{"id":6215,"date":"2015-03-05T06:53:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-05T11:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6215"},"modified":"2015-03-05T06:53:38","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T11:53:38","slug":"peak-meaninglessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6215","title":{"rendered":"Peak Meaninglessness"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/03\/peak-meaninglessness.html\" target=\"_blank\">Peak Meaninglessness<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Last week\u2019s discussion of externalities\u2014costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit\u2014is, I\u2019m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently.\u00a0\u00a0The long silence that closed around such things three decades ago is finally cracking; they\u2019re being mentioned again, and not just by archdruids.\u00a0One of my readers\u2014tip of the archdruidical hat to Jay McInerney\u2014noted an article in\u00a0<em>Grist<\/em>\u00a0a while back that pointed out the awkward fact that\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/grist.org\/business-technology\/none-of-the-worlds-top-industries-would-be-profitable-if-they-paid-for-the-natural-capital-they-use\/\">none of the twenty biggest industries in today\u2019s world could break even, much less make a profit<\/a>, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.<\/p>\n<p>Now of course the conventional wisdom these days interprets that statement to mean that it\u2019s unfair to make those industries pay for the costs they impose on the rest of us\u2014after all, they have a God-given right to profit at everyone else\u2019s expense, right?\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s certainly the attitude of fracking firms in North Dakota, who recently proposed that\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2015\/01\/28\/us-usa-north-dakota-waste-idUSKBN0L11Z420150128\">\u00a0they ought to be exempted from the state\u2019s rules on dumping radioactive waste<\/a>, because following the rules would cost them too much money. That the costs externalized by the fracking industry will sooner or later be paid by others, as radionuclides in fracking waste work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, is of course not something anyone in the industry or the media is interested in discussing.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peak Meaninglessness Last week\u2019s discussion of externalities\u2014costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit\u2014is, I\u2019m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently.\u00a0\u00a0The long silence that closed around such things three decades [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[3463,271,331,1758,3329,3794,723],"class_list":["post-6215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-archdruid-report","tag-environment-2","tag-fracking","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-profits","tag-radioactive-waste","tag-shale-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6216,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215\/revisions\/6216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}