I don't know whether this has been discussed much, but how can USMS support "going green," promoting and/or being supportive of being environmentally responsible for clean water to swim in as well as to drink?
Open Water swims, of course, are the perfect venues to remind us all to keep our waters clean for swimming. The Boston swim focuses on this; do other Open Water swims promote cleaner water? What do they do?
Can pool Masters swimmers, clubs, LMSCs promote being "greener"? Encouraging people to take shorter showers is one way. What are other ways?
I think it is a fine idea and good opportunity for USMS to promote this particular aspect of the environment. By the way, all the Great Lakes are down several inches, except for Lake Superior (where, at the moment, we don't have Open Water swims...but who knows, in the future???).
Jennifer Parks, Michigan Masters
... as Margrave states, it is pretty much universally accepted that the hook to conservation is market forces, not early adopters or new gizmos.
The market can only take into account the cost factors it can see. It doesn't, for example, price the carbon emissions into the gas you buy even though there is a cost to cleaning up that particular mess. There is currently no way for the market to take that into account. Taxes are one way (e.g. the proposed "carbon tax" or the taxes on the gas you buy which go to maintain the highway infrastructure) to (rather crudely and artificially) inject such information into the marketplace. Regulation (e.g. CAFE standards) is another. Thusfar the Bush administration has adopted Margrave's and Aquageek's stance, but has done little or nothing to make sure the market has even a crude approximation of the true costs of our activities.
Muppet summed up his view of the costs of commuting by train and car and decided the car was the cheaper alternative. Nowhere in there did he take into account the cost of the pollution generated by his car, which is almost certainly much higher than the per-passenger-mile pollution generated by riding the train. That's not Muppet's fault. He's only looking at the costs he can see. If he did see those costs it's possible he would have decided to take the train. He didn't put in a depreciation cost because his car is almost fully depreciated. I would argue that should still have been included. While as a car ages it stops depreciating as rapidly, the cost to maintain it increase. Consider that the IRS will reimburse you forty-something cents per mile for business use of your car. They don't ask you how old your car is. It's also not a gift from Uncle Sam. That's his estimate of the actual cost to you to operate your car over the long-term - gas, oil, insurange, depreciation, repairs.
Early adopters serve a useful purpose. They buy the iPohones, Teslas and other new gizmos, and thus demonstrate their utility (or conversely, prove they don't work). If there were no early adopters there would be nobody to help drive down the price of such gizmos through economies of scale. In the absence of a complete view of the true costs of a particular activity someone will always have to be the first to sacrifice.
This problem of incompletely accounting for the costs of human activity is just an example of the tragedy of the commons.
Skip Montanaro
... as Margrave states, it is pretty much universally accepted that the hook to conservation is market forces, not early adopters or new gizmos.
The market can only take into account the cost factors it can see. It doesn't, for example, price the carbon emissions into the gas you buy even though there is a cost to cleaning up that particular mess. There is currently no way for the market to take that into account. Taxes are one way (e.g. the proposed "carbon tax" or the taxes on the gas you buy which go to maintain the highway infrastructure) to (rather crudely and artificially) inject such information into the marketplace. Regulation (e.g. CAFE standards) is another. Thusfar the Bush administration has adopted Margrave's and Aquageek's stance, but has done little or nothing to make sure the market has even a crude approximation of the true costs of our activities.
Muppet summed up his view of the costs of commuting by train and car and decided the car was the cheaper alternative. Nowhere in there did he take into account the cost of the pollution generated by his car, which is almost certainly much higher than the per-passenger-mile pollution generated by riding the train. That's not Muppet's fault. He's only looking at the costs he can see. If he did see those costs it's possible he would have decided to take the train. He didn't put in a depreciation cost because his car is almost fully depreciated. I would argue that should still have been included. While as a car ages it stops depreciating as rapidly, the cost to maintain it increase. Consider that the IRS will reimburse you forty-something cents per mile for business use of your car. They don't ask you how old your car is. It's also not a gift from Uncle Sam. That's his estimate of the actual cost to you to operate your car over the long-term - gas, oil, insurange, depreciation, repairs.
Early adopters serve a useful purpose. They buy the iPohones, Teslas and other new gizmos, and thus demonstrate their utility (or conversely, prove they don't work). If there were no early adopters there would be nobody to help drive down the price of such gizmos through economies of scale. In the absence of a complete view of the true costs of a particular activity someone will always have to be the first to sacrifice.
This problem of incompletely accounting for the costs of human activity is just an example of the tragedy of the commons.
Skip Montanaro
