Respenus |
11-10-09 11:30 AM |
You know, I'm slightly divided as far as carbon rations are concerned. Although though carbon emission trading is considered a better alternative to carbon rations, they still have their merit.
It is not without its own problems. The first thing is of course government control. Who will decide the amount of rations, will they just cut us off right away, or will they slowly decrease as we slowly adapt to the new environment? How will they decide how much each thing, object, item costs in carbon rations? Fuel is one thing, what about food or clothing? Even electricity is troublesome, as you can't really measure where someone bought their electricity, either making it worth zero in areas with only renewable sources, or very high in old industrial areas. Who then decides to find the golden centre? While I for one don't really mind a centralised state, this might just be going a tad too far as far as control is concerned.
Oh, and how about the rich/poor divide? The rich find a few homeless or less well off people and bang, they're right back at 9M, while others are left to live in the gutter. Which once again brings up my question of how the hell can Labour call itself "socialist", while their politics are Thatcherist (more or less)
What bothers me most is that we just wish to solve the symptoms of a problem, not the problem itself. The first thing is the technology. If more money were invested in green R&D and oil companies taxed more without increasing the fuel price (a levy on company profits while forbidding major price increase), we could easily lower our CO2 energy output to almost zero, considering that we could get all our power from the sun. There are plenty of desserts our there, only Tesla died a few years too soon.
The second one is human population. No matter how much you limit CO2 output, you're going to have a billion more people around the world trying to get to your level. While I don't see that as a problem, I see the number of people trying to do it a problem. Skybird recently mentioned a number of people the while world could support if everyone lived western lifestyles. 500M to maybe, maybe 1B. Time to go digging some graves people. :yeah:
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