From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Mon Feb 04 2002 - 19:39:15 MST
t> <20020204115130.A15412@mindstalk.net>
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Damien Raphael wrote:
>
> Out of curiosity... if it _were_ proven beyond scientific doubt that
> our emissions were warming up the planet, to dangerous levels, what
> would the libertarian response be? Note that "suing the polluter" isn't
> obviously effective here, since the polluters are just about everyone.
>
> Conversely, one Drextech scenario has been people sucking so much CO2
> out of the atmosphere to build diamondoid structures with that a new Ice
> Age gets triggered. Same question applies.
As a libertarian, I am fully in support of mechanisms to cause energy
prices to accurately reflect the externalized costs of the particular
energy source they were generated from. The problem is, though, that
only a fraction of a percent of energy tax revinues, wherever they are
imposed, are ever spent on mitigating these externalized costs. The vast
majority go to supporting welfare state bureaucracies that subsidize
unproductivity. Furthermore, energy taxes are almost never imposed to
accurately reflect the true externalized costs, such as basing them on
carbon emissions. If they were, any nation that did so would rapidly
shift to a nuclear power based infrastructure.
Drextech can construct diamondoid off of limestone instead, which is
where the other 52 Bars of earth's proto-atmosphere went. The other
choice is to only develop Drextech on Venus as part of a terraforming
project, building nanolaunchers whose purpose is to take carbon and
oxygen from Venus and ship it to Mars.
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