Most of the main Green policies are terrifying

models such as?


I maintain that there largely isn't such a thing as "impossible to be affordable" as long as it is possible, even if it costs millions to get unobtainium, whether it be manufactured, mined, artificially produced, whatever, if somebody is willing to pay enough for it it will be done. And I think we're thinking of different "affordable"s


And a century ago the same was said of travel to the moon; heavier than air flight two centuries ago; lighter than air three centuries ago. Do I need to find things to keep going with?
And what exactly are these ethical issues? I suppose in theory you could run into issues with the Outer Space Treaty, but I that would be a pretty desperate attempt given it says nothing about private entities.



May well happen regardless, and I can't see that as a necessarily bad thing anyway.

I have responded to your points. The fact you're incapable of understanding my answers indicates I've reached a point where it's not worth my time. I will try one last time though.

Say you have this tree-based logging society we were talking about. 100% trees with $100 of GDP. And then one day Citizen 1 writes some software, and Citizen 2 buys it for $2 and uses it. The economy has just grown by $2, GDP has gone from $100 to $102. No issue with resource exploitation, it's just very very simple. The fact you can't comprehend it is astounding.

You didn't ask me for evidence, you made a snide comment indicating you are utterly ignorant of the fact that air is cleaner now than it was 50 years ago. Do you deny that?

There is also evidence to suggest air in London is cleaner than it was 500 years ago, because we don't have tens of thousands of wood and coal fires burning in the city.

I'm sorry, you're utterly clueless, you're even "remembering" things you didn't even say

Models built around collective ownership. People are much more likely, for instance, to support the building of renewable power buildings like wind turbines if they actually benefit from them, rather than the profits going off to some foreign multinational. This is a model that is proven to work and it is the driving cause behind virtually all major successful solar developments across the developed world and is the reason why Germany is now able to routinely get over 50% of its energy from renewable resources. It's completely possible, it just requires the rejection of capitalism.

You are being totally pedantic. If it costs thousands of times more to extract something than people are reasonably able to pay for, it's by all definitions unaffordable.

A few decades ago, people thought we'd have colonies on the moon and would have regular tourist visits to Mars. Technology is completely unpredictable. We can say with a high level of certainty that technology will continue to develop rapidly, but we don't know what those developments will be. Space development in particular has been notoriously slow and the price of space exploration hasn't significantly decreased since we first got people onto the moon. And you basically mentioned the problems yourself - what gives a company the right to mine an asteroid? No government on earth owns it so why on earth should a company be allowed to exploit resources that nobody gave it the authority to mine in the first place?

And are you genuinely saying that you think the deaths of billions of people isn't bad? Either you're joking or you're a clinical psychopath...




That is not how growth works! Growth is not the cumulative value of everything that has ever existed! If you have a steady-state business that produces X trees per year, it is not growing, it's in steady state! And there's no evidence to suggest that air was cleaner 500 years ago. Find me a shred of evidence that possibly even implies that. Clue: you won't, because it's utter nonsense. The only pollutants being released 500 years ago was a negligible amount of CO2, CO and soot that's absolutely nothing in comparison to what's going on today. We have millions of fires burning in our city today, the difference is that they're inside car engines. Different look, same (actually much worse) effect.

Where did I say that? Can you quote it?

Of course you can't.

What I pointed out is that London's air quality is far better today than it was in the 1950s and for hundreds of years before that. It's embarassing you didn't know that

Of course you'll probably do all you can to avoid admitting it because it goes against your quasi-religious narrative that all environmental indicators are getting worse

Say you have this tree-based logging society we were talking about. 100% trees with $100 of GDP. And then one day Citizen 1 writes some software, and Citizen 2 buys it for $2 and uses it. The economy has just grown by $2, GDP has gone from $100 to $102. No issue with resource exploitation, it's just very very simple. The fact you can't comprehend it is astounding.

That is not how growth works! Growth is not the cumulative value of everything that has ever existed!

Who are the thought police? Who is the Chief Constable of the Thought Police?

Do they have a website? Or is this just more Green hysteria?

This here actually got me thinking for a moment just how intangible so many of our assets are these days. Yes, there are still a lot of tangible assets and they still make up huge amounts of our net assets, but I was thinking just in this room what do I have?
Well, I have a few thousand pounds worth of tangible assets, the most significant contributor being my desktop, then my watch, then tablet, phones etc but then on that computer there is a games catalog that is also worth thousands, and ultimately that is mostly, as good as, intangible. Yes, I need some form of storage medium and the hardware to run the games and yes the infrastructure needs to be there, but that infrastructure is being shared by anywhere from just myself, all the way up to tens or hundreds of millions of people. And then, ultimately, what is that games library worth thousands? Well, nothing more than a few trillion electrons which I can make a copy of (or the data they hold), and those exact same electrons can be used by absolutely everybody else.

What do you think of these articles about why infinite economic growth is possible? (By infinite, I obviously don't mean "until the heat death of the universe"; think of it as indefinite growth.)

http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-continue-forever-of-course/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100017248/infinite-growth-on-a-finite-planet-easy-peasy/

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/murphys-law.html

Correct. It's the cumulative value of everything that has been produced in that year.

So that 100% tree economy that produces $100 of GDP per year from logging one day sees one of its citizens produce $2 of software, and GDP goes from $100 to $102. If he doesn't produce anything the next year and they go back their yearly logging worth $100, then the economy will contract by $2 and go back to $100.

But that's not at issue. What's at issue is your claim that the economy can only grow by some form of resource exploitation, whereas I just pointed out that in the case of software, the economy grows without it.

Therefore, the entire "we must have economic contraction because economic growth = resource consumption" is debunked.

Game, set and match, my dear boy

Correct. It's the cumulative value of everything that has been produced in that year.

So that 100% tree economy that produces $100 of GDP per year from logging one day sees one of its citizens produce $2 of software, and GDP goes from $100 to $102. If he doesn't produce anything the next year and they go back their yearly logging worth $100, then the economy will contract by $2 and go back to $100.

But that's not at issue. What's at issue is your claim that the economy can only grow by some form of resource exploitation, whereas I just pointed out that in the case of software, the economy grows without it.

Therefore, the entire "we must have economic contraction because economic growth = resource consumption" is debunked.

Game, set and match, my dear boy

But the value of new software in real terms is static so no it can't make growth.

Or they do and they want to change it

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That's completely meaningless though. Who decides that value? If we have the exact same resources floating about, value is just some abstract thing humans have invented. If you have a totally software-based economy that's completely independent of the world, you're not creating anything, you're simply modifying electromagnetic information. There's only so much value humans can have in things. If you decide that program B is more valuable than program A then that's great, but it's also physically meaningless. That's some abstract human notion, it has no root in physics. That growth is imaginary, it's not real growth. Nothing is actually growing, what's happening is that people are calling steady-state, growth. That doesn't mean it is.

But the value of new software in real terms is static so no it can't make growth.

That's completely meaningless though. Who decides that value?

By that logic, all GDP values are overstated, for one we can slash in excess of 75% off our GDP. It's irrelevant whether the thing being traded is tangible or not, all the system does it measures the flow of money, doesn't really matter what it's for.

If you accept what those arguments are saying, then you also have to accept that "value" is some arbitrary and meaningless concept that doesn't reflect physical reality. If you use some abstract definition of "value" then sure, "value" can keep growing if someone decides to allow it to keep growing. It's utterly meaningless though. One of those articles asserts that infinite growth is possible in a steady state economy. In a steady state economy, there is no change in the amount of work done. So "value" is therefore completely independent of work, so it can't have any physical basis.