Government oversight is probably a better phrase than intervention. Apparently I am more socialist inclined than you, but I don't know if the reasons I gave conincide with a socialist market theory. The ones I know never really cared about safety and health issues or the enviconment.

I really had to think about those principles because I was in an exercise and the task was to evaluate different potential building sites for a fiction industrial park according to a biocentric ethical viewpoint - we were a fictional ethics commission assigned to a county board or something like that. It was quite the problem for us (none of us were economists) how exactly placing different values should be done. The biocentric environmental view states that every living matter has equal value, including plantlife and animals. There are great philosophers that make excelent arguments why that is so, which is entireley useless because there is no accompanying manual on how to apply that to reality.

Long story short, it comes down to a systematic approach on assigning values to different things like scarcity, biodeversity etc. - probably a form of CBA, just not strictly in an economic sense. How exactly that apporach should look like - well, we only recommended the development of it and luckily didn't have to do it ourselves.

I found quite a few essays regarding CBA in a book called The environmental ethics and policy book, Philosophy, Ecology, Economics. The easiest to understand (no overly complicated language, concrete examples) studybooks I found are all from american authors. Germans always write way too complicated and longwinded.

Clusters do work in applications like vehicle light. I am actually quite curious as to why lighbulb replacements use the "single diode" mode. My guess is that it is a matter of production cost. There is also the issue of directionality. car lights are highly directional which lends itself well to focusing the light via reflectors. While light bulb replacements should emit light in all directions. LEDs do wonders in the spotlight department where their limited light can be focused into a small angle.

I can buy the leds I described, but I have not seen an LED cluster in the store yet. Maybe they are there and I just have not noticed.

every illumination technology has its plusses and minuses. And I am certain that the LED tech has great potential, enough to become the dominant light tech in the near future. It just makes sense to do so after the technology exists, not before we actually have a product.

as for the heatsink + fan LED: http://www.earthtechproducts.com/led-bulb.html

its actually 13 watt replaced 100 watt incandescent.

This one replaces a 45 watt  incandescent without a fan: http://www.earthtechproducts.com/p2636.html?gdfdomain=.store.yahoo.net&gdftrk=gdfV2538_a_7c634_a_7c2338_a_7cLEDCL3

here is a 60 watt equivalent (7 watts): http://www.earthtechproducts.com/p2637.html

So yea, I was wrong about the 60 watt replacement thing, it was the 100 watt replacements. they are better then they used to. Still, a 60 watt equivalent @ 40$ is quite a lot of money. when a 4 pack of 60 watt equivalent CFLs (14 watts actual) costs 7$

http://www.amazon.com/Compact-Fluorescent-Temperature-Incandescent-Equivalent/dp/B00029QUWG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1267360016&sr=8-2

To pay for itself the LED needs to be vastly longer lived and more power efficient. at 7 watts difference, thats about 7$ a year savings when on 24/7. (depending on your electricity cost)

it claims 11 years when on 8 hours a day (~3.6 years @ 24/7/365), but also claims over 50,000 hours life (~5.7 years). I am sure both figures are exaggerated.

If its closer to the 3.6 yeras figure, it will only save 25$ or so over the lifespan of the bulb in terms of electricity compared to CFL. 40-25 gives 15$, thats enough to buy 9CFLS. the CFL are rated for 1/5th the lifespan, but are much cheaper. And you get to reap the benefits of improved technology earlier (by replacing bulbs more often and paying less each time. I still have CFLs I bought years ago @ about 10$ per bulb).

if it is closer to the 50,000 hours figure, then it can actually pay for itself, as it will save ~40$ over CFLs in its lifetime, and it costs 40$ to buy. making it the better deal.

I think you have more socialist tendencies than I do, but I would not call you a socialist.  I think the difference is just in how we were raised - you in a society that tends more socialist than I.

It always comes down to that.  But then how do you assign values?  What is the basis of the value?  IN any society today, the basis always comes back to money.  In one society, they may value a human life for pittance (most dictators do that), and in others they place a much higher value on it.  In some areas, a human life is worth more than anyone can afford, and so the CBA always comes out with very high safety features.  In others, they assign a lower value, so safety, while important, is not the make or break factor in the decision.

