciable amounts.  The problem with the third solution, well, its what we have been talking about the whole time :)On Environmental ethics II: The humanist strikes back posted 3 years, 8 months ago 37 Responses

  • groping towards ethics

    As a Christian/Scientist, I too have struggled with
    the duality problem in an attempt to frame this
    question.  WAL succinctly sums up the problem.
    If we are purely animal, then we live purely by
    the evolutionary drive to ensure that a copy
    of our genes makes it into the next generation,
    period.  Everything that we have tacked onto that
    is subservient to this need, regardless of whether you are the poor farmer slash/burning the Amazon
    forest to raise crops to feed his/her children, or
    the CEO of a large multi-national corporation.  There is no real 'ethics' here.  There, especially, is no concept of 'reducing our population substantially', an idea that really makes me queesy when I think about the practice of some group of humans deciding which people would be allowed to reproduce, and which would not, or which groups should just be destroyed to be even more efficient in meeting this goal.  In this light, it doesnt matter if, as birdboy mentions (and I agree), the animal values its own life, as we must value ours and our children's lives over everything else.  However, as a Christian, like canis candida, I have a framework for believing that other living things have value in God's eyes.  This forces me to think about ways to mitigate our behavior, even in ways that go against our self interests.  Now, how do we go about creating practical, real world systems to mitigate our impact, without agjectly limiting or even pre-empting the lives of others who, as a right, should be able to live as comfortably as we do? The first step, in my opinion, is to take the already expansive laws regarding property, and extend them to account for the property of future humans. Yes, I agree, that it is still homo-centric, but it gets us a hell of a lot farther than standing around arguing about offing ourselves, or just supporting the status-quo.
    On Environmental ethics II: The humanist strikes back posted 3 years, 8 months ago 37 Responses

  • who decides value

    I think the problem with any intrinsic-value
    ethics is who decides the value.  Individual
    species, such as ourselves, have always sought
    to maximize short term survival, and hence, resource
    utilization.  The first massive pollution probably
    came about when oxygen producing bacteria came onto the scene, and polluted the entire earth with their oxygen.  This caused mass extinctions of anaerobic
    bacteria which could not tolerate the oxygen.
    However, was this a 'crime'?  How do you mitigate it.  Who is indemnified in this case?  I think the
    only way forward for us is to find ways of using
    liberal property protection laws to fully account for the cost of current activities on future generations of humans, the only entity that is rationally definable as being indemnified for our current wrongdoings against them.On Environmental ethics II: The humanist strikes back posted 3 years, 8 months ago 37 Responses