Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 9:03 am
Immanuel Can wrote:
Thrashing about without knowing what we are doing will just inevitably hurt people.
Yes austerity often hurts. [/quote]
Not "austerity": incompetence. We don't know what we need to know in order to do the right thing, so thrashing about is almost certain to be the wrong thing.
There is sufficient evidence that adverse climate change is caused by human activity.
Not
scientifically sufficient, for sure. The left-wing mass media seems to have closed on the question out of pure ideology, but that's not evidence.
There are millions of selfish or ignorant people everywhere. It's not a matter of "China admires us and looks to us for moral leadership" it's global communications with freedom of information.
Information isn't the problem. The Chinese and others are very bright, and they have information. It's ideology.
China is in a crazy race to industrialization -- for which we cannot blame them, because we did it first -- and has no incentive not to take every advantage we may offer them. And unlike America, China has no legal inhibitions on polluting. You should see the state of Beijing or Shanghai, at the moment. For them to produce a product instead of the US is certain to create more, not less pollution.
And I'm pretty certain that's the dead opposite of what you want.
Intelligentsia of science are among the salt of the Earth that leavens the bread. (mixed metaphor! it's sourdough that leavens bread ) f the salt have lost its savour what then?
This isn't the point, because the science isn't in on this question. It's not like climate panickers have science and climate-change skeptics don't...it's that the real causes and cures of climate change are not presently known by science. We've got work to do there. My advice is that we get it done -- but decidedly not that we panic and thrash about before we do.
We don't have a choice after all.
Yes, we have many choices. But what you're suggesting is one of the worst.
We disagree. Even if the scientific predictions were wrong it would still be a safer prediction.
Oh, decidedly not. There's nothing "safe" about predicting without warrant, and then tanking one's own economy in an effort to do something symbolic. That just creates human suffering, and increases pollution. Like I said above, don't think China or India or anywhere else that's industrializing won't immediately jump into the gap to take over as the US pulls back. If you think they will, then you haven't seen what developing-world poverty is really like, nor understood how far people will go to get out of it, or how willing people are to seize an economic opportunity.
There isn't time now to keep on stalling.
Au contraire: if the problem is really serious, we can't afford to get it wrong. The last thing we ought to do is to set out in some well-intended but totally counterproductive direction, and make the problem far worse by doing so.
If nothing were really at stake, perhaps it would matter much less what we do.
America is the worst polluter of all.
It has been. It's losing that role to China.
America has at present an authoritarian regime.
Hilariously wrong.
Look, I'm not a Trumpist. I don't even live in his country. But I do understand American politics. All that's happened is a guy got in that the Democratic aristocrats didn't like. He's just a small "r" republican, subject to the constant resistance by a Democrat house. He's about the farthest thing from an "authoritarian," and in a couple of years he'll be up for democratic re-election.
Nobody wants to "kill our own economies".
Then they'd better not buy into uninformed thrashing about. They'll not just kill the economy, but will ultimately increase the very pollution they fear.
