the warm globe revisit
so Mike and i were talking about global warming. we came to a few general core agreements about it. and maybe one would not be able to call them agreements, but mere observations. here is how mike summed it up:
"...we first need to realize that such actions will have consequences. And, if these consequences outweigh the initial threat proposed by global warming, then the best course of action would be to just get out of the way and to try not make things worse by starving people and shipwrecking economies in the name of environmentalism."nice.
it is a very interesting exercise to place a monetary value on things. and when i say things, i generally mean the well-being of people, life, death, poverty, quality of life, etc. if one wants to tackle the global warming argument with logic and practicalness, they need to be able to place a value to these things. or at least have some argument to justify why its important to say...save the world.
but thats hard to think about...what about on a small scale...what about saving one endangered bug? lets start with that...how much is this bug worth? is the well-being of the bug...the life of the bug..is that worth $1 dollar? yeah, i would say so. ok, agreed. but is it worth $100,000,000,000,000 dollars? one bug? i would say no. and why is that? well, i think for that much money, it would be better off to save some actual people. it would be better to save the people of a indigenous tribe in the jungles of congo. human life is more valuable than that of a bug...yeah?
well, we could get into the whole Noah's arc tale and how God put animals on the boat cause God loves his animals...sure. BUT for the sake of this conversation, lets just say a bug is not worth trillions, but is worth one dollar.
so now we need a sharp double edge sword to be able to divide bone and marrow...to draw the line. and that is pretty hard. its like the philosophical debate of a pile of rocks. if you have a billion rocks, its a pile of rocks, yeah? and what if you take one away, is it still a pile? Yeah, i would say so.
But what happens when you have just 3 rocks left...and you take one more away...is it still a pile? and one more? well then its just one and its not a pile anymore, is it?
oh boy, this could get tough.
But going back to bugs...there is a beetle here in eastern Nebraska. endangered beetle...the tiger beetle. and it is only found here.
how much is that worth?
http://lincolnjournalstar.com/news/local/doc486a8b2b41e5b255304622.txt
1 comment:
Present company excepted, it seems odd to me that many of the world's environmentalists are also materialistic Darwinists. How does that work?
If I 1) Believe there is no God, and therefore no "universal" morality, and 2) Believe that we got here through random genetic mutation and natural selection, why should I care if the tiger beetle becomes extinct? I have no moral obligation to said beetle, and in fact I may be doing Mother Nature a favor by helping to weed out a weak little critter who doesn't cut the evolutionary mustard. But I digress.
To clarify, my objection isn't so much a question of money, but more on the grounds that spending this money on *that* means it's not available to spend on *this*. You want to spend $20 million to save this bug? OK. That's $20 million that's off the table for helping the poor in Lancaster county.
What if I told you that with that same $20 million we could set up an endowment to build a shelter that would house up to 100 homeless people at a time, feeding them and giving them career-oriented training and helping them to find work? Would you rather see us save the tiger beetle or help these folks? Maybe this isn't the most realistic example, but the idea is solid. Helping the tiger beetle means not being able to help people.
So, it's not the monetary value that's at issue. Money is just the means by which we can either accomplish A or B. If A is saving the tiger beetle, and B is saving the homeless in Lancaster county, I'm all for B at the expense of A.
To be fair, these developers aren't proposing that we build homeless shelters. I get that. But still, building houses and roads means jobs; especially jobs for the lower/middle class folks.
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