I remember reading (no link, sorry) that someone had done an estimation on how much money we where given by the natural processes going on. How much the earth absorbing and cleaning pollution, CO2 and whatnot is worth, i.e. what it would cost if we should do it on our own. Their conclusion was that what we get for free was at least 10x the total world economy.

Guess I'm not making any real argument here, but I belive the effects of pollution and climate change has the potential to cost large large large amounts of money.



I think what you're talking about is cost externalities. The argument being that the cost of a barrel of oil is artificially depressed, because the people using it are not paying the costs of pollution. I actually agree with this completely. 100%. What happens is that because the cost is externalized, the resource is used in ways that are uneconomical, i.e. it is wasted, because if the full cost were internalized, the price would go up, and the demand down. Agreed, agreed, agreed. Oil is being wasted by the externalization of pollution costs.

But the solution is not less capitalism, i.e. more government regulations, interventions, and restriction. The solution is more capitalism, i.e. allow the market to internalize the costs of pollution. Statists merely assume the cost must be externalized, and I couldn't disagree more. A completely free market simply would not allow pollution costs to be externalized. I've written about it with regards to private roads before. I think there was a thread by someone titled "Help me understand AC!" where I explained how private roads for example would internalize pollution costs and create incentives to reduce emissions.

Quote:
" Doing things that are uneconomical is wasteful (by definition)"
I'm not at all sure this is true.



But it is true, and true by definition, which is my point. Uneconomical == wasteful.

Quote:
It's only true if the price you are paying are reflecting the real value. And in many cases what we are paying does not reflect the actual value, especially not when it comes to natural resources. When it come to oil for example we are paying the price it takes to get the stuff out of the ground, but not really the price it would take to replace it. The value of a barrell of oil is a lot more than 60$ if you should supply the energy or the material for production in some other way.



That isn't how "value" is determined. How much work or energy went into the creation of a good is completely irrelevent. The only thing that's relevent is how useful it is in satisfying future needs or wants, and how much competition for that good exists in the market.

Frankly, I think fossil fuels are a barbaric and filthy energy source. I am not pessimistic about future energy demands at all, if government allows the market to operate. As the cost of energy goes up and up and up, energy prices, and hence profits, will go up and up and up. This will tempt more and more and more capital into the energy markets. I see no possible fundamental insurmountable technological barriers. The beauty of capitalism is that if energy becomes a bottleneck, if need be, all of the capital of the entire world would eventually be brought to bear in the energy market to break that bottleneck. Literally trillions of dollars of investment, because that will be where all the demand and all the profits are. There's simply no way that humanity working with the available intellectual capital and the technological base that we have now could not solve the "energy problem."

But what really, really, really scares the [censored] out of me, is that I see government turn with hate upon the very providers of what we all need: energy. They see increasing profits as "exploitation". They seek to tax away "windfall profits", i.e. destroy the incentive to invest in the energy industry and supply what we all desperately need. Government will tax away those incentives, install price caps, centrally plan the energy economy (as it has disastrously done for decades) and create endless misery, poverty, and shortages, all the while blaming the "evil capitalists" who are "exploiting the masses". It's happened multiple times in the past (antitrust, the New Deal, etc), and I'm very pessimistic that it will happen again.