Global Warming,
Cut The Carbon Or Die
By Mike Roselle
I have been monitoring the so-called mainstream press for reactions to the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most pundits had already opined on the subject of global warming. The responses fall into three rough categories. Those who think Al Gore is right. Those who think Al Gore is wrong. And those, like me, who think Al Gore is soft-peddling the crisis.
Those who agree with Al Gore are fond of wind generators, hybrid cars, organic food and the kind of things Amery Lovins proposed in his seminal work, Soft Energy Paths, when he worked with Friends of the Earth in the 1970s. He was considered a kook back then but nowadays I hear folks talk a lot more about what Amery was trying to say.
The deniers are usually religious fanatics, professional skeptics or lackeys of the energy companies. When columnist Ellen Goodman compared these people to Holocaust deniers recently she received the predictable backlash from the guardians of the memory of the Holocaust. I’m guessing this was exactly the debate she wanted to provoke. Her argument that global warming is a holocaust that lies in the future, rather than the past deserves some serious consideration, even if her critics are right that there is an apples and oranges aspect to this comparison that deserves mention.
The Energy companies are not forcing us into getting into the ovens. They are talking us into getting into an oven where we control the thermostat and are turning it up. Exxon and their ilk are not selecting one group of people for this evil deed, but all of us. Eli Wiesel has compared the nuclear arms race to the Holocaust as well, and we generally take this as an attempt to illustrate the enormity of the event. For something to be called a Holocaust it must be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. I leave that for you to judge.
The third group of people, those who think Al Gore is lowballing the problem, are under attack by both of the other groups. We are the alarmists with an agenda. This has become more and more evident as the discussions on what to do have come up at the highest levels of government and industry. Ellen Goodman, in the same column that she compares global warming to the Holocaust goes on to decry alarmism, saying that the reason nothing has been done about it is actually psychological as well as political.
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Well, I’m no psychologist, but it seems wrong to say that people are not ready for the truth, so we therefore won’t tell them the truth, believing that it will paralyze them with fear, impotency and denial. This is not only blatantly paternalistic, but more importantly, like the intellectual product of most consultants, it ignores the facts. Why are so many people lining up with Al Gore, putting their money and their mouth into solving the crisis, including one of the most self-absorbed billionaires on the planet, Sir Richard Branson? It’s fear!
http://lowbagger.org/carboncut.html
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