Josh, I believe that liberals using this to push a socialist agenda is more of a pressing issue, since that leads to communism and lose of freedom.
What part of environmental regulation is socialist, pray? Your argument is doubly illogical; you assume that people who are concerned about global warming are necessarily pursuing a socialist agenda, which is wrong, and then that socialism is an innate and irredeemable evil, which is also wrong.
This has nothing to do with socialism. Only the most hardcore anarcho-libertarians are crazy enough to argue that government should not govern. Government regulation mitigates the horrors that would ensue from a free market economy. Many Republicans preach that this sort of “free” is a good idea, but “free radical” is the better comparison, and more accurately an unregulated economy would be akin to a group of jailbirds broke loose from prison and running amok over the town. It’d be a throwback to the robber barons of the late nineteenth century--and even
then the doctrine of laissez-faire was not free of government intervention entirely.
I don’t know what people like you mean when you talk about government playing a role in the administration of society as though it were an innately bad thing. Either you have no clue whatsoever as to how this country actually works, or your ideological passions trump the Good Sense lobe in your brain. Government in this country is elected by the people and is administered for the people. The people we sent to office are ostensibly
our people. Why would you distrust them over profit-driven tycoons whose interest is to a few shareholders rather than the entire public? Government’s role is to administer a healthy society. It collects taxes and expends these revenues on physical infrastructure that raises our quality of life, social infrastructure that increases accessibility, legislation that establishes helpful guidelines in the conduct of people and institutions, a foreign policy and defense of the nation, and the bureaucratic and executive structures necessary to carry all of these undertakings out. There is nothing socialistic about any of this. Every functional government on Earth must discharge these obligations to some degree or another. You simply don’t know what you are talking about. Government does not equal socialism.
How can you possibly have the gall to say that no less a threat to the prosperity of human society than global warming is less important than your socialist bogeyman? You conservatives care less about actually improving the wellbeing and prosperity of our country than you do vilifying and hating liberals. You believe in ruinous policies that oppress the public, deplete our resources, bankrupt the economy, and pollute our land. Global warming is going to change this world with great swiftness, disrupting or eliminating potable water supplies all over the globe, redistributing agricultural productivity worldwide, flooding lowlands and islands and coastal cities, and altering the massive ocean currents that define every climate on Earth. And you don’t care? You’d rather that automobiles emit as much smog as they want? You’d rather that smokestacks be as big and wide as their owners want them to be? You’d rather than we just go right on pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the optimal rate to satisfy our basest economic impulses today, with no regard whatsoever to the health of our economies in the long-term, to say nothing of human society in general? What the hell are you smoking?
Sure, Global Warming is a problem. I also don’t believe we are the cause of it, nor is there a whole lot we can do about it. I don’t believe that our industry is to blame.
Your beliefs are worth exactly zero dollars and zero cents in the exchange market of reality. It doesn’t matter what you believe; the truth is that global warming is an enormous adversary looming on the horizon of every nation. Human societies bear some if not much if not most of the responsibility for this problem. But whether our share of the bill is ten percent or ninety, we will suffer one hundred percent of the full consequences of climate change, and it is imperative that we do everything we can to reverse or at least mitigate the coming changes. Private enterprise isn’t going to do a damn thing to combat the problem until global warming starts impacting the economy’s bottom line, by which time the climatological momentum will be even more difficult to wrangle with than it is today.
What will it take for you to get it into your head that our actions have consequences?
Yes, global warming is a problem. Yes, we share the blame in its growth.
Yes, there is something we can do about it. Enough of your fatalistic gobbledegook! You Republicans can’t think and shouldn’t govern. Now the only challenge is convincing the equally idiotic electorate to vote for the person with brains over “heartland values,” which I take to mean “anti-freedom, anti-women, anti-science, anti-personal-liberty, anti-environment, anti-personal-responsibility, anti-gay, and anti-free-speech”
Plus, I’m not “Doom and Gloom” about this. I have my faith, so I have my own ideas about how the future will pan out.
