EDN's Best of Power: Community/Blog Posts

By Staff -- EDN, 5/15/2008

These posts speak for themselves: Design engineers are an outspoken bunch, with strong opinions on topics within their community.

Reader responses to "'Green' marketing hype turning off consumers"

on 12/18/2007 at 8:22 am, bluelair said:
Your math is correct, but you're giving it purely from the POV [point-of-view] of the "selfish" buyer who considers only [his] economic well-being. Others may view this differently to take into account resource use in general, not just what hits them in the pocketbook. At this point in time, there is no direct tax on spewing carbon emissions into the atmosphere; it is a cost borne by the entire populace.

on 12/18/2007 at 8:45 am, Economics 101 said:
Economics 101 dude ... something called 'externalities.' These are things that the buyer/seller market relationship does not price, and they explain why libertarian types completely miss the point of the environment. For example, let's say we have a simple economic transaction: You hunt whales in the ocean; I eat whales. I pay you for your labor. Simple, right? The problem is the loss to the world of the whales. Market economics simply breaks down in these situations, just as you are describing in your article. This is why government regulation is 100% appropriate, and I don't say this as a bleeding-heart hippie. I say this as a trained economist who recognizes this at a very fundamental level. In technical terms, regulation is needed because of 'market failure' with regard to the environment.

on 12/18/2007 at 8:54 am, grayscale said:
Sure, there's something wrong about trashing a perfectly good washing machine just to go out and buy a greener version. The point is not to do that. The point is, when your old machine is dead, buy the greenest one you can afford. Just like the point of CF [compact-fluorescent] light bulbs. When an old incandescent one burns out, replace it with a better model. And, with regard to the dead birds around the windmills, that's only one particular site that has that major of a problem. The others are placed with bird-migration patterns taken into account and birdkill is much less at those sites. Is it perfect? No, but the alternative is even more dead birds/animals/people. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing situation, just better than before.

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