Mekstizzle wrote:
I don't know why American right wingers hate all this stuff. It's because of Al Gore mainly I guess, if Al Gore wasn't a left wing Democrat then he'd probably find much more support for all his Climate Change shit from the right wingers. If you replaced Al Gore with I dunno, Glenn Beck or whoever, suddenly you'd get them all going "oh shit climate change", it all boils down to political spectrum/party allegiance for Americans.
That and there's the connection with Science which brings up memories of Science vs Creationism probably.
Personally, I don't think it's as big as people say, but there's still an impact that Humans are making on the environment, a negative one for the long term. Still need to clean up our act, pollute less, waste less and look for sustainable ways to produce electricity and shit like that. I don't know why people object so badly to all this environmental stuff. It's better for everyone, surely.
You can deny Climate Change if you want, but you can't deny that the Pollution and shit is still there. Go to China if you want a good example. I still don't see why the world shouldn't look towards cutting down pollution across the board and shit like that.
I don't really know too many that refute that humans have an impact on nature. Drop a piece of trash on the sidewalk and you've degraded your environment. However, I find it really hard to believe that the world is going to end, the polar ice caps are going to melt and the polar bears are all going to drown because of a 0.02% increase in atmospheric carbon. Nor do I feel that carbon credits and cap and trade are the answer or even really anything more than another level of beurocracy in which people can make money by doing... nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's really nothing more than the old jobs the King of England used to give out back in the day: Customs officer. The guy made money every time wool was exported out of the country and all he had to do was support the king and provide him a line of credit. He did no work, just collected his money and went about his business.
"Rent seeking
In economics, rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.
Most studies of rent seeking focus on efforts to capture special monopoly privileges, such as government regulation of free enterprise competition, though the term itself is derived from the far older and more established practice of appropriating a portion of production by gaining ownership or control of land."
Now, I'm all for planting trees and having earth days and pollution caps on cars and filters in smokestacks. What I won't abide is rent seeking behavior hiding behind environmental causes and deceiving people into believing they're helping the environment by supporting these measures.
