[b said:
Quote[/b] ]No I do not see how that is gouging. Perhaps you did not read the formula that some one else posted...Increased demand + less supply = rising prices. That is a basic, indisputable fact of business.
See, I think there are two issues in that, though. One is the issue of scale: It's one thing, to use rattlermt's example, to make $20 of a D. capensis that cost you $3 to grow, it's another to make 20 billion dollars off a product that cost 3 billion to make. It's the same relative profit, but it's the absolute size of the numbers that makes people uncomfortable. If I made $2000 of overpriced D. capensis, you can see the whole 'good for me' angle, because that's a sum of money we can deal with, that people need (say, for 4 months of rent). But when it gets to astronomically high amounts in absolute terms, one has to wonder where 20 billion gets spent. Hell, I couldn't spend that in a year, and that's with all my crazy plans of robot squid armies to conquer earth.
The other issue is one of necessity. Nobody *needs* a cape sundew, they merely want one, and free market systems are fine for that. But what about items that are necessities for daily life or close to it? People don't simply *want* oil, they *need* it. It fuels our cars, it heats our homes, it generates the vast bulk of our power, it's the source for most plastics and many chemicals vital for the manufacture of more complex chemicals, and it transports the goods we need (such as food and clothing). In such a case, is it ethical to charge as much as the market will bear, even knowing that you're getting wealthy off people who have no choice but to pay? While I'm not advocating that government control profits to be 'ethical', I am saying that the perception of businesses lining their pockets by profiting of something consumers have no choice but to buy is bound to generate resentment, justified or not.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]There are plenty of alternatives to foriegn oil out there but I don't see many people rising up and demanding, nuclear (Iran is trying nuclear and we get all upset.), wind, solar, oil shale, drilling in ANWAR, coal gassification etc...
Actually, for the individual consumer, there *aren't* real alternatives. Nuclear power plants take years to build and have their own problems (like 'where do we put 200 barrels of material so toxic that simply being near it can kill you?'), and fusion has been 'ten years away' for the past 40 years. Solar cells have an efficiency of a mere 10%, and upping that requires making them out of gallium arsenide, which, as you can guess from the name, includes arsenic and lots of it. People object to wind because they don't want to see it (seriously, there's a plan right now to use wind off the US eastern seaboard, and that's the objection). Oil shale has the same problems as more traditional methods, and will only postpone the same crisis we already have, ditto for the ANWR. Coal is just a collosally bad idea from the get-go; it includes sulfur products that cannot be effectively removed and which cause acid rain (fine for our plants but not the rest of the ecosystem). Hydrogen is useless, merely a different storage method for the energy we get from oil or nuclear or however.
More importantly, none of these are choices the individual consumer can make; they must wait, stuck with dependence on oil, until sufficient infrastructure exists for them to even be offered a choice.
Take my situation; I think the use of coal for power is a *bad* idea, due to the toxic emissions. But the power company in my area uses coal-based power as one of it's sources. What real choice do I have? To not use electricity? I can reduce it, sure, but I still *have* to pay because I have no other option.
Same thing with oil; there's no choice for most individual consumers. You either pay the outrageous price, or you never go anywhere outside of walking/biking distance. That's not capitalism, it's extortion.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]those choices may kill a spotted owl...but that sure beats walking to work.
Would you say the same thing if our best solution was to build powerplants over the wild populations of cobra lilys, exterminating the wild population.
Don't be so trivial about the value of a species. The western US has been that trivial about rattlesnakes for decades, and now they wonder what to do about the fact that the ever-expanding rodent population is carrying bubonic plague (yes, the stuff that wiped out half of Europe). Even from an economic perspective, you'd be amazed how much the most seemingly useless species actually contribute.
Mokele