Submitted by Andrew Duguid (not verified) on May 24, 2006 - 15:48.
John observes that the OGTR is a rubber stamping agency whose actual policy is a safe until proven otherwise. Presumably this is a political influence (ie from the government) rather than an institutional tendency bound up with the culture of the public service. How much would the OGTR's performance improve (from the green point of view) if the government held and enforced a precautionary policy? What in practical terms would the other impacts of this policy be? One might be challenges in the WTO or under other free-trade agreements, that seem to implicitly militate against precautionary regulation. Another might be that the principle is unimplementable for the reasons I suggested earlier. But these aside (there are ways to manage or finese either of these), I'm interested in the idea that the problem is less dramatic than we might be making it. It should in theory be easier to change policy or change governments than it is to change the institutions that provide the continuity for the change to occur.
It is also interesting that John uses the notion of a "more precautionary" approach, suggesting that the principle is not superlative or absolute. I think that this would redress my objections to the principle somewhat, although it raises the issue of how precautionary do we want and how do we elect or institutionalise the values or epistemology required to make decisions in line with the "right" amount of precaution.
The issues of social and ethical impacts is very difficult and I tend to think that they do require a back to the drawing board philosophical consideration - I think John was suggesting this earlier. The notion of "impacts" is also quite specific to the current governmental way of thinking - I would tend to consider ethical implications rather than impacts (the latter seems to externalise ethics from the locus of action).
We are in a very difficult position as far as social impacts or implications go because we are far from a metanarrative that is broadly accepted. Social impacts can collapse to simply the politics of existing groupings and I don't think that this is a good basis for progressive governance (the social impact of stopping mining is lots of unemployed miners - and the destruction of the major union stronghold in Australia). Someone needs to craft a vision of society that can provide some sort of guidance in the face of structural changes that would otherwise seem incohate, arbitrary and vicious to the people enduring them. In this sense I again seek to turn the question into the positive, although the onus is still on the proponent: before we address the question of whether this technology is safe, first prove to us that it is worth doing at all?
Reform of OGTR
John observes that the OGTR is a rubber stamping agency whose actual policy is a safe until proven otherwise. Presumably this is a political influence (ie from the government) rather than an institutional tendency bound up with the culture of the public service. How much would the OGTR's performance improve (from the green point of view) if the government held and enforced a precautionary policy? What in practical terms would the other impacts of this policy be? One might be challenges in the WTO or under other free-trade agreements, that seem to implicitly militate against precautionary regulation. Another might be that the principle is unimplementable for the reasons I suggested earlier. But these aside (there are ways to manage or finese either of these), I'm interested in the idea that the problem is less dramatic than we might be making it. It should in theory be easier to change policy or change governments than it is to change the institutions that provide the continuity for the change to occur.
It is also interesting that John uses the notion of a "more precautionary" approach, suggesting that the principle is not superlative or absolute. I think that this would redress my objections to the principle somewhat, although it raises the issue of how precautionary do we want and how do we elect or institutionalise the values or epistemology required to make decisions in line with the "right" amount of precaution.
The issues of social and ethical impacts is very difficult and I tend to think that they do require a back to the drawing board philosophical consideration - I think John was suggesting this earlier. The notion of "impacts" is also quite specific to the current governmental way of thinking - I would tend to consider ethical implications rather than impacts (the latter seems to externalise ethics from the locus of action).
We are in a very difficult position as far as social impacts or implications go because we are far from a metanarrative that is broadly accepted. Social impacts can collapse to simply the politics of existing groupings and I don't think that this is a good basis for progressive governance (the social impact of stopping mining is lots of unemployed miners - and the destruction of the major union stronghold in Australia). Someone needs to craft a vision of society that can provide some sort of guidance in the face of structural changes that would otherwise seem incohate, arbitrary and vicious to the people enduring them. In this sense I again seek to turn the question into the positive, although the onus is still on the proponent: before we address the question of whether this technology is safe, first prove to us that it is worth doing at all?