Quote from: agentbluescreen on May 17, 2013, 12:05:44 PM

Quote from: halfawake on May 17, 2013, 07:18:52 AM

Quote from: myrkul on May 17, 2013, 04:39:52 AM

Quote from: halfawake on May 17, 2013, 04:27:44 AM

People love to talk about market forces solving all problems, but protecting the environment is something that market forces do a very poor job at protecting. See global warming on a global scale, or overfishing, it's the economic principle of externalities - also referred to as "the tragedy of the commons".

You know how to fix the tragedy of the commons, right?

Well, my memory of economics tells me that the way of fixing the tragedy of the commons would be to build the externalities into the price of whatever is being sold. In other words, if you were to use gasoline as an example, put a large tax on it to account for the fact that it contributes to global warming. Over the long run, this will result in a situation where people will drive less, and use smaller cars, thus use less gas.

So, in this case, the solution is government intervention. The same idea would apply for many other cases of tragedy of the commons, ie: some species is being overfished? Declare an area off limits for fishing for a set period of time. So on and so forth. I like minimalism in government, but environmental protections like these are regulations that I fully support.

In fact thermonuclear communism is the #1 cause of global warming, not fossil fuel burning. Nuclear reactors dissipate millions of terawatts of completely wasted heat as direct thermal pollution into waterways and seas as do their dangerous eternally-decaying new, used and spent fuel rods. In fact if stored nuclear fuel bundles were to be "racked" within simple, foolproof electrical thermocouples they alone would function as their own nuclear batteries to uninterruptedly power their own stupid water pumps to pollute the earth with the remainder of their wasted heat. This would make external batteries, power or generators to "cool fuel pools" unnecessary and redundant and would have prevented Fukushima. (and a thousand more of them to come)

But, of course, Tory-Trotskyite Federal Reserve private boardroom-socialist communism, dictates that their handsomely-profiting elite foxes always "regulate" our hen-houses.... (while we all face and pay them dearly for the consequences)

(Not wanting this tread to become a GW tread, but still..)

The heat dissipates into space just like the other 99.9% or so of the energy from the sun.
Heat produced by humans have just local effects, the heat will soon radiate away.

Have you ever noticed that a night with clear skies is colder than one where there are clouds? That is because the clouds work like insulation and traps the heat.
(On a cloudy day it's the opposite)

Every day the earth receives enormous quantities of heat from the sun, if not almost all of it went back into space, the earth would be boiling.
The question about global warming is weather a little more insulation is added to the earth or not. It's not about human-produced heat.