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Reading the latest post about global warming on Scott’s blog (yeah, we’re on a first name basis now) reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post about that topic for a long time. I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer to this question is pretty simple, and you don’t even have to know the first thing about science to find it. You just have to know human nature.

Whenever there is an issue this complex, you can’t trust the extremists on either side. They’re motivated largely out of fear and/or profit, and their viewpoints are never very firmly rooted in reality. The answer usually lies directly in the middle.

With global warming you have two extremes, the environmentalists and the oil companies. The oil companies are motivated by profit. The more people drive Hummers, the more they make. So they, being the experts at lobbying and propagandizing that they are, spread a bunch of obvious bullshit about how the scientific consensus has not been reached (it has) and how global warming occurs naturally (which is true, but not like this) and that’s what would have caused any effects we would be seeing if we were seeing any, which scientists do not agree on. The Republican Party loves those Halliburton dollars, so their sock puppets say retarded things like “all of the science isn’t in yet”.

On the other hand are the rabid environmentalists. These people are motivated solely out of fear. Fear of losing cute, fuzzy polar bears, or poor countries being unable to grow crops, or Hollywood not being able to produce any more documentaries with Morgan Freeman narrating. They spread their propaganda too, which is that unless we scrap every SUV right now we’re all going to die. They’re really not any closer to the actual scientific consensus than the oil companies are, but they do a better job of faking it. Fortunately for them everyone fears doomsday whereas only a small portion of us own Exxon stock, so in the end they will triumph.

The reality, as always, falls somewhere in the middle, as does scientific consensus. Global warming is occurring, and it’s caused largely in part by us. It is a problem and it needs to be addressed. It is not the end of the world, and is not threatening to destroy life as we know it in the next twenty years. Except, maybe, for those cute, fuzzy polar bears.

If forced to take a stand I would probably have to support the environmental extremists. Their end may not justify the means, but it might come close, and that’s far more than can be said for the oil companies. You have to convince a good portion of the population that the fate of the planet is in jeopardy to get people to change even the small amount necessary to reverse this trend.

This is one of the few times I’m actually in favor of government regulation, because without it corporations will go green, but they will do it ridiculously slowly. They won’t have a choice because unless all of them are forced to do it, it will be cost prohibitive. The new, cleaner technologies can not only be more environmentally friendly, but also cheaper. That can only happen if economies of scale are leveraged, though, and right now an oil company that does go green will make considerably less profit than one that doesn’t. It’s an economic prisoner’s dilemma, and their only rational decision is the wrong one.

This entry was posted on May 25, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Me Thinking So You Don't Have To . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.