[greenyes] Environmental Counterattack

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

Dear David (on your posting of the Goldberg piece),

    I certainly do not harbor any thought that the mainline environmental 
movement does not need to undergo a fundamental re-evaluation. What else 
would a rational person do when the greatest issue to confront us, global 
warming, is not even discussed during the last presidential campaign.

    On the other hand, I do not believe that Golberg, any more than Messrs. 
Shellenberger and Nordhaus, augur anything more for us than a path to leap 
off the cliff.

    There is a chasm of difference between saying something different needs 
to be done than what we have been doing, and saying that abandonment of 
regulation replaced with market incentives IS the way to go.  Now, I know 
that, in the bowels of their articles, one could find caveats, but the 
thrust of what they are consciously doing in toto is to ratify the Bush 
Administration's unambigiously stated approach of abandonment of regulation 
replaced with "volunteerism" -- so revealingly different from his foreign 
policy.

    Wake up everyone and smell the roses.  We live in a U.S. defined market 
economy.  That is one which inexorably pushes everyone to maximize 
externalization of their effluvia, thereby completing defeating market 
prices as a valid means of optimizing societal well-being when depends for 
its validity on costs being allocated with benefits.  And even though the 
private sector has a substantial number of decision makers who as concerned 
with social good as the Sierra Club leadership, the market place 
affirmatively prevents their acting on their beliefs or they will be wiped 
off the floor by their less-considered competitors.

    There is no responsible way to be in favor of either a properly 
functioning marketplace or noble moral values without a strong system of 
regulations.

    Where the range of reasonableness extends is to how to structure and 
implement those regulations -- not on their need to be.

    Yet that is what these panderers have joined sides with for, I suspect, 
cheap personal aggrandizement, not any sort of deep, heart felt belief. 
For, I do not believe that any reasonable person can argue that regulations 
should be dismantled.  Saying that marks one for a hypocrite.

    We are being manipulated by these siren songs, and I believe that we 
need to understand that, not give them any credence.

    Saying that, though, I would like to emphasize, is not meant as support 
for the status quo. We badly need to rethink core beliefs and strategies. 
But, these folk are not the ones whose lead we ought to follow.

    We need to regain control over the course of reform if we are to be a 
part of making a better world (or at the least not a far worse one) for our 
children.

                                                                             
                                Peter


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Peter Anderson, President
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