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tomarin
Guest
The so-called “tragedy of the commons,” isn’t that it?
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Ridgerunner
Guest
Buffalo may be regarded as a “common good” now, as a tourist attraction, though there are privately owned buffalo as well as publicly owned buffalo. But when there were massive herds of them, they weren’t much of a “common good”. Buffalo are nomadic when they can be, and trample everything in their path. They’re also difficult creatures in other ways. They’re mean and aggressive. They won’t “head” like cattle will, so they can’t really be herded for any purpose, and since it’s extraordinarily difficult to doctor them, they largely can’t be protected from disease; anthrax being perhaps the worst (but not the only) one of them.
Right now, there are about as many cattle on the Great Plains as there were buffalo at their most populous. People (ranchers) do benefit personally from cattle, but so does the population at large by having a source of high-quality protein at a fairly reasonable cost; something the public would not have if the present cattle were replaced with buffalo.
My understanding of the near extinction of buffalo is that some of it was motivated by the market for hides and (for some reason) tongues. But some of it was to get them off the plains so cattle could be there. Some were killed to deprive tribal groups like the Comanche of their primary food source so they would accede to being on reservations.
Interestingly, some have opined that had whites not killed off the buffalo, the Indians would have inevitably done it once they got access to horses, just more slowly. An Indian on foot had little chance of killing a buffalo when a herd briefly crossed the Indian’s portion of the plains during migrations. An Indian on horseback could chase them down and whole tribes could migrate with them. The plains tribes enjoyed a population boom once they got horses. Some tribes that had theretofore never been on the plains moved there. But that same population boom and the ever-increasing number of horses would have doomed the buffalo fairly soon had the white hunters, ranchers and soldiers not killed them.
WOW! Went massively off topic. So, complaints about methane and cattle belching should be ignored because plains empty of cattle would inevitably fill with some other grass-eater that will also belch methane.
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zz912
Guest
I’m saying this is an excuse crafted by some who want to vote for pro-abortion politicians and still try to pretend they are in line with Catholic teaching. They create a fiction of widespread calamity and death that is either happening and we don’t see it, or will happen in some indeterminate time. And this calamity will be so horrific that it will be greater than the slaughter of a million babies every year.
Now, it’s science that warmer temps lead to greater crop yields and more food production. The others you listed are possible, only possible outcomes that are only predicted in computer models that never actually predict anything accurately.
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zz912
Guest
That’s a drought, not warmer weather. There’s a difference.
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zz912
Guest
So when there was no private ownership, and everyone enjoyed “public” or “common” ownership, the herds were decimated.
And you think this supports your contention about the evils of the free market???
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Ender
Guest
What is irrelevant is this entire issue. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the cause of the buffalo slaughter was; the political conditions that existed then do not exist now. The environmental differences between the parties in most cases are about what conditions actually pose a threat to the environment. There is no “do whatever you want” approach supported by the Republicans; that is simply a fairy tale.
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LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
Potential evils, yes. In most cases these evils do not materialize because there is too little incentive to abuse the common property - not enough profit in bad behavior. But I think I see what you are getting at. Correct me if I am wrong, but you are hinting that it was the public nature of the resource that caused the decimation of the herds, and that if all the buffalo were privately owned, such decimation would not have occurred, and therefore that shows the evils of communism, or some such thing.
You are confusing free market with private ownership. They are not the same thing. It is true that you can’t have a free market without the potential of owning something. But that doesn’t mean that everything has to be privately owned to have a free market.
Take for example the air we breathe. It is most sensibly treated as a common good because it is not easy to subdivide it for ownership, and in some sense we all feel that everyone has the right to breathe air whether they have any money or not. Another reason it is sensibly treated as a common good is that there is generally more than enough of it to go around.
Yet when the opportunity presents itself whereby a business, operating free of any governmental restrictions, can turn a profit by abusing the air (such as in the early days of the industrial revolution in England), they will do it, as long as it does not negatively impact them personally. Whenever a common good is abused like this, it is an example of a potential evil of the free market. The solution is not to decry the public nature of air, and say that sharing the air is akin to communism. The solution is to implement some reasonable and minimal communal control on such behavior so that all competitors in the free market are on a level playing field, and no one competitor feels the need to abuse the common good for fear of being bested in the market by someone else who does it.
Now maybe the buffalo was not a perfect example of this, because, as Ridgerunner pointed out, some of the blame may be placed on government policy rather than on the action of individuals acting out of self-interest. But it is likely that even absent that policy, the outcome would have been much the same. As Ridgerunner pointed out, the natives themselves were over-hunting the buffalo once they acquired horses. It was never claimed that native Americans were immune the the evils of a free market. They were just technologically limited in how much damage they could do.
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powerofk
Guest
Right. And it’s true that in some areas, warmer weather increases crop yield - as long as such warmer weather is also humid. Why? Because warm humid weather means more storms and more rain. But warmer weather in dry areas causes more fires and droughts, as the little moisture that is in the ground is evaporated. This actually is part of the cause of the desertification of grasslands. Also, the world’s number 1 food, rice, loses fertility in higher temperatures.
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Al_Moritz
Guest
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Ridgerunner
Guest
A part, yes, but not even a very important part. In areas (like my own) where there is a great deal of rain part of the year, and (usually) hot, dry weather part of the year, far and away the most important thing is how the grassland is utilized, both during the wet seasons and the dry season.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
In this article, at least, he is not quoted as blaming fossil fuel use. Maybe he does, but maybe he doesn’t.
I wonder if he really believes fossil fuel use causes negative climate changes. Certainly, in places like the Sahel and north China, climate change is man’s fault, but it has nothing to do with fossil fuels.
