Those calculations explicitly do not include two kinds of costs that make the result that there's no positive benefit. You can't use that argument to reach that conclusion.

One of them is the cost of everything being in the wrong place. Humans have built farms, dams, ski resorts, cities, and all kinds of other things based on the current weather. If the Earth warms up, all of these things will be reduced in effectiveness.

The other is the cost of everyone being in the wrong place. When the water and food moves, the people who are the beneficiaries of the the climate change and now have surpluses of food and water and not going to donate to the people who now have shortages. Food and water will be on the other side of a border and political unrest and likely even wars will break out. People will starve. Crops will die.

It's not the argument that a warmer climate is good for the human race is incorrect. It's just that it only refutes the argument that a colder climate is somehow inherently bad or that the current climate is inherently perfect. It's only perfect because we've built ourselves and our world taking it into account.

Any change in climate is spectacularly bad for the human race. And that's very unfortunate because the only thing almost everyone does agree on is that the climate is going to change.

Libertarians shouldn't promise a utopia, and generally they don't. The problem of creating a legal system that's fair to people regardless of wealth is pretty much the same in a Libertarian society as it is in any other society. Most Libertarians accept that taxation will be needed to fund the legal system.

One commonly proposed Libertarian solution to the problem of things that cannot be owned (such as climate and air) is to use the legal system. Essentially, you would create a cause of action for harming an unowned resource. So people who harm the climate or pollute the air could be sued. In other words, there's really nothing un-Libertarian about government protecting resources that cannot be owned.

I believe this is the majority Libertarian view. There are some Libertarians who believe that if it cannot be owned, anyone is free to trash it as they please.

Then the short answer is that nobody knows. Markets create the information needed to solve problems. Without that information, the solutions are unimaginable. Nobody alive today has anything more than a guess as to how a Libertarian society would deal with problems like global warming or water pollution. The trick is simply to create the right incentives and then let people respond to them.

What's interesting is that the criticisms of Libertarianism has tended to move from the things existing governments do well to the things existing governments do very, very badly. If your only issue with Libertarianism is that it it might not do a great job on things existing governments royally screw up anyway, you should probably become a Libertarian.

I don't think anybody has any idea how a libertarian society would handle it. But that's the point. But that's the beauty of solutions that don't involve central planning -- they work even when nobody has any idea how to solve the problem.

Imagine if our entire food distribution system was run by the government. It would likely do the mediocre job that's typical of governments. The system would be running multibillion dollar deficits each year. There would be occasional serious shortages, long lines, poor selection, and so on. Now suppose I proposed a simple solution, let anyone who wants to sell any food they want to any place they want to for any price they want to.

You would get the exact same kinds of responses. What would ensure that anyone actually sold any food? Who would make sure Denver had beans? What would stop people from just selling the most profitable foods and driving the government food distribution into deeper deficits during the transition?

Before you set up such a system, nobody could tell you that the answer included a national chain of stores that sell a $4 cup of coffee. Nobody could predict, or even propose, Costco or McDonald's.

You can't even guess what the solutions might be until you have a system that allows people to test solutions and rewards the good ones and punishes the bad ones. So, I admit it, I have no idea how a Libertarian society would deal with pollution. I have a few guesses, but I'm pretty sure they're wrong. It's hard to imagine it could be any worse than a society where the government just permits people to pollute.

I got the impression that he didn't have a full understanding of what merged mining actually is. But it's also possible he's thinking of something that hasn't occurred to me.

If you could pull Bitcoins out of the main block chain and then somehow get them back in again, that would make all kinds of things possible. I'm not sure I see the connection to merged mining, other than that could mean that you could easily have "side chains" that were about as secure as the main chain.

The Silicon Valley Bitcoin meetup was held at Google HQ last week with guest Gavin Andresen. Jered was there.
http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Bitcoin-Users/

Jered mentioned that TradeHill had this in the works at Google last week.

The primary reason lower cost to provide means more profit is because it enables you to sell at a lower price and therefore generate a higher volume. Unless you have a very atypical situation, costs will be roughly comparable across competitors, so a lower cost for one company to produce will mean a lower cost for their competitors as well. Every restaurant charges less for hamburger than steak because every restaurant can produce a hamburger for less than a steak. You're treating the exception as if it were the rule.

I live in California where State law requires nonsensical electrical pricing. You can read more about it here: http://www.pge.com/myhome/myaccount/rateinfo/ and here http://www.pge.com/myhome/myaccount/charges/

It does mean it's inefficient. Power companies didn't drop from the heavens. They exist because they invested money to build and maintain transmission facilities. This investment was made only because they expected a profit from those investments.

You seem to think that you can somehow make the right decisions if only you had the power. You *can't*. The information needed to make the right decisions simply doesn't exist in one place like that.

You need incentives because the only thing people really respond to are incentives.. If you take away the handicap of being born poor, you take away the incentive not to let your children be born into poverty. Being born without musical talent is having the deck stacked against you too, but leveling the playing field would mean giving music lessons to those with the least natural talent.

You're trying to push a ball uphill. You've stacked the deck so that all the incentives work against the direction you're trying to go. You want excellence, but then you reward excellence and mediocrity the same with a level playing field. You want to find the big rocks and push on them until they're at the top. And you insist on starting each ball at the bottom. It just won't work.

