James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: The tragic thing is that the economy actually would benefit if half the > unemployed were paid to dig holes in the ground and the other half paid to > fill the holes in. >
That would be something like war. WWII was a tremendous boost to the U.S. economy, even though it mainly consisted of digging holes, blowing things up, and killing people. So it is true that even if there is no global warming, paying unemployed > people to fight it would result in trillions of dollars of benefit simply > because wealth is so insanely maldistributed that the demand side of the > economy is failing to attract capital to job-creation. > In the case of global warming, unlike war, all of the steps proposed to stop it would be beneficial in their own right. Most would be profitable. Some -- such as making as much liquid fuel as the Middle East does -- would be insanely profitable. > The first thing you do in any business plan is look at whether there is > demand for the thing the business provides: No demand -- no investment. Businesses are often wrong when they make these evaluations. The minicomputer companies all rejected the idea of making personal computers in the 1980s because they saw no profit in it. That is why they all went bankrupt. Large companies today see no profit in doing cold fusion research. That is very foolish. In the 1850s, there were millionaires in San Francisco so wealthy they could could gamble away $100,000 a night at poker. I mean $100,000 at the time, now worth $2.5 million. They had money to burn, but they would not invest $600 in a venture to build the Transcontinental Railroad. No one did, until Lincoln put Uncle Sam in charge of funding it, loaning the money ($48,000 per mile of rail in California), and giving huge rewards to the companies that took the risk, including 33 million acres of land. The loans were paid back. Most decision makers at large businesses, banks, Wall Street and government agencies such as the DoE are not very smart, in my opinion. I have often read their books and opinions. In 1929 and again in 2008 they destroyed the economy by making very stupid mistakes. - Jed
