Owen,
“with enough energy you can reverse entropy.” Nice. But this needs technology and each technolgical step has an energetic and material loss (efficiency). Try, for instance, to calculate the EROI (energetic return on investment for the alu of your tetra pack.
“we might find.” What if we don’t find?
I ‘m in favour of applying the Precautionary Principle: better safe than sorry.
Sorry, I don’t understand your carbon logic. I think most people believe fossil fuels are burned and then gone forever. It took fossil energy stocks many millions of years to be formed in a long ago era that was vastly different from todays world. Maybe there’s some oil in the process of being formed on the bottom of the oceans, as far as rapturous fishing is not destroying whole ocean bottom habitats. I have not heard of any coal being formed anywhere nowadays.

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Owen, sure what you’re talking about may be theoretically possible but relies on technology yet to be invented. your assertion that “there is no limit to our ability to invent” is not in fact true. there are many limits including food, resources, knowledge, time. the fact that we live in an age where some parts of the human population have more than enough of these things does not justify your assumption that this will be the case in perpetuity.

your first comment in this thread is “Pity all his assumptions are without foundation”. yes… pity…

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ACtually, I studied Physics, Maths, Applied Maths and Chemistry to stage 2 level at University and I have written quite a lot about entropy.

Life is anti entropic and hence bacteria can be used to recover the gold out of tailings and with enough energy you can reverse entroy for just about anything.

The concentration of aluminium in clay is very low but we extract it with high powered electrolysis.
If Al ever got very expensive we might find some process to make it worth extracting the Al from the tetrapac. It is not impossible.
I only want to remind people that our use of stuff does not destroy it – but just changes it.
Actually the carbon dioxid from fossil fuels enters the food chain quite quickly. We do not need to transform fossil fuel back into its ‘original” state to make it useful again. By turning it into carbon dioxide we actually area returning it to its original state. where do you think the coal comes from?
Maybe you should have studied biology? But them maybe you did and have forgotten.

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Owen – You appear a follower of the late Julian Simon:

http://www.juliansimon.org/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

One critic is here:

http://www.mnforsustain.org/partridge_e_j_simon_and_perilous_optimism.htm

Even happiness is finite because you can only rise to the seventh heaven.

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Owen – You obviously don’t have a background in physics or an understanding of entropy. We are not “transforming” many of our resources. we are raising their entropy beyond redemption. The aluminium thinly spread on the inside of every tetra-pack is a good case in point. As we scatter this finite resource throughout our landfill systems, we will likely never recover it. No economic theory mumbo jumbo will ever bring it back. As we burn our coal and oil, getting it back into the ground in the form it started in to be re-used again will take millennia.

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OF course we can send species extinct but the great megafaunal extinctions were before industrialisation.

And farmed animals do not go extinct.
And wolves are at no risk of extinction – they have evolved themselves into dogs a species which is in a rich symbiosis with human beings. Once wolves learned to smile and embedded that in their doggie genes their future was assured.

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Hate to throw a spanner in the works but so-called natural resources are infinite because with the exception of alluvial gold and meteoric iron they are all human inventions and there is no limit to our ability to invent.

We do not use up the stuff on the earth we just transform it – so it does not disappear except for the few bits that end up in outer space or vapourised in the sun.
Our power of invention is why natural resources have become ever more plentiful and never run out – except locally. This is also why resources get cheaper during times of population explosion – there are more minds to invent new resources.

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Dear BluePeter

I may have mixed up the term comparative and comparable. “Comparative advantage” is inextricably linked to products that cannot be transported, the fertility of the land, for instance. Nowadays one speaks of “competitive advantage” since in the globalised world skills and manufacturing can be almost freely expatriated to the site with the lowest costs. Thus David Ricardo’s term has passed its “best before” date.

Yes, we are trashing the country and the world.
Yes, green and left do go together, since capitalism/feudalism is bad for people and the environment.
But even the greens and greenz believe in sustainable growth, at least publicly.
In private some prominent greens of the greenz admit that one must abolish the growth scripts.

