Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous

[Michael Hardner]

I can't help noticing there isn't much talk going on in this place about the environment, or about global warming. The talk is all about money, about how much those evil rich capitalist nations should be paying to the poor, downtrodden, long-suffering third world "holes", whether the aforementioned holes ought to be expected to actually do anything for that money.

Apparently the suggestion they ought to be expected to do something has outraged much of the third world. "Give us the money and shut up!" is the cry.

Oh, and the Chinese are angry at the suggestion that the world might want to verify some of the emission reports the Chinese are reporting. Like, if you can't trust a brutal, corrupt Communist dictatorship to honestly report information who CAN you trust?

This is why the discussion needs to be broken down, and why we need to have honest proxies of the main point of view brought in so that a true consensus can be found.

Would FOX News be likely to nominate a scientist to represent them at discussions, with the condition that they abide by the findings of that scientist ? If not, then they're not an honest stakeholder in this issue, and are likely just making noise to attract attention to their news sources.

[eyeball]

Value.

Value of what, things that just pop out of thin air?

Don't be dumb. The use of natural resources are fundamental to any economy. They're there to be used. You can't 'audit' our economy and then subtract from its growth the depletion of our resources. That wouldn't make sense.

No, not if you wanted to maintain the illusion that natural resources just go on forever. As far as auditing not being possible go tell it to the World Bank. I doubt their heart is really into the sort of deep audit described below but I suppose its a start.

Full cost accounting, triple bottom line, measuring well-being and other proposals for accounting reform often include proposals to measure an "ecological deficit" or "natural deficit" alongside a social deficit and financial deficit. It is difficult to measure such a deficit without some agreement on methods of valuating and auditing at least the global forms of natural capital (e.g. value of air, water, soil).

The concept of natural capital implies that the savings rate of an economy is an imperfect measure of what the country is actually saving, because it measures only investment in man-made capital. The World Bank now calculates the genuine savings rate of a country, taking into account the extraction of natural resources and the ecological damage caused by CO2 emissions.

Link

I guess the real trick is to get people to agree on methods of evaluating and auditing. I noticed World Bank estimates acknowledge the limits to its data and that fish stocks for example are not counted. Well, I have a fair bit of experience about what happens to a local economy when the local environment no longer produces natural capital in the form of fish. It starts going backwards really fast and terms like 'social deficit' start to take on a tangible auditable meaning.

[wyly]

Having State owned oil companies will skew those numbers, case in point Kuwait, Quatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Try opening up a golf course in Venezuela and see how that goes over...

The problem with State owned oil is that nobody except the government makes money, and nobody gets rich. It's such an inefficient and horrible way of developing an oil industry.

The average joe in Venezuela might not pay much for taxes, but government is very intrusive there. For a country floating on oil depending on big government, it has resulted in a massive failure.

the massive fail was decades of capitalist corruptions that left a potentially wealthy oil country in poverty...with all Venezuela oil wealth the only people well off were the shareholders of foreign oil companies and corporate elite Venezuelans, leaving the majority in poverty...ya the country is so horribly run by the oppressive socialists that the people keep democratically reelecting them to power...

[Wilber]

Bravo, let's nationalize the oil companies and sell gasoline for 3 cents a liter just like Hugo. Take that Copenhagen.