----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> There is time to hit the brakes, but I share Coby's pessimism that we
> will have the maturity to manage. The train is on autopilot, and I see
> your argument as encouraging the human engineers to remain asleep.
If you go for a revenue neutral solution, as is being proposed by the
Liberal Democrats in the UK, you do not achieve anything, because
you are only moving one type of spending to another. All spending
inevitably means using energy and the vast majority of all energy is
produced today by burning fossil fuels.
There was a naive economic idea called the labour theory of value,
but today the labour is all done by machines so the value, not the
price, is set by the energy expended. Scarcity can set the price
much higher than the value, but in general they are the same.
So, in order for us to reduce global CO2 levels we must not just
pay more for fossil fuels, we must use less. This means we will
have to be poorer. I too share Coby's pessimism, but if we do
not cut back on our own consumption then Mother Nature, aka
James Lovelock's Gaia, will do it for us!
Cheers, Alastair.
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