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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (3500)	12/17/2008 5:31:33 PM
From: RetiredNow	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Here's what's really interesting. Nothing about this is a static target for analysis. So here's a thought experiment that leads to my conclusions near the end of this long post. So let's say it is a given that over the last 50 years, human activities such as the industrial revolution drove CO2 emissions sky high and was the primary cause of CO2 increases. Then today, the resultant global warming has started to kick in other reinforcing global processes. For example, with increased ice melt at the poles and large areas like Greenland, there is less ice to bounce sunrays back off the earth. Instead, the ground and seas absorb the warmth. In areas like Siberia, that can create situations that leads to large quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas orders of magnitude more harmful than CO2) to be released. So at this point of self-reinforcing processes, if we were to remeasure root causes, perhaps we would find that humans are no longer the prime movers in increasing greenhouse gases. We could rightly say that natural processes are the largest causes, despite humans being the initial catalyst. So now the picture could very well be confused. So it really no longer matters whether humans are the cause or natural processes are the cause. We know that the results are global warming and we know that global warming has very real and costly consequences. The logicical conclusion to global warming could be an atmosphere that is not hospitable to sustained human life. So the real question then becomes not who or what caused it, but how do we combat it and do we still have the power to combat it. I love the international debate and the scientific process that we have for arriving at grand unifying theories. However, what I worry most about now is whether our process is fast enough. If we delay too long in this, will he have reached the point of no return, beyond which humans no longer have to power to avoid catastrophic consequences that may occur over the next several hundred years? Or even if we do have the power to reverse the processes that lead to global warming, would we have the political will to make it happen? The mostly likely scenario based on my knowledge of human nature is that we are witnessing a playing out of the Tragedy of the Commons. No one, or at least not enough people, will step up to keep the Commons fit for use. In the end the Tragedy will be that our individual desire to get something for nothing will lead to a collective loss to humans of the only habitable place in the universe we know of. Stephen Hawking was right. It is imperative that we find other habitable planets and colonize them, if we want to survive as a species. Fighting global warming is tilting at windmills, because we won't even be able to get people to believe it is happening until it is too late to do anything about it. This is one reason I mostly focus on the economic gains and national security implications of being free from oil. It's a way to convince people it is worth their while. Appeals to altruism never gets anyone very far. Appeals to greed and security always captures an American's heart.