U.S. Response to Climate Change Divided Across Party Lines
Steve Cohen, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of Columbia University’s Earth Institute sees the climate change issue in much the same way we tend to here at 2GreenEnergy: shamefully divided across party lines – yet not hopeless. On his blog at the Huffington Post, Cohen points out that Republicans really have changed their minds on the legitimacy of climate change. He comes away, however, on an upbeat: “Young people understand the challenges of global sustainability and I am convinced that the situation is far from hopeless.”
Steve: Though I’m glad to hear that you’re optimistic, you may wish to consider handling the matter the way I have come to: just change the subject. I’m through with arguing about climate change. I know there are people who are “manipulatively misguided” on the subject (to use your words), but I’ve lost my patience with debating them. Tragically, there are half a dozen other outright catastrophes we’re causing with our continued reliance on fossil fuels: lung disease, ocean acidification, empowering oppressive regimes, choking off the economy, etc. I simply urge climate change deniers to pick another issue. I know lots of people who aren’t paying close attention to what’s going on, and lots of people who don’t believe in climate change, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe in cancer or terrorism.
I have been thinking about and doing what I can to reduce or eliminate my use of oil since I had to wait in line for my weekly 10 gallon ration of gas on the day that matched my licence plate some 30+ years ago. I realized at that time that our dependance on oil was extremely dangerous not to mention that we seem to spill the stuff all over the globe like a toddler walking across a white carpet carrying a full bucket of red paint and pollute the atmosphere by burning it. The reality of how bad using this stuff is has only been intensified over time at least as far as I am concerned.
I was extremely dissapointed when the whole global warming/climate change theory was advanced as a reason to stop using fossil fuels was advanced and have never used it as a point of argument. No matter how true it is, I could not imagine a more difficult theory to convince the general public of. It just takes too much attention and concentration for most people to be bothered with especially when, as Craig mentions, there are so many really good and simple to understand reasons to eliminate our use of fossil fuels.
Whenever I end up in a debate about eliminating our use of fossil fuels, someone usually tries to claim we should continue our use because global warming/clmate change is not true or not really happening or not effected by man. My usual response is to say that as long as I don’t mention global warming/climate change they are not allowed to mention it either. Once you eliminate their best excuse to continue to use fossil fuels they no longer have an argument. The debate usually comes to a speedy end because there is no denying all of the very many other really simple to understand reasons for quitting fossil fuel use.
XSCO2…
It’s as undeniable as that! The deniers can NOT refute that humanity has converted over 100 CUBIC miles of FF’s into XSCO2. Thus the simple argument is this “How dare you say it is Ok to change the very composition of the air!”
In return, they say “The air had many times that amount of CO2 in the past, so it IS ok”.
To which I reply “It has been hundreds of thousands of years since CO2 levels were as high as what we’ve caused. You’re talking millions and even Billions of years ago, when the air reeked of massive dieoffs…anyways, again, it’s not nice to mess with mother nature!”.
They will spout off things like “But Al Gore is a liar, blah ,blah, blah…
WHICH IS TRUE (bear with me)… Because he does NOT promote the proper solutions, however, we must still give him credit for helping with global awareness.
We MUST understand WHY there are deniers in the face of the greedy political landscape in which we live. You see, deniers are wrong about the science… but they don’t care! They are RIGHT about the fact that we can’t allow yet another layer of taxation slowing down our energy supply. And they DON’T understand (just as proponents don’t either) that there are ways of making (almost) clean and unlimited energy.
Robotic factories could be used to make solar panels and batteries for TEN X cheaper… but, instead “they” make sure it goes bankrupt (and give way to China for the best battery, the LiFePO4).
Unlimited closed cycle nuclear such as LFTR or IFR has been developed and proven (albeit briefly) to be on the order of thousands of times safer than conventional nuclear (meltdown PROOF)… but instead “they” insist on using the inherently unsafe water reactors… nobody but profit seekers wants that.
You see, as long as we live in the age of money, we will NEVER see cheap energy. It takes trillions of dollars and billions of tons worth of fossil fuels, not to mention all that extra uranium being used in the 99.5% INEFFICIENT water reactors just to supply a years worth of global energy demand… And “they” want growth… That means keeping things as inefficient as possible in order to make even more money. Same is true about the solar panels and batteries, profit seekers will charge every bit they can out of every single little watt and amp hour!
The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) can do ALL THAT using just a millionth (about 5,000 tons). This equates to reducing the energy market a million fold.
This is why I promote robotic factories that make batteries and solar panels. At least there will be millions of install jobs to make up for the loss of coal mining jobs not to mention the conversion to electric cars… but we should use LFTR to power up the robotic assembly lines!