– I have mixed feelings about some of this. I know that people of great sincerity hold beliefs on all sides of these questions. It is easy, when you are strongly on one side, to demonize folks on the other side as being intentionally evil – but, in many cases, it simply isn’t true.
– I’ll qualify this in two ways, however. First, this argument doesn’t let off the folks who run the big Oil and Coal companies that intentionally spread disinformation to confuse the public about global climate change. Once folks have reached that level of power, there is no excuse for misusing their power. With power goes responsibility.
– My other qualification is that while I agree that many good hearted and sincere folks disbelieve in global climate change, this does not give them a free ticket for the rest of their lives. All of us in democratic societies have an obligation to maintain an open mind and to challenge our own belief systems by taking a good look at what the other side is saying periodically and seriously considering it.
– If folks do not open themselves up intentionally to absorb and assimilate new information periodically, then they are badly misusing their democratic rights by accepting all the benefits of democracy and shunning the work of being an informed and thoughtful citizen.
– We have the right to our opinions, but we pull the system down if we do not work to make sure that our opinions are informed and fair opinions.
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Independence Day may be the best day to ask ourselves — what is the greatest, preventable threat to Americans’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (LLPH). The answer is simple — human-caused global warming. Certainly there are other major threats to LLPH, the gravest of which is probably terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapon, in this country.
Between Homeland Security and the Pentagon, we spend billions of dollars every month to try to prevent terrorism. Indeed, President Bush and John McCain say Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. If so, the government spends more than $20 billion a month just to fight terrorism — of which more than half is new money we were’nt spending before 9/11 (and we spend more than $50 billion a month total on military and homeland security). And those who oppose such spending are routinely labeled unpatriotic or even appeasers.
But unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are by far the greatest preventable threat to Americans’ LLPH (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction and Part 2: The Solution“). Yet the government spends virtually nothing to fight global warming — certainly no significant amount of new money has been allocated for this major threat (the Clinton Administration tried, but the Gingrich Congress reversed that effort, reducing or zeroing out every program aimed at climate mitigation or even adaptation).
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