Don't disagree. What I said was "the political mobilization you have in mind." Which is scaring the shit out of people while leaving them to infer that the only way out is for the world to give up transportation and production because that's all they ever hear about in terms of proposed legislation and treaties.
That's certainly not Gore's strategy or argument. In the film he makes much of the things that can be done on a smaller scale if the political will is present. So if you have Gore in mind with these sentences, at least the Gore of the film, then that's misplaced. I can't address others.
If some engineer came up with some solution that required enactment of anything, I'm confident it would pretty much simply be enacted, yes. What requires enactment is the facilitation of those engineers coming up with things.
That's where we disagree, once again. Any solution, however elegant, will involve winners and losers. And the potential losers will fight it politically. And, most likely, potential losers will have a great deal of political clout because they have economic clout. So a sense of crisis is the only way to overcome that.
I do think that cutting greenhouse gasses is mostly technology and that is mostly about scientists engineers, not politicians.
If there is a general sense of crisis about cutting such gases, then I agree with you. If there is not, then we are back to the interest driven debates over the "science."
The role of politicians in this is in the area of adaption, for examples, constitution and treaty changes regarding displaced persons, changes in insurance laws, and the like to deal with times when some places on earth become less habitable and other places more habitable.
We really do have very different ideas about politicians. I see the political realm as inherently awash with interest conflicts, moral language conflicts, and the like. You, apparently, see it as waiting for engineers to come up solutions. I wish it were that simple. |
