Most of the main Green policies are terrifying

Nice pathos and all but the pollutant related laws, the climate, business related energy facilities et all aren't analogous to a back-garden and simple property rights. It's not the same at all.

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Why? Explain to me how they're not analogous. Businesses are sending pollutants into the environment that is polluting the water that everybody owns, polluting the air that everybody breathes and is causing the environment that everyone lives in to become less inhabitable. If anything, the garden analogy is a massive understatement. A better analogy would be someone urinating in your water supply and placing a timebomb under your house.

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No it wouldn't because we don't own the climate, air or flora. There's no property to which you can reasonably legislate in terms of particular or singular right to.

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You're very confused, and as you yourself conceded, economically illiterate.

I'm not going to play anymore pigeon chess with you

You've got it the wrong way round. Imagine there's a random guy and every day, he throws his trash into your front garden. When you protest, he says "I'm very willing to dispose of my trash responsibly but only if you pay me so I've got an incentive". Obviously, you'd be pretty pissed off because he has absolutely no right to throw his trash into your garden. Similarly, when a company emits air or water pollution, that goes into the environment and affects everyone. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere affects the entire globe. Sustainability is the default - you shouldn't have to pay people not to throw their trash into everyone else's front garden. We shouldn't be creating "financial incentives" to stop people polluting, we should be creative regulations with punishments serious enough to completely destroy any business that doesn't abide with these regulations. That is the absolute only way a capitalist system can ever be sustainable because companies are never willingly going to be sustainable since it's more expensive for them.

You're very confused, and as you yourself conceded, economically illiterate.

I'm not going to play anymore pigeon chess with you

It never ceases to amaze me how Greens confuse the two very basic concepts of resource consumption and economic growth, and erroneously conclude they are the same thing.

How anyone other than a complete moron could conflate the two is a mystery

It's not true to claim that sustainability is impossible. It's difficult, but many academics have proposed models that could easily work. What definitely is true is that a capitalist and consumerist society is incompatible with sustainability, there's no two ways around that. Capitalism is great for rapid development and we couldn't have got where we are now without it, but it's now the greatest risk we have for our species' future. If you have an economic system where the dominant force is corporations whose only goal is to make money and where laws are cost-benefit calculations, you're not going to have a system that develops for the good of the people. The only truly sustainable future is a future of communal ownership. I understand that this is completely unacceptable for all major economic powers that exist this day but they're probably not really going to have a choice in the matter. People are already voting in favour of communal ownership all over the world, it's a social movement rapidly growing in strength.

Firstly, there are theoretical limits on resource extraction. There is absolutely no way it is ever going to be possible, at least within any kind of imaginable human future, to do any kind of large scale mining for affordable minerals any deeper than a few kilometres. And shale really isn't the greatest example because shale extraction is mutually exclusive with preventing catastrophic climate change. No degree of cost decreases will make that affordable.

I'm thinking about virtually all mineral resources we use as a society. And extraterrestrial exploration is not a solution because it doesn't exist. There's a remote possibility that it could be potentially feasible in over a century but even that is totally speculative. And on top of the massive economic problems, there are lots of ethical problems attached too.

Fair point, I mean a large civilization. The planet is never going to be uninhabitable for civilization completely, but by uninhabitable I mean a situation where you've got billions of people dying over the course of the next few centuries and probably massive land and resource wars.

They are not analogous because your garden is privately not publicly owned. As for your other examples, unless the time bomb had a countdown longer than your life expectancy and your personal water supply was being cleaned again by the government, then it falls into the same trap of indifference as the first example.

The point being - most people don't take offence to the environmental exploits of businesses because it simply doesn't affect them. Yes they pollute the air and water but our water is cleaned and the air is seemingly fine. There's certainly nothing inhabitable about the street I live on - how about yours? I'm not saying this attitude is right or wrong; I'm explaining to you why your examples won't hold up to public scrutiny.

You've contradicted yourself somewhat. You move from "We shouldn't use incentives to help protect the environment" to "Only a regulated economy can cause people to behave environmentally". The moral argument you propose doesn't conclude that, it instead implies that incentives would work but we shouldn't do that.

I take issue with your example; the key thing with you example is that the man is putting his trash onto someone else's property. That has nothing to do with environmentalism and everything to do with private property rights. But the argument is an irreducibly ideological one, whereas I am talking about purely practical concerns, so I shall ignore it.

With pragmatic concerns in mind, I reject your final remark because I think that incentives would be a better solution. Assuming companies will always act selfishly, if you make it so that they have no selfish reason not to be green, through tax breaks and tax disincentives etc, then they will certainly pollute less. The same with the regulations you propose, however they have the double edged sword of a command economy where efficiency and growth is reduced, because there's more barriers to entry for a company in the market. That, coupled with the blanket tax increases on everybody the greens will impose, will be economically beneficial. This will reduce the money which the government has at its disposal to fight the environmental issues. We need to use markets as a tool for good, not stifle them out of existence.

If I'm so confused and economically illiterate, you'd be more than able to actually respond to my points.

You claim the air is cleaner than it's been since the middle ages, I ask for evidence and you give me an article about smog from the 20th Century.

Considering what you said made no sense I think he won.

Try telling that to the people in Japan who were killed in their hundreds from Mercury poisoning, or the people in Bangladesh who are still currently suffering from Arsenic poisoning. Try telling that to the millions of asthma sufferers, the majority of those conditions being blamed on the toxic levels of nitrogen oxides in our cities. Try telling that to residents in many parts of China whose kids can't play outside because of the smog. All of these things are visible and dramatic, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Climate change is a much more significant threat and it's going to affect everyone - to claim otherwise is outright denial. To claim that environmental pollution from big businesses doesn't affect us is just plain wrong. If the public doesn't believe it or Industry denies it, that's another thing. But to claim that these things aren't destroying the environment we all need to live is factually incorrect.



Why do you love selfishness so much? If you admit that companies can only act selfishly, why are you fine with this? You're not benefiting from it, this selfishness is destroying the environment that belongs to you just as much as it belongs to everyone else! I don't understand why you're willing to give away the basic things that belong to everyone away to private entities who treat it like dirt.

You might well think that if you have trouble understanding basic concepts like GDP.

I read somewhere that they were going to legalise membership to terrorist organisations !!!!

You're environmental argument

I read somewhere that they were going to legalise membership to terrorist organisations !!!!

My argument (or rather my comment, which is actually irrefutable) is that resource consumption and economic growth are not the same thing.

If you think they are, you are clueless

'there is no London smog so the environment is better now'.

Getting rid of the thought police