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PEDDLING_SUSTAIN

                              November 6, 2001

Sustainability 

Constant refrain of the environmental-left. 

Usually the context is opposition to fossil
fuels.  "We are running out of them" and hence 
shouldn't implicitly plan on oil/gas always 
being cheap and plentiful. 

My problem with "sustainability": how do you 
know what you can sustain?  It presumes that 
you're going to restrict yourself to what you 
know you can do, but none of us really knows 
this.  

But let's say in principle we agree that 
oil/coal should be phased out.  How do you 
do that?  

(I say: look for subsidies, and remove them. 
Let market forces do their stuff.  

Added note though: taxes to compensate for externalities
strike me as okay.)

Currently the way we do things is a juggling act, 
we use what we've got, when it starts to get scarce, 
the price starts to go up, so we start looking to 
using something else. 

If sustainability implies stasis, then 
I'm not for it at all... 

Try this scenario: 

We use energy from fossil fuels to get
a low-earth orbit industrial rev going,
and beam massive amounts of solar energy
down from power sats, which in turn can
be used for future space development. 

Is it "sustainable" to use the fossil 
fuels to get to that point?  


Above is contrived, point though is that 
there may be regions you can pass
through that look unstainable, in order 
to get to somewhere without limits. 

Going cold turkey on coal isn't likely 
to be a great idea.  

So what do you do? 

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