Brother Gore's traveling salvation show
A friend of mine recently invited me to go see An Inconvenient Truth. I politely explained that sitting in a dark room and being lectured by Al Gore for two hours is not my idea of entertainment.
It's nothing personal, but global warming is a religion to Mr. Gore. I don't mean that as an insult, necessarily. He's clearly very passionate on the topic. But just as I don't want to hear a televangelist preach to me about how I should live my life, I don't want Gore doing it either. "Don't have an abortion" or "Don't be gay" would be replaced with "Don't drive an SUV," but at the end of the day, Al Gore is just another bible-thumper, complete with apocalyptic rhetoric about "the end of civilization."
And if there's anything that bugs me more than religious proselytizers, it's religious proselytizing masquerading as science. Science says average global temperatures currently seem to be in a warming trend. Fine. But once you've gone on to attribute Hurricane Katrina or Indonesian tsunamis to global warming, you are now squarely in the domain of religion, plain and simple.
Global warming is a serious issue, but also a political hot button. Too many people from both sides carry their ideological baggage to the debate, which is a shame. There is precious little in the way of sober, dispassionate scientific examination of the data. We need more of that, not less. We certainly won't be getting it from Al Gore, however.
Comments
The most plausible explanation I've ever heard about the realities of Global Warming came from a project manager with a large energy company who has an engineering background along with a background in geology, who said, "Right now, we are between Ice Ages and have actually passed the halfway point, so it's a natural and unavoidable reality that world temperatures will gradually increase, bringing on the next Ice Age. Can human activity hasten the process? That's difficult to determine, given that nature impacts the environment regularly and in far more powerful ways than man does. The reality is that we are warming and will continue to warm until the the polar caps begin to recede, causing sea levels to rise and eventually resulting in huge ice glaciers sliding down over much of the curently inhabitable world."
Though my energy company neighbor probably wouldn't like to hear this, again, the Free Market is the ONLY answer.
We've foolishly gone down a path that led away from the boom & bust cuycles of the natural market and the innate insecurity that comes with that - new technologies supplant old ones regularly in a free market and thus old, secure and "well-paying" jobs are likewise swept away in the ensuing economic rearrangement.
It's short sighted to seek to protect established companies and industries merely because they keep hundreds of thousands of people employed and yet it's natural, even inevitable when money is allowed free and unfettered access to the political process.
Money has bought influence in many, many negative ways, allowing Unions to make homegrown labor much more expensive and allowing old technologies like the internal combustion engine and fossil fuels to remain unchallenged by new technologies.
Freedom/LIBERTY doesn't promise or guarantee anyone anything. A free worlk worker is just another entrepreneur, living by his/her wits, by selling their labors to the highest bidder.
If the jobs they were trained for dry up, or are swept away by new technologies, as entrepreneurs it is UP TO THEM to retrain themselves to be able to do the new jobs that will eventually arise in the new, replacement technologies.
Posted by: JMK | May 31, 2006 11:51 AM
I don't like to be lectured to, especially by politicians pretending to be something they aren't, for reasons they deny.
Penguins don't like to be lectured to, either: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI
Posted by: eidelweiss | June 1, 2006 12:39 AM
I don't like to be lectured to, especially by politicians pretending to be something they aren't, for reasons they deny.
Penguins don't like to be lectured to, either: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI
Posted by: eidelweiss | June 1, 2006 12:40 AM
And if there's anything that bugs me more than religious proselytizers,
And I thought that in the last few elections you voted republican. I was apparently wrong.
Posted by: Blue Wind | June 1, 2006 08:08 AM
And if there's anything that bugs me more than religious proselytizers,
And I thought that in the last few elections you voted republican. I was apparently wrong.
Posted by: Blue Wind | June 1, 2006 08:11 AM