You see? You see?! Did anyone else see that? This is why Republicans are batshit fucking insane. They think the Second Coming is just around the corner, and so before it gets here we may as well run this poor little planet straight into the ground--and us along with it--because soon Jesus will come and banish all the homos and take the good Christians up to Heaven.
That is not a sound national policy! When our newly elected officers take their oath of office, they put their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution. They
do not put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. The United States government should be concerned with the wellbeing and prosperity of the United States of America. Period. That means, in this case, recognizing global warming for the serious problem that it is, and doing something about it!
Glory be to God! With followers like this, it’s no wonder that God is so hard to find these days. I wouldn’t want to show my face either.
And now to take a slice out of ZeaLitY...
I am just weary of announcements that the world is going to pot. Platforms on both sides of the political spectrum employ the “fundamental truth” that the entire world is going to the trash can. If that is true, then humanity has been going to pieces for the entire breadth of its history. In other words, the world is NOT doomed and society is NOT going to utter ruin.
Let me first say that I agree wholeheartedly with your opening sentence. Let me next say that, sadly, every sentence that comes after it is a colorful new shade of
completely friggin’ wrong. There is no high road to be found in your continual pained indifference toward political matters. It is both selfish and self-defeating, and all it serves to do is persuade impressionable people that their dreams need not be achieved through their deeds, which is a perfect lie.
I share your disdain for the conspiracy theorists, alarmists, and naysayers, because they are wrong. They are caught up in an irrational fear and proceed to dirty the public dialogue by peddling it to the rest of us. Being easily alarmed is a common animal trait, and when people refuse to impose their minds upon their emotions, these sorts of doomsday forecasts will foam up and spill out like suds in a bathtub. Most people would understand and agree with what you have said about wearying of alarmism.
Nevertheless, you go beyond this basic sentiment to commit a long series of intellectual follies:
There is nothing that angers me more from adults than discussions about how Wal-Mart is coming to town to ruin local business, how the kids are getting more out of hand in school, how robots are going to enslave humanity, how housing costs are going to go up to the millions of dollars, etc. Humans are adaptable and are on the verge of taking to the skies and carving a piece out of the heavens.
Really? There is
nothing that angers you more? Then I submit that you are an unfortunate man, because you are angry at the truth. Every one of the examples you provided is an example of the sensationalization of a real problem. Wal-Mart really has changed the face of retail, and run thousands of small businesses into the ground. Kids really are becoming more violent and disrespectful in school, as well as more medicated and unmotivated. Housing costs really have priced more and more people out of the market of owning a home. And robots, while far from enslaving humanity, really are altering our behavior patterns and social customs in ways that are sometimes quite disappointing. I’m thinking, for instance, of the disgusting sight of seeing a bus full of people with headphones around their ears, and nobody is talking to anyone else.
Your problem, Z, is that you have failed to discriminate between alarmist sensationalism and the much more serious underlying problems that give rise to this sensationalism.
Suppose a house in your town catches on fire. It does little real damage before being extinguished by the people living there, all of whom get out safely. But the local news station, which is having a slow day, picks up the story and decides to puff it up a little bit. They interview the “survivors” and elicit overly dramatic recounts of their “heroic escape.” Then they take biased shots of the house, showing off the few burned areas to the exclusion of the vast majority of the house, which is unburned and just fine. They show footage of the fire engines and ambulances that arrived on the scene, even though none of these vehicles’ services were needed. Then they turn to the audience and ask,
”Is your house at risk for a fire?! Will you be able to escape when it catches on fire?! Tune in at eleven!!”It would be easy for anyone with some good taste to be put off by the shameless sensationalism of this kind of news coverage, given the non-newsworthiness of the actual story. But does that mean the fire wasn’t a serious risk to the people in that house? Does it mean they shouldn’t have bothered to install smoke alarms and fire extinguishers? Does it mean that emergency services should not respond to calls that may not require emergency aid? Does it mean that the news station should not have reported the story at all? Does it mean that viewers watching the broadcast should not take the opportunity to check their own alarms and extinguishers, and make sure they have good contingency plans?
