Pericles, I say again that your argument doesn’t stack up! Simply look at the real world.

It can hardly be more obvious that to push more and more people into places with serious water-supply problems is just crackers! Likewise in cities with bad traffic congestion.

There is a rapid rate of entry of children into the education system, while we are struggling to maintain, let alone improve the whole stressed system.

And there are so many other examples of population growth negatively affecting us on a personal to societal level.

But I don’t hear business groups crying out for a reduction in population growth. I haven’t heard one single business do this!

So… how does this sit with your argument?

<< If a company policy on water usage endangers the very existence of the market they rely on, then that policy will quickly change. It cannot be any other way. >>

Oh right. So if it looks like getting critically bad to the point where the company in question might be seriously stuffed around, then their policy will reflect this. But if it is just part of a general decline in the quality of water-provision for the whole community, it won’t figure in their policy, and indeed their policy will continue to encourage ever-more demand and hence decline of that particular resource/service.

This seems to be the case. So again I say that there seems to be a propensity for businesses to plan for the medium future, and certainly not the long-term future…….. and most definitely not in keeping with a holistic outlook about what is good for the whole of society!

Ludwig
So after all this, all you can come up with is to insist as a precondition of the discussion that obviously government can manage sustainability!

Pathetic.

“Upon your request, I defined sustainability.”

And upon your request, I asked questions which would falsify your definition.

And you couldn’t, and didn’t answer them! All you’ve done is circle back to your point of departure, without ever joining issue, or recognizing any of the problems of value government would have to solve, or saying how.

“Could you restate the questions that are most important to you. No more than three please. And we’ll take it from there.”

Remember that?

So…
1. How do you distinguish between human needs and wants?
2. How do you know how much of a depletable resource should be consumed now, versus conserved for the future?
3. How do you know what the distribution and abundance of species should be?

The problem isn’t that these questions can’t be answered in the "nth degree". The problem is that government cannot answer them in ANY degree because government lacks any rational method way of *knowing* or *integrating* the billions of different, subjective, constantly changing, AND FUTURE human values.

“You broadly know what the role of government is, I presume.”
The whole debate is about the role of government. It's not for me to agree with your opinion as a precondition to entering into the argument.

“Our economy is totally unsustainable!”
So is everything in the world. What’s an example of any aspect of life at any time anywhere in any place that is not “totally unsustainable”, given that your definition *doesn’t state a time-frame?*

If government could manage sustainability, you would have no problem answering my questions.

But if it can’t, then we would see what we are in fact seeing: definition with no time-frame, open-ended credulity in government, no way of knowing the values in issue; no way of calculating them; ignoring that fact; endless assumption of unlimited governmental goodness and capacity, dodging any falsification, responding by mere indignant circularity: in fact everything you're doing!

So, still no examples, Ludwig?

>>It can hardly be more obvious that to push more and more people into places with serious water-supply problems is just crackers! Likewise in cities with bad traffic congestion.<<

While an abstract concept - motherhood good, murder bad - is irrefutable, it is still only an abstract concept until you provide concrete examples. So exactly who is crackers, in your mind?

No-one is "pushing" people anywhere, let alone "more and more" of them. They go entirely of their own free will. You would be right to complain about pushing if, for example, government suddenly decided that all new migrants should only be allowed to live in, for example, Townsville. Where there is no serious water-supply problem, and no bad traffic congestion. But right now, freedom of movement is the norm.

>>But I don’t hear business groups crying out for a reduction in population growth. I haven’t heard one single business do this! So… how does this sit with your argument?<<

Why would any business want to reduce demand for their product or service by reducing their their customer base? Doesn't make sense. But surely we were discussing the supply side? So long as the supply side is adequately planned to meet the projected demand, there will be no problem.

In fact, it would be a good leading indicator of upcoming problems, if a business started to flag issues such as potential shortages, scarcity or supply cost overruns in their annual report to shareholders. Which, I have to say, operate under far stricter levels of disclosure requirements than any government department.

