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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (59583)4/16/2008 2:51:59 PM
From: Cogito  Read Replies (1) of 542836
 
>>Al Gore: "Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making."

No one has added up the cost or even assessed the feasibility. But it's intuitively obvious that you may not be able to cure in ten years such a catastrophic problem at let alone without catastrophic crippling of the economy and much else.<<

Karen -

I think you may be parsing Gore's statement incorrectly. He is not saying that the catastrophe will occur in ten years if we don't act. He's saying that if we don't act within that time, the catastrophe will become inevitable.

Obviously, there's a big difference. And I don't think anybody should take the "ten years" as anything other than a very rough estimate.

Your questions about what it is feasible to do within that time frame are still valid, of course.

But even if we can't fix the whole problem in ten years, perhaps we could make a start and buy ourselves a little time. For example, why would we not want to increase our electrical generating capacity using solar thermal, which uses existing technology that is inexpensive and reliable? Since it takes less time to build solar thermal plants than nuclear or even coal plants, doesn't it make sense to invest in them? It seems as if we could do that without harming businesses or eliminating jobs.

- Allen
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