No, no, no, no, no, and no. And this is your mistake. You have judged one person but punished two. Global warming is a serious problem. I have never said anything alarmist about it. In fact, I have not said much about it at all. (I have focused on my frustration that more people will not wrap their heads around the issue.) But even if I had said that global warming is a major apocalyptic threat that will definitely wipe out everybody and put nine out of ten cities underwater and kill all the polar bears, even though I would thereby be guilty of alarmism, that would do nothing to change the
real threats of global warming.
For instance, I live in Seattle, which is in Washington State. Washington is one of the largest agricultural producers in the country. Last winter an
el niño weather pattern almost completely eliminated all statewide rainfall for nearly the three full months of winter. No winter precipitation meant no snow in the mountains. By spring, snowpacks across the state were between ten and forty percent of their averages. These snowpacks are vitally important, because the eastern half of the state is arid and receives little precipitation in the warm months. Snowpacks provide practically all of Eastern Washington’s agricultural water reserve. With no snow in the hills, agricultural output in 2005 was looking to be absolutely grim. There weren’t going to be any famines, but everything from cherries to apples would have been much more expensive that year, and many farmers would have gone out of business by reason of not having the water to grow their crops. No crops means no sales. No sales means bye-bye Mr. Farmer.
Just before spring, Governor Gregoire declared a state of emergency. Ironically, the skies opened up almost literally the next day, and we got one of the wettest springs in decades. Much of the looming drought was eliminated at the last minute, and the disaster was mitigated into merely a lean year.
As global warming progresses, the computer models call for significant climate shifts leading to temperature increases in the Pacific Northwest. No, not enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Just a couple of degrees. But this is still a serious problem. El niño killed our rainfall totals, but as far as snowpacks are concerned hotter temperatures are just as deadly as less rain. And so even though our precipitation is not likely to be significantly reduced in the decades to come, much of what once fell as snow will instead fall as rain. That rain will bleed into our rivers and out to sea during the winter instead of throughout the spring and summer. In the summer and autumn, Eastern Washington will go dry. Farms with wither and die; agricultural output will be slashed. Underground reservoirs and aquifers are already depleted after decades of botched infrastructure planning; there is not much reserve left to tap. The weaker our mountain snowpacks become, the less agriculture output there will be in our state. People will go out of business. No, they won’t die. They’ll get jobs somewhere else. Maybe things will work out for the better.
But maybe they won’t.
You can’t plan policy on that kind of “maybe.” We have a viable economy in Washington now, today. We’d be fools to wager it on global warming. And yet that is precisely what we are doing, indirectly, by refusing to curb our automotive and industrial emissions.
Look at Mount Kilimanjaro, the so-called “Roof of Africa.” Nowhere in the world is global warming more evident: In less than fifty years, the mountain’s famous glacier has melted away. This is a black omen for mountain glaciers and winter snowpacks all over the world—and that is not an alarmist rant. Water for farming and drinking is already one of the most scarce and precious commodities in the world. Global warming will aggravate summer droughts. This will kill people, and it will impoverish many more. An “alarmist” position might be that the scarcity of water will lead nations to war. I don’t know if that will happen; I seriously doubt it. But just because people are saying wacky things like that doesn’t mean that the underlying problem is not critical.
When people complain about global warming—or housing prices, or Wal-Mart—even if their complaints sound sensationalized, there may be a serious problem underneath. Wal-Mart has directly contributed to the stagnation of wages in America. Ironically, it is also a major welfare corporation. I can say, without alarmism, that Wal-Mart is a blight on its workforce, on local economies everywhere, and on the fiscal health of the entire nation. Much like global warming, you don’t have to believe that Wal-Mart is a threat; but one way or another you are already suffering from it. Your state, ZeaLitY—Oklahoma—is in the poorest, sickest, least-educated, and, not coincidentally, the most business-friendly region in the entire country. This is a terrible joke on America: Republicans are poorer, but are also disproportionately the biggest victims of their own ideological policies. Liberal states are much more wealthy; our tax money flows out of the blue states and into the red ones, and when Republican governments slash public spending, who suffers the worst? We all suffer, but you guys suffer even more.
