From: billyg@lahonda.Eng.Sun.COM (Bill Gogesch)
Newsgroups: ca.environment
Subject: Re: How much pollution from motor vehicles?
Date: 27 Jul 1992 18:35:24 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems
Distribution: world
Reply-To: billyg@lahonda.Eng.Sun.COM
NNTP-Posting-Host: lahonda

In article 14ro5hINNrl1@hal.com, howard@hasse.hal.com (Howard Gayle) writes:
>In article <l70vmbINN2vk@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>, billyg@lahonda (Bill Gogesch) writes:
>>I'm afraid that lines at fuel pumps, when weighed against the enormous
>>ecological damage caused directly by overconsumption and misapplication 
>>of fossil fuels, looks like a pretty puny argument.
>>
>>Moreover, proper management need not lead to lines at the pump.  I do 
>>believe that management is necessary.  I do not believe that, left to
>>its own resources, the market and the public at large will 'do the right
>>thing'. 
>
>Can anyone offer any evidence that politicians and bureaucrats
>will "do the right thing," especially if "the public at large"
>won't?  Both public choice theory and history show that
>politicians will try to allocate resources to further their own
>interests.  If wise and benevolent beings were available to
>allocate fossil fuels, that would solve the problem.
>Unfortunately, the only choice is between having the consumers
>do it (i.e. a free market) and having the politicians and
>bureaucrats do it.
>--

I'd like to address your question with a few comments.

1.  To look to history as a guide in making decisions for the future is wise.
    We must recognize that basing future plans only on history is to
    presume little or no change in human behavior.  We can and do
    progress, albeit slowly.

2.  I think that the notion of a free market is quite a good thing.  It has
    proven much more benificial to the human condition than centrally controlled
    systems like Communism, as implemented by the former Soviet Union.  Freedom
    allows ideas to flourish and a system of rewards sees to it that the best
    ideas survive.
    
    But, I think we need to recognize that today's free market is complex feedback 
    system.  It responds very rapidly to some inputs and very slowly to others.  It
    is "tuned" to monitary inputs.  Market initiatives and responses that produce
    no monitary benifit are corrected very quickly.  The free market, however,  is
    NOT particularly well tuned to environmental issues.  Businesses tend to use
    a resource until it is economically unfeasible to extract that resource or
    market demand for the resource falls off.  In too many cases it takes ecological
    problems a very long time (decades or more) to translate into the economic
    feedback that the market understands.

    As a society and as concerned inhabitants of an abused planet, I think we need
    to make the free market accountable for its actions.  We need to turn up the 
    volume on non-economic stimuli.  The market should exist to serve the people.
    Too often people are just viewed as "human resources".  We need to take back
    the role of citizenship in the U.S.  It means more than just pulling a lever
    in a voting booth ever couple of years or so.

    I see the free market as something that exists within a framework that allows
    complete freedom within defined boundaries.  The framework can encourage goals
    like energy efficiency, transportation systems that don't cover the country with
    pavement and humane treatment of the people the market serves.  It can 
    discourage the overuse of resources by defining hard limits on their use.  For
    instance less than 4% of Californaia's Old Growth forests are intact.  I 
    suggest that Old Growth is a resource that exploited, but it seems that industry
    has the usual 0% as a target.  They longer they are encouraged to cut forests
    that took thousands of years to evolve, the longer we postpone renewable forestry.
    In 25-50 years we will *desperately* need renewable forests, but we should have
    been investing in them almost a century ago.  The market responded much too 
    slowly.  Teddy Roosevelt showed the courage to take a stand on National Parks.
    We need someone to take the nest logical step on National Resources.

    I think that we (our government) has a role in managing our resources.  In doing
    so, it offers these resources to the free market.  If the market chews up its
    ration of resources it can get no more.  In this way, we can encourage efficency
    in industry and protect our resources.  We need a horizon that extends beyond
    that of the free market.


3.  In a related note, I saw an editorial comment in _The Economist_.  It said that
    Communism was an attempt to cure the ills of Capitalism.  It turned out that
    the cure was worse than the ills.  The death of Communism does not mean the
    world's problems are solved.  We still have Capitalism.

    Capitalism is a free system that measures its performance solely on the economic
    axis.  I think we need to recognize that we would be better served by a system
    that was multi-dimensional.


We must succed at improving our government.  The consequences of failure are dire.