On 2006-12-18 21:40:56 +0000, John Beardmore said:

In message , Andy Hall writes

Quite amazing. I've always considered education to be about finding
out things for one's self, questioning
them and sifting the important and influencing from the dross.

If you were observant, you would have noticed that environmentalists do
not all sing off the same hymn sheet.

There is a green hill far away..... ?

The last thing that I have felt it to be was being fed
a package of goods and treating it as sacrosanct.

This seems to be exactly the way you regard economics.

Not particularly - it's simply a starting point. Experience over
millennia shows that if economic criteria are not met, pretty much any
exercise will fail.

Therefore, it is necessary to satisfy that first and then to look at
what it can buy. Then one can iterate back. If the outcome isn't what
was hoped for, can the economic model be adjusted to support it?



I suspect that that is one reason for my not wanting to buy
unquestioningly into mindless ecobabble for the sake of it.

Maybe you should take the trouble to learn something meaningful about
the work environmentalists have done before you start making
assumptions ?

It is very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.


While acknowledging that you must comply with the law, attitudinally
you seem far more disposed to find justifications for inaction than to
see if action is really required. This alone makes me reluctant to
support your ill specified commercial proposals.

You are missing the point. I have not said that there should be
inaction as long as the proposed action is genuinely worth doing and on
the scale that can be realistically achieved actually affects outcome
in a worthwhile way. In other words if there is a choice between
action A and action B with A resulting in a 0.1% effect and B resulting
in a 10% effect, there is little point in doing A unless it is less
than a hundredth of the effort or cost.

Now let's say that action B is sorting through plastic bottles and so
is worth doing. Then the next question is quite simple. Who is going
to do it? If it *requires* me to do it as opposed to paying extra to
a contractor t do so, then the whole thing comes into question in terms
of whether it was worth doing in the first place.

So if you say to me that I *must* sort the bottles myself and there
isn't an option that I can buy at a reasonable price without paying
twice, then I am going to say no to it. OTOH, if you offer me price C
for the contractor to do it and D if I do it, then there is a basis for
it to be done.