ECONOMIST: Ban Of High-Seas Fishing Saves $2 Per Person On The Planet

[hunter]

4. I'm very familiar with medical ethics and economics.

But I see where RMI, for example, takes "normative economics," and I don't like it at all.

In the coal -- nuclear -- "natural gas" debate it leads to irrational decisions, like filthy gas as a "bridge" fuel, solar panels covering the deserts (or stranger, green places like Germany), or increasing swarms of "more efficient" cars.

Symptoms are addressed, not root problems. We get increasingly sophisticated and subsidized iron lungs, not polio vaccines.

Fossil fuel world is death by catastrophic systems failures. Floods, drought, crop failures, and all the other horrors of climate change

"Renewable" energy gadget world is death by a thousand cuts.

The path we are following now is a combination of both.

A truly sustainable modern technological human society would look nothing like the society we have now.

I daresay the greatest forces for environmental improvement are those that empower women, reduce infant and child mortality, promote birth control, and provide comfortable retirements for elderly people, even those with no working age family.

These are not things that can be put in a box and sold.