Everyone beyond childhood knows that without a profit incentive, there's no real initiative or responsibility. The problem is we are choosing to pursue and subsidize the reliance on petroleum and it's known strategic and enviromental issues , instead of strongly financing the transition to a new and possibly less troublesome alternative power source(s).
We can spend $300 Billion plus on the war on Iraq, and tens of billions on space exploration, why can't we invest more in hydrogen, or fusion, or ???????? R & D? Of course I know why, and it's stupidly shortsighted.
Because the government by definition can't invest in something. Investment requires people can predict risk and a known price structure to place values on certain research directions. When the government 'invests' the take one of two routes. One, they decide beforehand what the solution is and put all money towards that, money which has to be pulled out of the private sector where it's used far more efficiently and productively. Two, they spend all kinds of money on all kinds of lunacy if it even holds the slightest promise of a return. R&D has a cost that's directly related to how risky it is and how far into the future the return is expected to come. When the government gets involved there is no reliable price associated with the differring R&D directions. It's considered priceless because, hey, everyone wants clean fuel and a clean environment, right? So money is wasted that would be more efficiently used by the private sector.
I would also take issue with the idea that oil company CEOs are somehow different from everyone else. I'm sure they relish the idea of their kids breathing poison. Posts here show a definite bias towards the lefty ideoligcal bent, that anyone involved in a capitalist venture where, Oh My God!, they make a profit, is inherently evil and wants to destroy anything and everything for their own short term gain, and somehow all the people working for the government are saints with no alterior motives. Quite the opposite is true. The private sector because of it's
vested interest in the long term value of resources takes a much more long term oriented approach. That's why private forrests look great and produce wood at a consistent rate and forrests that the government owns but leases logging rights out to are a total mess. The policitician's time horizon is the next election cycle. For the loggers leasing the land, it is too. For someone who owns the forrest and wants to log it but also needs to make it last, either for himself or shareholders in his company, he must balance the long term and short term value of the resource and develop repletion methods to make it last as long as possible to preserve its capital value. You see the same thing with private fisheries vs government owned or meddled in fisheries, freedom of the seas being a good example. You see it with government owned mines vs private mines, etc.
Global Warming appears to me to be far less certain and dangerous a threat than the introduction of new plant and animal species from one ecosystem to another as a result of global trade. For example,I've read that everytime a container ship dumps it's ballast into the ocean, around 5000 new to that area species are introduced , and a unknown number of these will establish themselves as a predatory influence on the existing ocean ecosystem. These are finely tuned balances that took eons to create, and in a few years we have and will continue to mix them up without truly knowing the consequences.
That's just the thing, these are
not finely tuned balances. They shift all the time, and they usually do so without serious consequences of any kind. Nature is not engineered, it is happenstance. It's a
shifting balance of competitions and the animals are no more in tune with it than us. They would happily use every resource they have to its utter destruction and then either adapt or die. Unlike the animals, we have a complex society and on an individual level, a superior brain, which allows us to be much more adaptable. Sometimes ecosystems are in balance, sometimes they're shifting, sometimes they're dying. Suppose the Carribou in ANWR are all wiped out tomorrow, can you tell me, what would be the consequences? All the species there, plant and animal, would simply start competing with each other until a new balance was arrived at, as they would with any other intrusion, man made or otherwise. This is not evil and it's not something that should be stopped. Nor is our consumption of oil evil or something that should be stopped.
If you want real change, instead of urging more government control, perhaps you could urge the government to do what it should do, which is protect property rights. That way if someone pollutes your land, water or air, they don't get off because they're polluting just as much as everyone else or meeting some arbitrary standard set by the government. That way people and companies are allowed to own resources and their interests would then be a lot more long term oriented. You guys speak of the short-term, money-now attitude of the oil companies, it's the damn
government that's giving them subsidies that focus on exploration and production now rather than a future oriented approach. It's the
government that is stopping ownership of oil fields by sticking to the antiquated doctrine of freedom of the seas, so when an oil company finds a field they
have to suck it dry, or risk some other company profiting from their find because they have no legal claim to it. By pulling the government out of the business of petroleum you'd also see a spike in prices reflecting true scarcity and uncertainty, which would provide the necessary economic incentive for conservation, efficiency, and development of alternative fuels. Relative to petroleum those alternatives will start to look better, and the relative rise in cost of petroleum would shorten the time horizon for the return expected on investments/loans for R&D in those areas.
What I don't understand is the government keeps screwing the planet up, they are the #1 polluter you know?, and yet everyone keeps looking to the God damn government for a solution. Seems terribly... short sited. I don't question the motives of any one of you, but I do question your judgement on this, especially since I used to agree with it.