courtesy of Harold Ambler in HuffPo (which is nowhere I would have expected to see global warming called “the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind,” but there you go). He does a nice job of exposing the baloney “science” underlying global-warming claims (including a point about the limited ability CO2 has to absorb heat); perhaps more importantly, he also points out that bowing to global-warming hysteria would misdirect our environmental efforts and do considerable damage to the world economy—which would not only increase human suffering, it would also further damage the global environment by moving the world collectively back toward more primitive, and dirtier, technologies for energy generation.One of my fellow debaters in high school used to say, “I’m pro-environment, but anti-environmentalist.” Issues like this make me think he was right.HT: Bill Roberts
I’m still waiting for this grand conservative plan for the environment, this alternative to “the environmentalists”. As an environmentalist, I see the momvent I’m part of as saying the following: use less, waste less, pollute less, despoil less; species apart from human beings are valuable apart from how we can exploit or kill them until they are out of our way; lastly, that our current economic system is untenable long-term.
What I see from the conservatives amounts to “Uh, if we do that stuff, we won’t be able to get as rich.”
Well, you’re right. If we don’t change our current course, we will continue making Earth uninhabitable. If we change, we’ll have to give up some of our rapacious consumption. I guess either we’ll deal with that fact, or we won’t. But there’s no economic fairy-dust that will let us exploit everything as fast as possible and *also* preserve it.
I see nothing from conservatives except for calls for fairy dust, frankly.
And I still need to see a lot more to contradict global warming before I’ll buy it. I’m just not that big a fan of world-spanning, multinational, decades-long evil conspiracies aimed at ruining everyone’s fun with no basis – especially when there’s all this evidence, and thoroughly convinced scientists. I need a lot more reasons to stop thinking that’s a bunch of whining BS from people who don’t want their exploitation-parade rained on by basic science.
“use less, waste less, pollute less, despoil less; species apart from human beings are valuable apart from how we can exploit or kill them until they are out of our way”
I agree with all of that, as do many conservatives.
“our current economic system is untenable long-term”
Here is where we disagree; I would say that any other economic system is untenable in the long term.
You’re right, though, that conservative environmental approaches are as yet not as developed or widely argued as they should be, in part due to the natural process of political reaction; but they’re a lot more developed than you realize. They just tend to be localist and ground-up, rather than top-down, and so much more in evidence elsewhere in the West than in California.
As for scientists being convinced, a lot of them are convinced for ideological reasons which have nothing to do with the actual science. There really isn’t “all this evidence,” there’s an agenda–socialism with another justification. I long ago stopped believing the fairytale that scientists are any more objective than any other group of folks.