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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (22868)	7/5/2006 12:04:15 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541337

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.

To: Lane3 who wrote (22868)	7/5/2006 12:16:09 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541337

There is no silver bullet for this. There are a lot of silver BBs, tho,and lots of them will require political mobilization.Unfortunately, most of that mobilization here has been at the local and state levels, fought every inch of the way at the national level; eg CAFE standards, auto emission standards. Germany had the political will to commit to green a number of years ago, and they are replacing all their nukes with windmills. It's gonna take political muscle to electrify the railroads and switch our freight from trucks to trains. But all we have now is to build this homugulous big freeway from Mexico to Canada. It's gonna take political mobilization to give the alt en industry the same subsidies as we give Gas, Oil, and Plutonium interests. It may take political mobilization to get a national recycling law. It takes political mobilization to make ALL federal buildings green. The technology is already there for this. But,our political reaction to this has been Reagan taking Carter's solar panels off the roof of the WH in '81.The feds are doing what they can to avoid anything which may help.. Sierra Club Sues Pentagon Over Wind-Farm Delays AP, L.A. Times The Sierra Club sued the Defense Department in federal court Wednesday for allegedly halting construction of wind farms across the United States by failing to complete a study on whether they interfere with military radar. The suit filed in U.S. District Court claimed that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon missed a deadline for completing a study that is holding up permits for more than a dozen wind-farm projects in the Midwest. "The end result is the wind industry is being crippled," said attorney Kristin Henry of the Sierra Club. (29 June 2006) energybulletin.net