The question is wether moral values are valuable on their own or only because we assigned value to them. I'd like to believe the former.

Does the environment have (moral) value because it exists or only because we as humans assigned value to it, like aesthetic, instrumental, sentimental, religeous etc. values. You could ask the same for a human life. Does human life have value on its own, without human influence, or because we decided that it does? Pricing moral values just feels wrong, even if a CBA can accomplish it.

A ethical counterargument against those supporters of AGW who claim that exploitation of resources on the cost of the environment is amoral and wrong could be this: If you state hat the environment/the whole world has a moral value that is independant from humans, then the environment has value no matter what we do. So even a dead nuclear wasteland (very extreme case) or a world with drastically changed eco- and climatesystems would still have the same moral value because it is independant from human oppinion. There is no moral obligation to the environment to do anything to protect the environment or to stop change in this line of argument - that is, they would have to come up with a convincing ethically sound counterargument, which is possible without too much difficulty, but it's a fun challenge.

This is getting very philosophical. But I will try to keep up.  The answer is yes.  We as moral and ethical human beings assign a value to life that far exceeds the chenical cost of the components.  But we assign it never the less.  We value some lives over others (my family means more to me than a stranger's life).  Whether we sit down with pen and paper and calculate the cost is another matter.  But we will assign a value to it.  The moral and ethical part comes into play by valuing it greater than the cost of creating another life (which is the usual valuation method of assets).

yes is does sound wrong when discussing morals and ethics.  It sounds wrong because you are mixing morals and values - an important aspect of valuation - with economics.  The Mona Lisa is a few dollars of oil and canvas, yet it is considered priceless.  Because we placed a value on it for more than just the replacement cost.  Human life is the same way. 

It is hard to think of it that way, because that is being cold and heartless.  And that is what is needed to do this type of analysis.  That does not mean it is cold and heartless, only that if you start injecting feelings into it, you would never get anywhere.  On the titanic, the captain and crew assigned a value to life, and decided that women and children were worth more than men.  It was necessary.  Was each woman better than each man?  Hardly, but he had to make a cold heartless decision to save some, as not all could be saved.  he placed a value on life based upon criteria that others may not.  But he did so to save some, since not all could be saved.

From a pure valuation standpoint, they have some merit.  But then who is doing the valuation?  God?  Aliens?  No, in all cases man is, for it is man that controls his world to some degree and must allocate scarse resources to infinite problems.  So a sterile world has no value - there is no one there to value it.  A destitute world has very little value - as there are very few to value it.  it is to our (collectively man) beenfit to value a livable planet with very high since as of now it is the only one we have.  But the cost of not exploiting the resources has to be weighed with how many would perish for lack of warmth, clothing, food and shelter.  Clearly if we disrregard the ecology, we destroy that which we need to survive.  But if we put the ecology on a pedestal and make it scared, we destroy human life in the process.  A balance must be struck.  And it is up to the collective man (not one man or a cabal of men) to place the value on the polar opposites and then to see where they intersect.  because man places such a high value on life (relative to other things), then man moves the intersection to a point where resources are exploited, but man survives.

Since man has not reached the stage where he controls his environment, the intersection is a guesstimate.  And until man can control it, it always will be.  But woe to the greens and gore should they get their way.  For when it causes mass starvation and hypothermia, the revolt will be worse than anything they think they want to impose on this world.  And it will be their fault - the road to hell is paved with good intentions (although in Gore's case I think it is just greed).

lol - thanks for keeping up! I find it a fascinating topic to have a conversation about.

Philosophy is the foundation of natural science, of all science. Philosophers were the first who tried to come up with a systematic model to explain the universe and the world, and out of that evovled the rest. So even if this getting philosophical might seem totally off topic from the op, I see a connection. Just think about people like Alexander Humboldt, adventurer, explorer, botanist and philosopher who had a concept of how the world worked and tried to map that in nature only to discover that it didn't really work the way he thought it did.

Hey!  Lightbulbs were Off topic too!  And Taltamir left me in the dark when he started talking about heatsinks on them!

Like I said, you never know where a topic will go.  And for those who are bored, they just dont have to respond.  but as for this topic, I will concede you probably can beat me to death with it.  I am more hard science than philosophy.  And it was hurting my brain trying to keep up with you.