{"id":237,"date":"2009-09-25T05:54:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-25T09:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intuitiveinvestor.com\/web\/?p=237"},"modified":"2018-08-23T09:04:23","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T13:04:23","slug":"some-brief-comments-about-the-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2009\/09\/25\/some-brief-comments-about-the-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Some brief comments about the environment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Happy Friday everyone. I hope that this post finds all of you doing well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">I wanted to make a few brief comments about the environment, especially as it applies to our modern capitalist economy. Primarily the focus is on two things that dramatically affect the environment:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The &#8220;dead end&#8221; nature of artificial chemicals and other people-made products.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The importance of accurate pricing in capitalism.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Let&#8217;s take these in turn&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; font-size: 16px;\">Dead End Nature of People Made Products<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Unfortunately for the health and well-being of the future of our economy we need to begin to consider the long-term affect on the environment of artificially made products. To make this point a distinction needs to be made between what I am referring to as &#8220;natural&#8221; vs. &#8220;artificial&#8221; products.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Natural products are those that are manufactured by human beings but that are simple in their construction. So wooden furniture is a &#8220;natural&#8221; product because a tree is the raw material and the tree is barely modified from its original state. The nails and screws that connect the wood are also &#8220;natural&#8221; because the metal is again, barely modified from its original state. Glues, varnishes and stains used to be made from various sources that were also &#8220;natural.&#8221; Another example of a &#8220;natural&#8221; product would be cotton clothing. And yet another would be agriculture that is grown with &#8220;natural&#8221; fertilizers and pesticides.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The defining characteristic of &#8220;natural&#8221; products is that if left outside they would eventually decompose and <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">re-contribute<\/span><\/strong> to the ecosystem. That is, &#8220;natural&#8221; products are <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">within<\/span><\/strong> the cycle of life. Depending on the time when you look at the elements, minerals and compounds in a &#8220;natural&#8221; piece of furniture they are either the source or use of raw materials.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">&#8220;Artificial&#8221; products are life cycle dead ends. Left sitting outside a broken and <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_0\" class=\"blsp-spelling-corrected\">abandoned<\/span> cell phone does not re-contribute to the ecosystem any time soon. Instead it likely stays intact for many generations and would become some future archaeologist&#8217;s prize. &#8220;Artificial&#8221; products stand outside of the cycle of life. Another example of an &#8220;artificial&#8221; product are the many manufactured chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, that are so much a part of our current lives. If we need a particular vitamin we can eat fruit or vegetables rich in that vitamin. Or we can take an <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_1\" class=\"blsp-spelling-corrected\">artificially<\/span> manufactured one that includes &#8220;artificial&#8221; ingredients such as the color or the packaging. These &#8220;artificial&#8221; products do not decompose and in their destruction become the ground of new &#8220;natural&#8221; creation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Hopefully the important differences between &#8220;natural&#8221; and &#8220;artificial&#8221; are clear; along with the long-term ramifications. But why do I feel this is important? And more importantly, how does this relate to my second point above?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; font-size: 16px;\">The Importance of Accurate Pricing in Capitalism<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Many environmentalists feel that capitalism is a system whose natural outcome is environmental disaster. In concept, this is absolutely false about capitalism. However, in practice this is absolutely true about capitalism. Why?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The reason is that many goods in capitalism are grossly <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_2\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">mis<\/span>-priced. In a world with <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">perfect<\/span> information the long-term environmental impact of all goods and services is known ahead of time. Those impacts are priced into the goods and services to ensure that their environmental costs are included in their pricing. Super unfortunately, people do not have perfect foreknowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">For example, hypothetically, if it were known ahead of time back in the late 1800s that the use of fossil fuels (e.g. coal, gasoline, kerosene, etc.) would result in runaway greenhouse effects and ultimately <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_3\" class=\"blsp-spelling-corrected\">destroy<\/span> much of the ecosystem and its inhabitants within 200 years, would fossil fuels be selected as the energy to propel vehicles and other machinery? Maybe. But I guarantee that the price of those fuels would have been much higher. But because the long-term environmental impact of fossil fuels was not, and is not, perfectly known, they were, and are, <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_4\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">mis<\/span>-priced. What happens when a good is <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_5\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">underpriced<\/span>? That&#8217;s right, it is over used and over used and&#8230;over used. [Just think about underpriced mortgages, for example.]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">I could list many such goods, but the problem with capitalism in practice (not theory) is that it assumes that we can perfectly price goods, not just for current consumption, but future consumption as well. But can you see what happens when much of the economy is based on &#8220;artificial&#8221; goods that are environmental dead ends?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">This is not an argument to dismantle capitalism. I <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">am<\/span> a capitalist. So I fully recognize the inherent strengths of capitalism for helping to ensure that resource\/economic decisions are made where the benefits of choices exceed the costs of choices. But I also am a conscious capitalist and recognize that if goods and services are not perfectly priced (especially <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_6\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">underpriced<\/span>) then it leads to drastic economic distortions. So this <em>is<\/em> an argument against &#8220;artificial&#8221; products being manufactured willy-<span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_7\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">nilly<\/span> and without an a<span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_8\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">priori<\/span> <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_9\" class=\"blsp-spelling-corrected\">understanding<\/span> of their relationship to the <span id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_10\" class=\"blsp-spelling-error\">eco<\/span>-system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Happy Friday everyone. I hope that this post finds all of you doing well. I wanted to make a few brief comments about the environment, especially as it applies to our modern capitalist economy. Primarily the focus is on two things that dramatically affect the environment: The &#8220;dead end&#8221; nature of artificial chemicals and other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-the-blog","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}