But maybe he does believe it’s people heating their homes, operating machinery and transporting goods and people from here to there that the world must be “saved” from, and that (like Obama/Soros) peoples’ access to those things should be made greatly more expensive and their uses straitened.
One sincerely hopes not, as such a world would be cold, poor, and grim. It is difficult to imagine any pope favoring that.
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Darryl1958
Guest
When one looks at the assumption of why it is thought that the Republicans are bad stewards of the environment, and the evidence of what bad stewardship entails centres on the buffalo and the Aral Sea, then it is noteworthy of how unsubstantiated that assumption really is.
We fully understand that liberals operate from the model of compassion and good intentions, but that does not mean that conservatives operate on the opposite of that, such as greed and duplicitous intentions.
Instead we note that it was Bush and Mulroney, both on the conservative side of the ledger, who signed into law the Treaty on Acid Rain, the most significant piece of legislation for generations in terms of the environment.
So in light of the evidence of good stewardship on behalf of such Republicans, and the lack of evidence tying the Republicans to such things as buffalo extinctions and the Aral Sea, we can take aim at the idea that stressing free market forces in any way means that Republicans are for the Wild, Wild West scenario that is the caricature.
The Acid Rain Treaty ought to be sufficient proof that the stress that the American right puts on the free market over governmnent action is a relative stress, and not absolute.
Less government does not mean no government at all in Republican circles. It never has.
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lynnvinc
Guest
I think he’s very knowledgeable and know that it is not just GHG emissions (which include other GHGs besides CO2), but also deforestation and land use.
He’s no dumb-bunny as people may think.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
I don’t know what he knows any more than you do. The article says nothing about whether he believes “climate change” is due to CO2 or desertification or something different altogether. None that have been posted on threads here that I have seen, do.
Nor have I seen him say the remedy is to make utility bills “skyrocket” and make food more expensive by artificially increasing the cost of fuels; the ObamaSoros position. (Parenthetically, Soros is heavily invested in oil production in Brazil and Obama loaned Brazil U.S. taxpayer money to develop it, sooooooo)
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Darryl1958
Guest
I have never heard him described as a dumb-bunny.
Who do you suppose thinks that he is?
The concern is that he is anti-Republican.
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stinkcat_14
Guest
If he were anti-Republican, why would that be a bad thing?
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pnewton
Guest
I did not give those as evidence of bad stewardship. You missed the conversation. Those were two examples of how allowing the free market to mold how we treat the environment can be reckless and have bad consequences. Of course no current examples can be given. The more current the example, the less know the consequences. I use the word reckless precisely because we do *not *know.
On the other hand, the environmental lobby has poisoned the political well. Environmental protection can also be done recklessly, and often is. There is an awesome novel that addresses this problem by Michael Critchton, “State of Fear.” It is a good cautionary tail of environmentalism run amok.
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Darryl1958
Guest
From the standpoint of separating himself from the politics of any nation, I think it would be a bad thing.
Papal interference in the affairs of a nation has not had a good history.
I am not saying he does that, but suffice it to say, that is how he is being used by those who truly are anti-Republican.
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Darryl1958
Guest
Believe me, I didn’t miss the conversation. The conversation of why it were being assumed that Republicans were bad stewards simply did not exist.
Instead, the examples come from the Aral see, presumably of the USSR, and the Wild, Wild West before conservation was even an environmental concept.
Suffice it to say we don’t know the consequences of the Democratic plans either. We should not assume them to be better suited to Catholic teaching that Republicans, based on what we don’t know.
One example that informed my position early on was the Greenpeace action against the seal hunt. The rhetoric was that the seals were being an endangered species, whereas the truth of the matter was that the seals made a great photo-op to pushing through their much broader agenda. The inconsequential seal hunt was merely the toe in the door to selling a leftist agenda.
Another example would be of a leftist group in Canada talking in one of their publications, mainly read by like-minded people of how what was important in an environmental debate about a major pipeline. What was important was not whether or not that this or that was unsustainable for the environment, but how the pipeline could be shut down by the red tape of endless environmental and other assessments.
The goal was not to make a decision based on the study, but to shut down the pipeline through studying the pipeline. Their decision was already made before the debate had even begun, before the facts had been compiled.
That is bad faith
We all know it was bad faith for tobacco companies to run positive studies on smoking. It is bad faith as well that climate date was being fudged by environmental monitoring companies in order to get the results that they wanted.
The intent of businesses is overt and well known. Their aim is to make a profit in the most competitive way possible, lest they lose the bid to the more competitive company.
We know the intent of the socialists and the left, which is revolution and shutting down the source of capitalist power.
What we should not assume is that all Democrats have that socialist agenda, or that Republicans have the business agenda. More than ever, because socialists have become so embedded into the environmental movement, it is important that their feet be held to the fire by such people as Republicans, who assuredly are in as much love with Mother Nature as are Democrats.
Being a socialist is not the equivalent of being an environmentalist. The worst abuses of the environment happen in the most socialist of countries
And being a free enterprise conservative does not mean that such people can be assumed to be going against the environment. Being against socialism, and being against socialist embedding themselves into the environmental movement in fact may be the most rational course for actually preventing some of the nightmares that have taken place when the experts on the top are the only ones in charge of making the decisions.
Thomas Sowell was a Marxist until he had a summer job working in government. The primary loyalty of any government bureaucracy is not to the concerns that that bureaucracy is in charge of. Being human, their primary concern is to maintaining their government job. What a strong free market can do is diffuse the decision making power from bureacracies alone, to the ingenuity and the creativity of the decisions of the masses deciding what is best for their own lives.
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