>>But if it is just part of a general decline in the quality of water-provision for the whole community, it won’t figure in their policy...<<

Pure conjecture...

>>... and indeed their policy will continue to encourage ever-more demand and hence decline of that particular resource/service.<<

Not at all. Precisely the opposite will happen, for the exact reasons I have described before.

Pericles,

Your rosy picture of uniformly far-sighted and socially responsible business leaders is far from the reality, although not all businesses are unethical. As a corrective, I recommend a book by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes entitled "Merchants of Doubt" (available as a Kindle e-book). It details the business funded think tanks established in the US to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on all sorts of issues, not just climate change: the health effects of tobacco and the dangers of secondhand smoke, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer due to CFCs, environmentally damaging effects of certain pesticides, etc. Very often the same people were involved in a number of these campaigns. The doubt mongering extended to casting doubt on science itself, and we see the consequences in such things as low vaccination rates. The tobacco industry in the US was actually convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what_we_do/industry_watch/doj_lawsuit/

In all these cases, business was happy to take the money in the short term and delay action on the long-term consequences.

You also ignore the fact that there are different class interests. No doubt the movers and shakers are just as annoyed by congestion as the rest of us, but this is countered by all the lovely money that they are making from the population growth. Apart from a relatively few hangers on, the rest of the existing population just get the downside. The people who call the shots also have the wealth to insulate themselves from many of the negatives of the policies they promote. Their children don't have to grow up in high rise ghettos near pesticide plants.

<< Pathetic >>

Hmmm, nice to see that you are striving to uphold a high-quality tactful discussion here Jardine!

<< 1. How do you distinguish between human needs and wants?
2. How do you know how much of a depletable resource should be consumed now, versus conserved for the future?
3. How do you know what the distribution and abundance of species should be? >>

Ahh so those are your key questions are they?

Excuse me, but that wasn’t obvious, in amongst the eleven questions you asked in the double post to which I was responding, especially given that they certainly don’t seem like particularly important questions. In fact they seem quite tangential to our discussion!

<< How do you distinguish between human needs and wants? >>

There is a spectrum from absolute needs to absolute wants. Water and food are absolute needs at the most basic level, but when we consume water or food, it is rarely absolutely vital that we do so right then and there. So to that extent they are not absolute needs a lot of the time. They could indeed not be needs at all a good deal of the time. So even with the most essential of resources, it is extremely difficult indeed to separate needs and wants.

But we certainly can say that food and water are essential for our survival, our health and our decent quality of life.

Different levels of consumption are essential for these different parameters. So when you talk about needs, you really need to make it clear what you need a particular resource (or service or piece of infrastructure) for.

continued

So obviously it just makes eminent sense to protect the supply of these basic resources and make sure that they can be maintained long into the future, and comfortably see us through hard times such as prolonged drought. That is; that the supply capability be able to meet the demand, with a big safety margin.

It is an eminently sensible aspiration for our government to strive to do this. And it is an eminently sensible aspiration of concerned citizens (which should be all of us), to implore our government to do this.

Part of this plan could be to encourage more frugal consumption, so as to move the balance somewhat away from wants and towards the needs end of the spectrum.

We don’t need to distinguish between wants and needs in order to pursue this ideal.

So um…. what’s the point of your question? Why is it so important to you that wants and needs be separated out? I don’t get the significance.

<< How do you know how much of a depletable resource should be consumed now, versus conserved for the future? >>

We DON’T know! All we can do is make judgements on how much of a non-renewable resource we need now and how much we should leave alone for the future.

Two things to consider would be the extent to which we need this national income and the jobs that the particular non-renewable resource industry provides, in order to improve our national quality of life, and secondly how we would transition from an economy based largely on non-renewable resources to one based on renewables and value-added resources.

This will be all the harder if we just go full-bore ahead with a very rapid rate of mineral extraction until it is all gone. So the level of consumption should be kept under check and the transition to other sources of income should be very carefully planned and executed.

continued