Far from aberrations, they are all rigorously faithful to the system's acquisitive logic. Life-impairing but lucrative deceptions have been repeatedly exposed in virtually every industry and in the most prestigious firms, from pharmaceuticals to the extraction of raw materials, from air travel to car manufacturing to food production. We need not belabor the point here, except to remind ourselves that the folks in control are powerful and "respectable" people, even philanthropists, in whose minds the denial of prosocial values has become acceptable, more virtue than sin, and either way, a requirement.
During the 1850s and 1860s, the Prussian economy experienced the transforming effects of the first world boom. Rapid growth in the railway network and in associated enterprises, such as steel smelting and machine-building, was supported by a phenomenal expansion in the extraction of fossil fuels. During the 1860s, the coalmines of the Ruhr district in the Prussian Rhineland grew at an average rate of 170 per cent per annum bringing economic and social change at a pace unparalleled in the history of the region.
Reklam
Gas power would be acceptable if it were combined with carbon sequestration (carbon capture and storage, CCS) whereby the CO2 is extracted from the exhaust gases at the power station and then transported and permanently stored underground.
Some claim that it would be advantageous to actually cut the CO2 concentration back down to its preindustrial level—to sequester not just the future emission from power stations but also to ‘suck out’ what has been emitted in the past century. The case for this isn’t obvious. There’s nothing ‘optimal’ about the world’s twentieth-century climate—what’s damaging is that the anthropogenic rate of change has been faster than the natural changes in the past, and therefore not easy for us or the natural world to adjust to. But if this reduction were thought worthwhile, there are two ways of achieving it. One is direct extraction from the atmosphere; this is possible, but inefficient as CO2 is only 0.04 percent of the air. Another technique is to grow crops, which of course soak up CO2 from the atmosphere, use them as biofuels, and then capture (and bury) the CO2 that is re-emitted in the power station when they are burned. This is fine in principle but is problematic because of the amount of land needed to grow the fuel (which would otherwise be available for food—or conserved as natural forest), and because the permanent sequestering of the billions of tons of CO2 isn’t straightforward. A higher-tech variant would use ‘artificial leaves’ to incorporate CO2 directly into fuel.
The extraction of the ratio decidendi is a much more important issue in Great Britain than in the United States, because under traditional British appellate practice, as well as that in some other British Commonwealth countries, there is no requirement that there be a single majority opinion or opinion of the court. The three or five or more judges who hear a case typically will each give his own individual opinion. The outcome reached by the majority of those judges is the outcome in the case, but determining what the case stands for is inevitably a process of determining which propositions of law and which rationales attracted the agreement of a majority of the judges. So if Judge A decides for the plaintiff for reasons x, y, and z, and Judge B decides for the plaintiff for reasons p, q, and x, and if Judge C decides for the defendant, then the ratio decidendi is x, the reason (and the only reason) shared by a majority of judges.
