CO2

@Cedur216 I see you are from Ukraine. You folks just recently escaped Communism - many of you don't understand how the free market works.

Go see the movie "Wall Street". Gordon Gecko says - "Greed is good !". He is right ! When you make a shoe, you want to sell it at a good profit. That is greedy. You make a good shoe, so people will buy it. People want a good shoe, they are greedy for a good shoe. Everybody is greedy, everybody gets what they want - the world becomes a better place.

Greed works for all of us ! Adam Smith discovered this in the 18th century. Read the book !

@weplaychess90 It has risen by a small amount - and that seems to be a good thing. Plants thrive on CO2 - it is helping the earth get greener. I care about the environment, so that is great news.

On the other hand, Wind turbines create a lot of pollution in their manufacture, transportation and disposal. They also kill thousands of endangered animals - birds, whales, etc.

@ambrooks the increase of temperature helps with desertification.

@weplaychess90 Desertification is most often due to human caused deforestation. Like in Haiti or North Africa. CO2 grows more trees and thus counteracts desertification.

@ambrooks said in #52:
> @weplaychess90 It has risen by a small amount

Around 0,9 Degrees Celsius?

@ambrooks A Carbon Tax wouldn't break the free-market, and would hurt free-market enemies, like China, more than anyone else. And it's also the best solution to encourage CO2 reduction.

@weplaychess90 You are just showing your lack of education in economics. Carbon taxes are regressive and hurt the poor the most. Poor people need carbon-based energy to protect themselves against the elements.

Poor countries don't have the money to waste on silly stuff that doesn't work well like windmills. They need fossil fuels. That's why they use fossil fuels, to raise the living standards of their people.

Your carbon taxes would undo all the progress they have made.

@ambrooks Hydroelectric Power is efficient and emits almost zero CO2, it doesn't need subsidies.
Solar Power is less efficient, but it can be used.
Nuclear Power emits very little CO2, and is efficient.

If the temperatures are rising, they need to develop in a different way, that doesn't use fossil fuels.
Or it can kill the poorests in the long-term.

Edit: cleantechnica.com/2022/06/08/just-the-facts-the-cost-of-solar-has-fallen-more-quickly-than-experts-predicted/

Solar Power is equally as efficient as other sources of energies, because the cost has dropped a lot...

@ambrooks said in #51:
> @Cedur216 I see you are from Ukraine. You folks just recently escaped Communism - many of you don't understand how the free market works.

Sure, 32 years 7 months 29 days ago is "just recently". Could you be more condescending, please?

> Go see the movie "Wall Street". Gordon Gecko says - "Greed is good !". He is right ! When you make a shoe, you want to sell it at a good profit. That is greedy. You make a good shoe, so people will buy it. People want a good shoe, they are greedy for a good shoe. Everybody is greedy, everybody gets what they want - the world becomes a better place.

For you maybe. And that might be all you care about. But one doesn't need to belong to the class of 1965 who took Economics 101 in order to see how woefully simplistic this view of the world is.
Suppose you want to make the most profit possible (maximum greed). But shoemakers and seamsters need to be payed a living wage in your country. So rationally – in full accordance with your goal of maximising your profit – you move your production overseas (killing jobs at home). There you can open sweatshops without having to worry about many rules and regulations, without caring for worker health or benefits, without caring about fire protection, building codes, building maintenance, earthquake engineering ...
There you can produce at a MUCH lower cost, far offsetting the additional shipping costs, because you can get away with paying people starvation wages, make use of child labour and wage slavery. Well hidden in an opaque network of local contractors and subcontractors who you can easily blame (and move on to the next one) when one of your sweatshops is exposed by investigative journalism or burns 500 people alive due to inadequate fire protection or simply spontaneously collapses (burying hundreds) due to shoddy (earthquake) engineering. That's not your fault, that's THAT country's fault, that's THAT subcontractor's fault, nothing to see here.
Surely your people's desire to have good/cool/fashionable shoes (every other month) is more important than a few disposable lives.

So here's an example of how greed doesn't make the world a better place for everyone. It only makes the world better for you (impersonal you, meaning the shoe manufacturer in the above example). And the few beneficiaries of the economic system. It can make it a living hell (or mean death) for people you don't seem to care about – or more charitably are woefully unaware of.

And I haven't even started about the environmental disaster that is the (fast) fashion industry. Even IF you don't believe that the roughly 3 BILLION tons of carbon dioxide (about 8% of all global emissions) added to the atmosphere each year by the fashion industry alone are very harmful (which they are, because they drive anthropogenic climate change, as all available data indicates), you still have to tell me in what way "92 million tonnes of waste produced per year and 79 trillion litres of water consumed" (www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-0039-9) are nothing to worry about and actually make the world a better place. Because as you tell us we are rightfully greedy to own more clothes than we can ever wear or need and to throw them out months after we first bought them.

But again, you (presumably) do not live in a place that experiences water scarcity (yet) and you don't have your drinking water poisoned by landfills or your lungs filled with particulate matter from garbage incineration. So you don't appear to care. Or you don't know. You think greed makes the world a better place for everyone.

No. It doesn't. It benefits those who are greedy and voracious. It harms everyone else, especially the most vulnerable. The poor and the unborn (future generations have to pay the price for the destruction of the natural world, will die in more frequent extreme weather events, etc.). You might not be/feel personally affected, but please don't pontificate on others.

> Greed works for all of us ! Adam Smith discovered this in the 18th century. Read the book !

Does it? Does it really?

@Thalassokrator How ridiculous that you seem to think that the existence of corporate offshore outsourcing serves as a general critique of free market economics.

If a hypothetical good-guy government in - let's say the USA - were to be confronted with companies outsourcing to India exploiting workers with bad working conditions - under which same industry workers were protected by government regulation in the USA - there is nothing wrong with the US government applying whatever tariff is required in order to LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD.

That is totally irrelevant to my general description of the free market as the driver of prosperity. Which it is.

And your mindless rant about the pollution of the clothing industry is pointless. You wear clothes. Sensible pollution rules exist. If they need to be tightened or loosened that can be debated in a free and open society.