- Joined
- 14 February 2005
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Climate change itself - I do agree that the climate is changing. There is more than enough evidence that things are significantly different now as compared to what was considered "average" for the 20th Century.
Causes - May or may not be man-made but commonsense does suggest that something would likely happen in response to a change in composition of the Earth's atmosphere.
It's the politics of it all I detest. The harsh reality is that the use of coal and gas is soaring whilst oil use is also slowly but surely grinding upwards. No amount of propaganda changes these facts. To deceive the public into thinking that Kyoto or the carbon tax is actually fixing the problem is what I take issue with. It's an outright lie at best.
If the problem is indeed real then I suspect action will be much like that in any crisis. It will come about only due to the lack of any alternative. If we're going to scrap fiat money and the notion of constant GDP growth being desirable, then that's not likely to happen voluntarily. It will take weather events, or a physical shortage of fossil fuels, to actually force that change the hard way.
Same goes for the large scale adoption of alternative energies. Technically we can do it but people aren't likely to accept a world where energy harvesting is itself a dominant activity until there is no choice. At some point we're going to do a lot with geothermal, wind, solar and we will likely build more big dams too. But with few exceptions the community isn't ready to accept that yet so we'll stick with fossil fuels until either something drastic happens or the whole issue is debunked.
Humans don't act until there's a crisis. That's just how it is.
Causes - May or may not be man-made but commonsense does suggest that something would likely happen in response to a change in composition of the Earth's atmosphere.
It's the politics of it all I detest. The harsh reality is that the use of coal and gas is soaring whilst oil use is also slowly but surely grinding upwards. No amount of propaganda changes these facts. To deceive the public into thinking that Kyoto or the carbon tax is actually fixing the problem is what I take issue with. It's an outright lie at best.
If the problem is indeed real then I suspect action will be much like that in any crisis. It will come about only due to the lack of any alternative. If we're going to scrap fiat money and the notion of constant GDP growth being desirable, then that's not likely to happen voluntarily. It will take weather events, or a physical shortage of fossil fuels, to actually force that change the hard way.
Same goes for the large scale adoption of alternative energies. Technically we can do it but people aren't likely to accept a world where energy harvesting is itself a dominant activity until there is no choice. At some point we're going to do a lot with geothermal, wind, solar and we will likely build more big dams too. But with few exceptions the community isn't ready to accept that yet so we'll stick with fossil fuels until either something drastic happens or the whole issue is debunked.
Humans don't act until there's a crisis. That's just how it is.