I thought the debate was over, that the concensus was in, that everyone agreed. Well, of course, The Goracle wouldn’t be spending $300,000,000 to “raise awareness,” known in the real world as “finding a way to suck money out of gullible people’s and governments pockets.”
(Daily Vidette) Influenced at least in part by the Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth,” there has been a lot of debate over global warming over the past few years. (oh, that must piss Gore off big time!)
While some question the logic of global warming, others have proposed ways to slow it down. One of these proposals has been to enforce limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The purpose of these limits is to persuade energy users to conserve their energy or to change to non-polluting energy sources. According to the New York Times, however, some scientists believe that whatever benefits such proposals provide will be too little and come too late.
“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated in a recent article in Scientific American. “If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”
And there is the crux of the matter. The climate change debate is a political one, not a scientific one. The solutions being pushed are basically all “feel good” ones – though, I’m not sure how the rest of us will feel good when the price of goods goes way up, innovation is stifled, and those poor folks suffer tremendously.
These feel good measures supposedly have good intentions. Remember when the crazies who got DDT banned had good intentions? Tell that to the millions upon millions who have died in developing nations due to said good intentions. Especially when DDT is not dangerous.
I’ll give you a scenario: in order to solve anthropogenic global warming, everyone has to give up their remote controls. What? You refuse? Go figure.
I will not disagree that Man has some effect on overall climate, outside of the urban island effect. But, what would solve it is pushing advances in technology, not stifling them through taxes, fees, and legal restraint.
