Climate Summit: What If ...

If I wanted to wipe out the economy and smash civilization ...

... I wouldn't have to do anything but stand back and watch.

LOL! Too true. Like God in "Conversations With God" by Neale Donald Walsch said, when what you're doing isn't working, do something else.

The problem is what you so often say: The ends do not justify the means. The means determine the ends.

Climate change happens. That we can agree on. Always has. We're in a cool spell, things are going to warm up, that's unavoidable. Does man create it? That's much more iffy.

The problem is that when we assume that man does create it, and that we have to save the world! or else everything will be destroyed, that leads to the bad science and scares and obsessions and many laws that are *bad for people*.

For instance, the obsession with corn-based biodiesel, which has really absurdly increased the price of corn, which was the main food staple for countless poor communities. Or the scares of pesticides on fruits, which leads poor people to avoid buying cheap fruit or veg, giving them horrible health (and leads to people eating fruit without pesticides, which actually increases the amount of poison they ingest, because a fruit without external pesticide that can be washed off creates its own internal anti-bug poisons that can't be washed off.)

Or the upcoming laws requiring specific gas mileage on cars, which can only be obtained by reducing the weight of the cars, which is shown to increase deaths.

Or the laws against coal factories and cheap fertilizers or bug poisons in third-world countries, no matter that coal factories are ridiculously cleaner than they used to be, which keeps third-world countries from modernizing, which keeps them from having clean water and irrigation, which keeps their women in unequality, which keeps them succumbing to malaria epidemics, etc, etc, etc.

The problem with the politics and 'SAVE THE WORLD!' mentality is that it is so self-absorbed. We think we actually have the power to destroy the world, and that we need to save it. What we should be focusing on is environmentalism not for the sake of the environment, but for the sake of us. We need clean air so *we* can breath, not to 'save the world'. We need to reduce poisons for our health, not so we can 'save the world'. In doing so, we look much more realistically at the challenges presented to us. When we're saving the world, the lives sacrificed to lethal car crashes or starving poor people are minor things, because we're saving the lives of countless infinite people in the future. When we're making things better for the people *right now*, suddenly sacrificing the people right now doesn't make nearly as much sense.

And yeah, you know what? If it's a hoax, then all the climate-change prevention laws which sacrifice a little freedom for environmental security aren't going to help the people whose climate is changing around them. if their orchards upon which their economy depended can't grow anymore because the sun's flux has increased its output, and it's too hot for those trees anymore, we need to stop spending so much energy on Carbon Dioxide Outputs and much more energy on helping them modernize and change. If the breadbasket of the US is turning into a scrubland, because of natural fluctuations, then we need to stop worrying about car emissions and more about moving operations northwards.

So it's really more of a matter of "What if it's a hoax and we could be making a better world *right now* instead of sacrificing the now for a nebulous future?"

catsittingstill said it best for me, in her song Living Earth. Being good stewards of what we have is the best way that we as individuals and communities can "weave our life lines back into the tapestry we've torn."

Those are all very fine and high ideals. I wonder if they can be accomplished without all of that annoying socialist redistribution of wealth?

Sure, but I don't know of any large corporation that wants to bother with it as long as they can keep hold of their current business model.

You make a very good point. I have no problem with regulating industry such that they are made to produce their products in a manner that doesn't pollute the planet. And I accept that this would probably drive up costs. In a free market society this would also, ultimately, drive up wages because no matter what you charge for your widgets, you still have to pay people a living wage to make the damn things. But there is an element within the current climate and environmental debate that seems to have an agenda that goes well beyond keeping the place clean and picking up after ourselves. I think they do a grave disservice to people who are honestly trying to protect the environment.

Changing who is doing the giving and who is doing the receiving will not fix the problem. Getting rid of the idea that anyone should be giving anything to anyone (or more accurately, be forced to give anything to anyone) might help more. I'm sure that the reason the Russian 5-year plans, the Chinese great leap forward, and the Cambodian year zero all failed was completely because of the greedy, selfish capitalists who just couldn't help themselves and had nothing to do with corrupt officials, inefficient bureaucracy, and the simple, human fact that people cannot live that way.

Capitalism isn't working well for America? And pray tell, where do you see any? In the health care system, where half of all dollars are spent by government and Medicare recipients are subsidized by the privately insured? In the central banks, which couldn't be doing a better job of promoting collectivism if they were being run by Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot? In housing, where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are quickly turning into government landlords? In the educational system, which has so completely failed to teach our children individualism and rational self-interest, passing such things off as "evil selfishness" instead?

“The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” – John Dewey

If selfishness is wrong and greed is a vice, then pursuing one's dream and producing value for one's own benefit have been damned as evil. America, the country built on these virtues, is damned. I am damned. And quite frankly Elizabeth, so are you every time you have enough to eat, go to bed warm and safe, and pick up a pen and write down books, stories and poems for nothing more than your own pleasure. Don't try to excuse yourself with "well I do lots of things for others too, so it's okay if I do something for myself once in a while." That's a slippery slope that can only be stood on for so long before you fall. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the state of our country. Your facts are perfectly fine. It's just the evaluation of them that's taken a leap into fantasy.

Accept the moral of selflessness as your ideal, accept the idea that you must live for others, and some lunatic fascist/socialist/communist system will always be the end result. Always. Not because of greed, but because of natural law. People are not equal. They just aren't, and there's nothing you can do about it. Deny the rights of one person to their life, liberty or property, no matter their social or financial status, and you deny the rights of everyone else to theirs as well. You think you're safe and that you'll win, Elizabeth, because you have so little compared to the big tycoons you skewer weekly? Just remember that with a house, enough to eat, a computer, and enough books to stock a small library there are still plenty of people on this globe who think of you as lucky. Don't try to pretend that nobody warned you when you feel their breath on your neck.

Reason, freedom, individualism, capitalism. Life, liberty, PROPERTY and the pursuit of happiness. If they stand among the damned, then so do I.

"Accept the moral of selflessness as your ideal, accept the idea that you must live for others, and some lunatic fascist/socialist/communist system will always be the end result."

I don't think Jesus was a communist. You're going too far the other direction. We want a clean environment, right? All of us? Does it not strike anybody else as strange that it so easily becomes a political or ideological debate? That we are so easily and so thoroughly distracted from that which we all supposedly believe?

I'm just asking people to reexamine the debate.