No, and your accusation that I'm "just being difficult" is starting to piss me off. I think you're a short-sighted, self-centered, argumentative, nihilistic, and stubborn little annoyance -- but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so.
Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed.
Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything.
Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster.
Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.
> but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so
Sure you did; you were just passive-aggressive about it with that "to be polite" bit at the start. You're the one who took the dialogue to this level. I'm just more direct.
> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster
Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner. There are other adjectives to describe it but I think the one I've already used is apt. Anyway, I'm sure you don't mean this, or wouldn't if you would just think about what you're asking for for a second. Since I can't seem to get a thoughtful, honest answer out of you, continuing this is probably not productive . . . although that was probably true several posts ago.
>> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster
>Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner.
But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?
That said, by allowing for a dollar cost thaumaturgy was not holding the debate hostage. In fact, he accepted your challenge to debate him in the frame of reference YOU set up. A frame of reference which, btw, is not the only one in common use to decide such questions.
What you need to respond with now to keep your credibility is whether the 'true' dollar cost is:
a) The cost to mitigate every single effect from the disaster.
or
b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.
Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells then perhaps we should explore them rather than drilling.
> But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?
It's not an ethical impossibility. It's a pragmatic imperative. AND it's the root of the entire conversation. It's what I started this comment tree about! How can it possibly be holding up the debate to talk about it?
> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.
Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible. Some obvious things I don't really care about are restoring BPs bottom-line to its pre-disaster levels. As a general rule I'm also not interested in paying to mitigate damage to wildlife that would fall under ICUN's Least Concern designation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_Concern) even after all harm to populations from the spill are taken into account. I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.
Endangered animals I do want to protect, but once again there's a line somewhere (I don't know where) where their protection costs more than its worth. For example, if there is a rare mosquito in the marshes of southern Louisiana that ends up being wiped out entirely because of this crisis, I would not assign a cost of a billion dollars to that lost. Some cost, yes, but not a billion dollars.
If the oil slick bears out to be very large but cause small or questionable harm across a huge region, I also don't think we should necessarily spend money compensating the victims of such small harms. (For example, even if the oil spill stopped now some amount of oil would probably disperse even as far as the west coast of the U.S. after enough time.) To assign a metric, if the amount of compensation we might provide to a given victim is less than ten times the administrative cost of giving that compensation, we should not compensate.
Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up. Obviously this would be a really bad trade because the fishing in that region accounts for a much smaller portion of GDP than a quarter. BP should have to pay to support the people in that region, but realistically even the profits of an oil giant like BP would quickly be quenched under such a deluge of liability. Maybe the government can help them move and pay for their retraining, but in the end there is no point throwing good money after bad. They would need to do something else or maybe relocate to another place.
Obviously all these numbers are sketches. I can hardly tell you what the actual numbers are (if you'll recall, my initial comment was a request for speculation on what that number might be). But there is no question that there is a number, or a range of reasonable numbers, to describe the cost of this disaster.
> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .
That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling? We are talking about whether it makes sense to assign a numeric cost to the disaster, which it obviously does.
>> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.
> Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible.
So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?
> I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.
Often yes I agree with you. Although that is not an absolute. Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem so the extinction of a species not directly used by humans may cause difficulties if it is necessary for the continued survival of another species which IS directly used by humans.
> Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up.
Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!
:)
>> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .
> That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling?
My bad, I completely misread you.
I think you will be sympathetic to my mistake given that cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms are so commonly used to justify ideas that would still be bad no matter how good the numbers looked.
> So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?
No, I'm quantifying it in terms of how much I'd want to see paid to avoid that outcome, or in terms of how much would need to be spent to "make it right" to my own satisfaction. There's nothing about such a quantification that is entropically impossible. Put another way, there's basically no possible outcome of this disaster that you could not pay me _some_ amount of money to endure. But the amount might have to be very high.
> Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem . . .
I agreed elsewhere that that would have to be taken into account when calculating the total cost.
> Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!
Yeah, that's pretty bad, right? Hopefully that is the worst case scenario, but I'm no biologist so I'd have to leave that to them. One of my friends tells me that oil does break down in water over time and that it is unlikely it would be that bad.
But even if that were to happen, life would go on, albeit worse than before. This account of the after affects of the gulf war spill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) gives me some hope that although there will doubtless be great harm from this spill, it is not going to be the end of the world.
> cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms
OK, I see where you are coming from. I am entirely amenable to the outcome being that offshore drilling is not worth it given the extent of this disaster. Personally I think gasoline should cost much more than it does in the U.S. today, and that would go some way toward making that a reality. But I do want to look at it honestly.
Mate, I think you should seriously reread what he wrote. It seems like you literally don't understand what he wrote, not that you understand but disagree.
Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed.
Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything.
Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster.
Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.