Here is my responce to Dan. In honesty, his post was much longer but I truncated it for brevity. The gist is retained.
Dan Foster wrote:
What is so bad about the electric utilities moving to cleaner sources of electricity? Even if climate change isn't as urgent as people originally thought is was, who cares? In the next 20 years, there will probably be plenty of clean energy technologies that become just as cheap as the old 19th century coal smokestacks. It's called PROGRESS. It happens.
People in the year 2030 will look back at the people of 2010 and think we are primitive Neanderthals compared to the technologies they have. They'll be amazed at how much money we wasted on energy in 2010.
Why use mercury spewing, super polluted coal plants if you don't have to? You want more of those in your state? You want to have pollution in America as bad as it is in China? Not me.
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Larry Killen replied: (your comment)
Danny, my boy. There has been a phenomenon going on since the cave man that has shown that progress results in cleaner living. It is a natural state of the market. Pollution is waste. Affluent cultures are always cleaner and have fewer children, by the way. But this is a result of market forces and not government edicts. The very moment you throw the force of government into the mix, the machine begins to run backwards.
Regulation invites corruption. Rules and waivers are always for sale. Governments are all about power. Pittsburgh went from being one of the filthiest places on the planet to being a beautiful city, even long before the steel mills closed. Why? Because smoke going up the stacks cost money.
Look at the computer at your finger tips. Right now you are commanding power that would have required gigawatts, only fifty years ago! You now command the power that would have been the envy of kings, if not gods, a century ago. Now think of the resources and energy that would have been consumed to process just this article and the comments. Just one article and the resultant comments!
For the readers to have read this article, they would have had to had gotten a paper delivered to them. Maybe it was just a news-letter and not the entire newspaper - I'll grant you that. I have no idea of the number of people who have read this column but let us limit it to just those that have commented; which is over a thousand thus far. So someone would have had to printed up this newsletter, using ink, paper and energy. The newsletter would have had to been placed in envelops and mailed out by someone, flown all around the country and delivered to each individual. What resources and energy and resources was consumed to do that?
All of the posts that you have read today would have had to have been written on paper, sealed in envelops and mail from their location to New York City. Somebody in a mail room would have had to open the mail and transpose all those letters onto the comment section of a paper. Everybody who has read this today would have been delivered a second newsletter made from cutting down precious trees and processed in paper mills. And the ink for us to write all our letters and print those papers uses resources and energy. How about the stamps and the fuel for mail trucks. Even all the human resources that would have been consumed just for one day of comments must be taken into account, including the food they eat and water they drank.
Just think what it would have taken to accomplish the very exchange of information half century ago!
Now, do you remember any government program in 1960 that demanded we create an On Line newspaper, just to save fuel and make the world cleaner? So what force was in effect to got that computer on your desk? What is a government program? Was it the result of regulation? Or was it the invisible hand of the market?
Trust the force, Danny. The market force!