You do neither yourself nor anyone else a service by pretentiously declaring that you are weary of alarmists who tell you that the world is coming to an end, because by focusing such irrational contempt on them, you are completely neglecting some very serious threats to human society that, while not likely to bring about the end of the world in a literal sense, are bound to cause a drain on the economy, and, more to the point, a reduction in the quality of life for many people. If only you could separate the alarmists from the problems that alarm them! Here is an example of what I mean:
CNN’s homepage currently states: “From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us.” Give me a break. From prehistoric impacts to the grand Ice Age itself, earth has endured a lot more and this trend might as well be a slight jostle on the cosmic scale.
I agree with you—nay, I feel even more strongly than you do—that sensationalism in the news is a very bad thing. But in the same paragraph you then leap from that legitimate point to suggest that “this trend” (i.e., global warming) might as well be “a slight jostle,” thereby implying that the threat of global warming is insignificant. And what do governments tend to do about “insignificant” problems? They tend not to try and fix those problems. By making the illogical connection between alarmism and real problems, your ideological bottom line lands itself in Sentenal’s boat. Even if you are a conservative (which I don’t know), you’ve got to have more sense than that.
How humans handle it is the issue, and in summary, I would that we could be hopeful, put faith in new technology, and adapt as needed. But I don’t want it grating on my conscience like a two ton weight.
Are you suggesting that you have more important things to do than worry about the future? If there is
anything that deserves to weigh on us, it is a concern for the future. It would be the pinnacle of selfishness to refuse to deal with big problems simply because they are unsavory. Let me point out that in this passage, you speak as though the human response to global warming will come from a humanity which does not seem to include you yourself.
When I write, you may have noticed that I try to avoid the general “you.” Instead, I use a general “we.” I do that because I try to include myself as a responsible denizen of human civilization. I only draw lines when I must, such as between myself and the Republican Party, or myself and the Religious Right. I recognize the tragedy of the commons; nobody wants to fix up our world because “somebody else” will do it…right? Somebody else will fix the problems I want to ignore. Well, I’m an engineer. One of the reasons for this is that engineers fix problems. To phrase it more positively, we meet challenges. I find that very appealing, and immensely productive to the human future in which you and I both believe, but which you have implicitly forsaken in your numerous refusals to take part in the dirty obligations of politics and ideological self-comportment.
Your efforts to put an end to humanity’s contribution to global warming begin with your own daily behavior. Reduce your carbon footprint. Patronize businesses with environmentally-friendly practices. Vote for candidates who support meaningful pollution regulations. Tell the people you know why it matters to you. If you do not do these things, you are a part of the problem. It is especially important to take part in politics, for the reason that the efforts of politicians in this matter and others will have a much greater reach than your own. The Democratic Party, for all its considerable faults, supports environmental stewardship in a way that will silence the ravings of people like Sentenal in a way that no message board discourse can. Together with the Democrats’ support of civil liberties and fiscal responsibility, it is unconscionable for any decent, self-aware human being to vote Republican.
So let me put it to you more plainly, John Paul: When it comes to the future, we get exactly what we pay for. And when you say:
Time Magazine, I apologize, but I would prefer to approach things rationally!
I agree completely. But now, after the talk, come the deeds. The Kingdom of Zeal was borne of much sacrifice and hard work, and was destroyed by the shortsightedness and laziness of its descendents. Would you like to go on all your life dreaming about a better future, or would you actually like to participate in building one?
Lord J Esq is a lock and stock humanist.
No, I am not. I am nothing of the sort nor did I ever say anything to that effect. Humanism is absolutely outside my spheres of motivation. If you read me as a disciple of that creed, you would be utterly mistaken. It puzzles me where you could have decided upon such a totally inadequate description of my philosophy. After some thought, I can only expect that you came up with that word because religious demagogues like to use it as a catch-all pejorative for liberals. When de-formalized, the central aspects of humanism—reason, education, and culture—go without saying. They are no more a philosophy than humanity itself is a vocation.
Having said that, I think humanism in the classical sense was an excellent formalized rebuttal to the religiousness that preceded it. But other than as an antidote to religion, it has nothing of substance to offer. I do not suffer from religion, and thus have no need to be cured of it.
Poll