ruveyn wrote:
The solution is clear. Charge for externalities. Charge people who pollute the water and the air for the damage the do. Then the cost of creating externalities will be an incentive to cleaner operation. As long as we enable pollution by permitting to occur without a cost to the polluter we will have pollution.
ruveyn
My only issue there is that charging corporations just means that they pass the charge onto the consumer.... In a truly democratic Capitalist situation, with multiple providers, thats all fine and good. Company A screws up enviornmentally, and either eats the cost or passes it on to the consumers, raising their prices causing their competitors to get more business and learn from their mistake..... But Tepco for instance is, IIRC, about the ONLY power supplier in most of japan? So you might as well just charge the japanese people more money until they decide to boycott Tepco (har har, like any modern society is going to boycott their only source to electricity). So charging conglomerates and corporations that have monopolies really doesn't accomplish much, in my mind anyway......
Dilbert wrote:
It would be political suicide to admit that, so TEPCO is flailing about and delaying announcing the obvious until the eyes of the World are no longer upon Fukushima.
IDK about political suicide.... They'd certainly lose face though, and their might be a culling of Administration people, but thats likely to occur anyway if I know anything about Japanese corporate politics. Only difference is that this way it'll be done quietly, after the fact, and no names will spammed across the news wires. Nothing will likely change though as far as the companies policies, beyond perhaps building reactors of safer/newer design, which will be good.
After that, I do agree that nuclear right now is the way to go, but ideally I think we should start building more of the later generation designs and phasing out the older ones...... But thats expensive, and roughly 50% of politicians in DC atm don't want to return taxes on the top 5% to what they were 12 years ago, and were at for large parts of the nations history.
27 May 2011, 5:10 pm
