Beam me to Planet Gore !
Good read...thank you!
We've gone at it hammer-and-tong over AGW over the years. He was always a true believer, and I have always been a skeptic, since the 1980s, when I was sitting around the Math Department at Berkeley talking about environmental models and how they could be massively powerful tools for manipulating public policy.
Anyway, my brother was going on about how he wants to buy a Chevy Volt when they come out, and how he thinks the plug-in hybrid will be a revolutionary product. I decided to needle him gently about how the Volt will actually have a larger carbon footprint than a conventional car of similar size if the electricity used to charge it comes from a coal-fired power plant.
He blithely replied that all that carbon stuff was nonsense, and he was really concerned about reducing our nation's dependence on foreign oil. So if he could run his car off of domestic coal, he was all for that, because this would mean that we would not longer have to support military adventures around the World to secure oil supplies.
Well, I about dropped my beer. A averred that kicking terrorist butt was a good thing in itself, and let it go at that.
So, my big prediction is that the Left is going to give up on this AGW business by the end of the year. We are about to experience a “Two Legs Better” moment, where the narrative will suddenly change.
One point I think you missed in defining it as hysteria rather than science is that in all the doomsday scenarios, the solution almost always comes back to the same thing: Government regulation to change our way of life.
Remember the hysteria over not having any place to put our trash, the garbage barge wandering around, looking for a place to go into port, and city after city refusing it?
The solution was us ceasing to consume so much.
The forest was being wiped out at an incredible rate, to the point that by right about now we wouldn’t have any forests at all. They almost got that one right - by cutting off logging in the local mountains, a bark beetle infestation was able to kill large swaths of trees, turning it into the rich tinder for the firestorms that soon came after.
This, of course, ignored historical record that showed that you could ride a horse through that same forest, whereas before it was burned through a forest fire, you were lucky if you could walk through it, it was so overgrown.
We’re going to run out of water in California - that’s the newest hysteria in my area. Some are even linking it to global climate change, whereas others are avoiding that, as so many have come to the same conclusion, that the climate change argument is bogus. Why are we low on water? Due to court orders preventing us from making more dams, court orders to release water from existing dams, and further court orders preventing the use of aquifers contaminated with, gosh, the fuel additives that environmentalists required us to use to reduce pollution.
Truly, a man made shortage, or rather, court ordered. So you’d best stop watering your lawn (while the ivory towers of university campuses continue to turn their lawns into mud pits from constant never ending over watering), and take only one shower a week, because we’re going to be out of water...
Everything done, no matter what the hysteria, has a singular goal, that of turning us into a third world economy. They just might make it, though, this time around, as they’ve driven out a tremendous amount of manufacturing (due to environmental concerns that disappear as soon as the factory moves to China...), and the near collapse of our markets.
I wonder how much carbon tax I’ll have to pay in the future to make a post like this...