Warships: why do you think the USA invaded Iraq? They depend for 55+ percent on imported energy. What will the Chinese do when their degraded environments can no longer support their 1.4 billion? I don’t know. They may start sitting and meditate their fate. South-Koreans have bought swashes of land in Madagascar for food and fibre. The Chinese are buying parts of Africa.

No, there are not many scenarios. There are only two:
(1) Depletion of the planet till humanity crashes.
(2) A U-turn, stopping growth and start shrinking.

Resources are finite, technology or hope or optimism or intelligence/creativity cannot replace depleted resources and extinct species. We have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity by far.

If we don’t reduce resource depletion and start living on a drastically lower level of resource throughput we are soon finished.

You might admit this once you’ve looked at the data of resource stocks and increasing depletion rates with rising population and per capita consumption levels. No religion involved, just number-crunching.

This graph is a pretty sure outlook, if we don’t change:
http://www.ecoglobe.org/scenarios/e/adx0.htm

This series by George Harrison is an artistic picture: all things must pass:
http://www.ecoglobe.org/scenarios/e/atmp-0.htm
Note the Gas Prices at £995 pound before collapse.

Cheers … Helmut

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“f** left

…is deemed a swear word.”

Not so fast, BP. “filter test: far left” was your test and it got caught in the spam filter, not the moderation filter. Go figure.

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Thanks, Liberty!

Glad you agree about doing away with parking regulations.

I have two things to say though.

1) Because these market distortions have been in place for such a long time, it will take years to reduce the parking supply enough that users will have to pay the true cost of parking. I support continuing PT subsidies in the interim. As long as we commence removing the subsidies to car travel and car-oriented development then PT will become more efficient and will eventually pay its own way. It is totally counterproductive to subsidise competing forms of transport.

2) I don’t think that fully privatizing urban transport (PT, roads, or parking) is going to get an efficient outcome because the transport system is a natural monopoly. In that situation, you just get private monopolies or at best an oligopoly. I can see the interest potentially in private PT or toll service operators who compete for contracts, but the network planning and integration is best managed by a public authority with an independent oversight group.

If you can’t get a truly competitive market, privatisation produces a less efficient outcome — as evidenced by the privatisation of bus services in Auckland in the early 90s. Ridership reduced by 50% and in recent years private bus companies have found it more profitable to lobby for increased subsidies than to provide a better service.

Also, private parking operators often work against measures to reduce congestion by offering early bird parking at peak hour or offering free parks to lure commuters away from PT. This is because it is more profitable for them to provide for commuters.

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libertyscott

I’d also commercialise roads so property owners paid an access charge for offstreet parking facilities. The road company would price it appropriately, such as paying for any intersection improvements.

I think you need to explain this aspect a bit better. Dont we currently pay road user charges? Would these still apply?

While we currently have an all uncompassing and comparatively simple system of road user charges depended on vehicle type.

What you are suggesting is that irrespective of the type of vehicle you are using, access to the publically owned highways will be a fixed cost.

So a shopping complex carpark owned by westfield with many thousand of daily visitors (customers and suppliers) would pay the same as me who has one or two customers a day coming into the factory drive.

Somewhere I see an adminastrative nightmare. You could end up with westfield shopping centres not providing any public car parking and arguing the toss how many customers and suppliers they should be paying for.

Not saying your idea wont work, it just seems a complicated alternative to what we have now.

And why should the public (which includes workers, owners, customers and supplies at any business venture) pay again for access to a public thoroughfare? They have already paid for the access through the taxes and rates.

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# frog Says:
February 12th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

Wow Johan! – gold star for your rebuttal too!

Not every issue the greens back has such rebuttability thanks to the phar left members. A lot of it is squidgey squashey stuff as in your next post [the maiden speech].

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Frankly, Julie makes a great deal of sense here. I was unaware of the degree of planning interference in the provision of parking. I would simply remove mandatory requirements for minimum OR maximum numbers of parking places. If a property owner wants to provide parking gratis for employees or customers then fine, it is a cost of doing business, but it should hardly be compulsory – nor should councils limit the amount of parking.

I’d also commercialise roads so property owners paid an access charge for offstreet parking facilities. The road company would price it appropriately, such as paying for any intersection improvements.

