Politics is indeed everywhere, Frog70. It's useful to try and understand what's going on.
James Taranto of opinionjournal.com (the WSJ's editorial page) points out that the Nobel committee wasn't terribly successful in predicting winners for peace in its previous nominees. For example, they gave Yassar Arafat a Nobel, and then he almost single-handedly managed the peace process straight into the ground.
I can understand that, but giving $1.5 million to a Cuban dissident group sure would have been cool. It would have embarassed the heck out of Castro, which I would have loved to see. (You may remember from my other posts that I've been to Cuba and have some understanding of what they face.)
But people seem to have been persuaded about global warming, more due to slick propaganda than actual science, and that worries me a lot more than warming itself.
Bambi, if you read the propaganda about global warming, they essentially say that we have to stop driving and stop heating our homes in the winter and cooling them in the summer, and maybe if we make all those sacrifices we won't destroy the planet.
What you don't hear is that people in China and India are industrializing, and they have ten times the people we do, and they are refusing to do their part to reduce global warming.
What this means is that global warming will happen, like it or not, and the best thing to do is figure out how to mitigate the consequences. Thus my idea to move the polar ice caps to Dubai, where they will form giant lakes in the Global Warming Mansions Phase I-XXXII real estate development, instead of increasing sea levels. That may sound silly but I don't think it's any more absurd than the idea of us discontinuing the burning of fossil fuels.
Now, intriguingly enough there is hope for people against global warming long-term. People like the founders of Tesla Motors are creating electric cars that are more fun to drive than gas vehicles and have the same range. And new nuclear power plants are being built in the US for the first time; nuclear energy has a far better safety record than coal, and it does not contribute to global warming.
So what does this mean to you and I? Quietly working behind the scenes, solutions are being developed that will dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels and that in turn will reduce global warming. Will they work on time to prevent the globe for being too hot even for me and most Filipinos? Will Pittsburgh become a tropical island?
Well, to be honest, I wish it would.
But I'm not counting on it. Human ingenuity has been counted out many times during the course of history, but it's always come through. So be of good cheer. The apocalypse is unlikely, but if it happens, well, I will have some tropical Pittsburgh real estate to sell all you guys :-).
D
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