What you need to do is roll the balls downhill. Align incentives so that things go in the direction you want them to go. Fortunately, nature pretty much does this automatically so long as you stay out of its way. The main thing you have to fix is broken incentives -- essentially cheating. You don't have to make the world fair, just the system.

The solution is to become so rich and prosperous such that our problems continue to rapidly become irrelevant and forgotten, joining the shortage of whale oil and streets filled with manure.

Yes, in less-regulated industries, they do. In a competitive industry, you would generally expect that products that cost less to provide have a lower price.

They charge me the price the State compels them to charge. They have no leeway.

I know it's inefficient because if it was efficient, it wouldn't have had to be compelled. If the prices they were getting for electricity were negotiated prices rather than compelled prices, they would be operating at a loss.

If you're going to do it by forced central command, taking it from one person to give it to someone else, you will almost always wind up doing the opposite of what you want to do. In general, people wind up with money because they are being productive. Forced, centralized redistribution is not the way.

Not in the electric power industry.

That's not quite what I said. The price to an individual customer should go down as their usage goes up. But higher total usage across all customers will cause prices to rise. It's the same with any other product. If you want to buy 10 Volvos, you can probably negotiate a rock bottom price. But if everyone wants a Volvo, they're all going to pay more.

Right, but it's promoting inefficient innovation and change. It's not clear that producing power that costs more than people are willing to pay for it is beneficial. Meanwhile, the resources that went to producing this miniscule amount of unprofitable power can't go to other things.

The right way to deal with global warming is to become so smart and rich that we forget it ever even was an issue. This is the same way the human race has solved every problem it's ever solved.

You won't find many Libertarians who think that the government would be competent to engineer the economy and the climate in that way. In your view, what is mechanism Libertarians would accept for how the government should decide how much CO2 there should be in the air? And, of course, unless you imagine one world government, you still have the problem of the conflicting self-interests of various nations (whether Libertarian or otherwise).

For some reason, the majority of governments seem to think they need to royally screw up electricity pricing and destroy the market for innovation in power delivery. All logic says that the more electricity I draw, the less I should pay per watt (because it costs less to provide the power to me), but my State government forces the pricing to go the other way to compel me to conserve even where conservation is counter-productive and inefficient.

It places other comically silly perverse incentives on me as well, I could go on for many paragraphs. By pushing prices artificially low for the majority of users, they actually disincentivize conservation. It is completely ass backwards. And when the weather is extreme, my prices actually go *down* (on the logic that I "need" more electricity), incentivizing me to shift my demand specifically to the times when it's the most expensive to service.

Exactly. So the longer you wait to start building the car, the greater the chances that the flaws will be found at the design stage.

Well sure, why pay for something if you can get the government to pay for it? The problem is that the government faces the same problem choosing priorities for basic research. But however you slice it, and whoever funds basic research, the more prosperous we are, the more basic research there can be.

You're again operating on the assumption that you can create some test to find the winners. You can't. The information to do that doesn't exist. If you created such a program, you likely would have passed right over Einstein. (I'll admit, you probably would have caught Beethoven.)

Ironic, since the truth is the reverse.

But that's not what would have happened. We'd have built dozens more crappy reactors like the ones at Fukushima. And the resources devoted to electric cars wouldn't have gone to developing the more sophisticated computers and basic research that is making *good* electric cars possible.

The reason we can design such great nuclear reactors and electric cars today is not because of all the research into electric cars and nuclear reactors we've done. It's because we have (or at least *had*) a prosperous economy with good basic research, so we can do *everything* better.

When these things will really work, the profit motive will direct money into them. If you have to push to get money into them, it's strong evidence you're trying to do it wrong. You don't know if solar is right. You don't know if hydrogen is right. You don't know if thorium is right. Central planning will always tend to move resources to less productive uses because the information to make the right decisions simply does not exist without an open market.

We don't want to equalize the chances. If your children get an equal chance regardless of what you do, why bother to do much for them? If you want excellence, you have to try as hard as you can *NOT* to do anything that tends to even things out.

Yes, it really does matter. If it's a century off, we'll probably manage it all wrong if we try to manage it now. The longer we can wait to deal with the problem, the more prosperous we'll be when we deal with it and the better the technology we'll have to address it with. Also, the more science we'll know, so our chances of screwing it up will be lower. (Imagine if we invested tens of billions into electric cars and trillions into nuclear power in the 70s because we were told we only had 20 years of oil left.)

The difference between this simplistic silliness and reality is why this kind of reasoning is complete nonsense. It's not about driving SUVs, it's about growing global economies so that we have the resources and understanding to deal with big problems the best way possible.

Every reduction in human population is one less ticket in the lottery for the next Einstein or Beethoven. The stakes are as high as they can be.

Sorry. This one has scales:

Exactly. Humans live where food grows. Human build ski resorts where it snows, dams where it floods, cities where it doesn't, and so on. It wouldn't take much climate change to impose a heavy, heavy cost on human life. If the arable land or drinkable water moves, wars will result. Of course, the one constant in global climate is change, so it's not so much a matter of if but of when.

Well that pretty much rules out every known strategy to combat global warming. Any attempt to restrict CO2 emissions would be climate engineering on a previously unheard of scale.