Of course the fact she wants public transport to be user pays is an anathema to Green Party policy. However, if there are no planning requirements to provide parking, on street parking is operated commercially and road space is also allocated commercially, then public transport would thrive and whither as demand dictates – much as it does over longer distances today.

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FYI chaps – I’ve spotted one of the filter terms:

f** left

…is deemed a swear word.

Funny.

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filter test: far left

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>>Are you not interested in a non-emotional discussion?

Double negative.

>>comparable advantage

Comparative.

>>Market prices, for instance, do not reflect environmental scarcities or predict futures, in many cases.

True to an extent. But that does not therefore mean we’ll act against our long term interests by trashing the country. Wealthy countries tend to have better environments than poor countries.

>“Refugees” can also come with war ships.

I suspect you’ve been reading too many comic books.

The Green scenario is just that – a scenario. There are many scenarios. The problem with predicting the future is that there are too may variables. You need to respect the laws of nature, and stop being so certain about things you cannot possibly be certain about.

An additional problem with the green scenarios are that they are heavily politicized. Just look at the number of f** left people within the green movement. That hasn’t happened by chance.

>>Do you think wishing me off your world makes it more sustainable or the problems go away?

I couldn’t care less what you do. You and I, as individuals, make no difference. The world, and nature, will exist long after we’ve all disappeared.

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>>Are you not interested in a non-emotional discussion?

Double negative.

>>comparable advantage

Comparative.

>>Market prices, for instance, do not reflect environmental scarcities or predict futures, in many cases.

True to an extent. But that does not therefore mean we’ll act against our long term interests by trashing the country. Wealthy countries tend to have better environments than poor countries.

>“Refugees” can also come with war ships.

I suspect you’ve been reading too many comic books.

The Green scenario is just that – a scenario. There are many scenarios. The problem with predicting the future is that there are too may variables. You need to respect the laws of nature, and stop being so certain about things you cannot possibly be certain about.

An additional problem with the green scenarios are that they are heavily politicized. Just look at the number of far left people within the green movement. That hasn’t happened by chance.

>>Do you think wishing me off your world makes it more sustainable or the problems go away?

I couldn’t care less what you do. You and I, as individuals, make no difference. The world, and nature, will exist long after we’ve all disappeared.

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Owen McShane says:

People do have more information than planners and make their decisions wisely – not perfecly but wisely.

Developers, using other peoples money, make the decisions on what will produce most profit and then sell to the public. This way the old Villa is knocked down by the Hummer driving developer as he can outbid the middle class person who loves the villa and its garden. Population and migration ensure there will (just about) always be upward price pressure. Developers fund the political parties ensuring favorable policies.

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Dear BluePeter,

Are you not interested in a non-emotional discussion?

You appear ill-informed or at least you’re shooting from the hip. You need to study “comparable advantage” a bit more.

Your “evidence” is more opinion than fact. Market prices, for instance, do not reflect environmental scarcities or predict futures, in many cases.

“Refugees” can also come with war ships.

“Outlandish scenarios?” Compare this, for instance:
http://ecoglobe.ch/scenarios/e/wef-9128.htm#referencescenario

Do you think wishing me off your world makes it more sustainable or the problems go away?

Kind regards … Helmut Lubbers

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>>I believe BluePeter is living in the widespread realms of illusionary and wishful thinking

Believe what you like. It’s called science. What you’re spouting is religion.

>>works for products that depend on the local land/soil

Tell that to Silicon Valley, the fashion houses of Milan, and the financial district of London.

>>It does not apply for anything that can be transported

We are good at creating cheap milk. We transport that milk to China. China swaps it for TVs. We’re no good at making TVs.

>>Peak-Oil, Peak-Water, Peak-Population, etc. are not far off.

And only a few months ago, peak oilists were saying we’d never see sub $100 barrels of oil again. Their credibility when it comes to predicting the timing of future events is low. The other two won’t happen in our lifetimes, if ever, so no need to panic.

>>One NZ frigate is not going to stave off environmental refugees

Like to see you cross that ocean on a raft.

In any case, your scenarios are outlandish. If you do believe this garbage, then
what are you waiting for? Go live on a commune. Off you go now….

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