by Pops » Thu 20 Feb 2014, 10:43:04
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'W')ont state owned oil companies increase their share of production as the profits get squeezed beyond what would be the cut off point for a private company to do so?
The main point of my post, however, is really the demand side, not the supply side. And the demand side I am refering to is the vast billions of middle class consumers.
Maybe we have start to frame the question as follows. At what point does a vast growing consuming middle class become more of a liability rather than an asset to the global economy?
I look at state owned companies essentially the same as private, they too need to turn a "profit", albeit instead of those profits going to a shareholder, they go mostly to the bureaucracy itself - the big difference being the state run enterprise has essentially no oversight. So the outcome of increasing state supply is probably increasing environmental degradation.
It is only the middle class in it's luxury and leisure that has the time and spare cash to be concerned about environmental degradation. When one is scratching for the next calorie he is not much concerned where it comes from or how it is obtained or the view from the veranda, or especially the view from someone else's.
Just as an example, I belong to an electric coop of which there are lots in Missouri. Every month I and every other "member" receive a magazine from the coop association and every month the first page of editorial is on the EPA's actions and how they will raise electric consumer's rates. Every month the call goes out to coop members to contact their representatives and urge them to vote for low rates rather than environmental regulation.
And that is here at the peak of fossil prosperity. The fall of the middle class doesn't bode well for the environment in my opinion, just the contrary. Unlike lots of other novice nostradamus' I don't see the sheep simply laying down to die. They'll scratch and claw and toss out every environmental regulation and Silent Spring sentimentality in order to preserve their last data plan byte and Pringle chip crumb.
So where you see the elimination of the problem, I see the beginning. Grasshoppers only become a plague when they are overcrowded and starving
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The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)