The next point on the bullet list is "Human flourishing requires fossil fuels."
I'm not going to spend time arguing about the science, which is absolutely settled and has been for decades. In fact the pace and consequences of climate change have been at the upper bound of previous estimates. The disaster is already upon us, which is obvious to anyone. And no, all those dead and homeless people aren't flourishing.
Fortunately, the cost of sustainable energy is already lower than the cost of fossil fuels. We do need to make major investments in energy distribution and storage, and electrification. Instead of everybody driving themselves around in electric cars, we should also invest in mass transit. There are a lot of ways we can build a better world while freeing ourselves from fossil fuels, but I'll leave all that for another time.
What I want to discuss now is denialism. It is mostly paid for by fossil fuel company executives and shareholders who put their insatiable greed ahead of the welfare and the very lives of their own grandchildren. They have bought almost the entire Republican party, politicians and pundits who are also perfectly happy to betray humanity for a taste of power and a pittance. There is also an ideological incentive for some people. They worship at the altar of the Free Market™, and admitting the truth about carbon emissions would require accepting the necessity of government intervention to fix the failure of the market. I don't know which motive is more reprehensible.
This is a true existential crisis, and it's completely and indisputably the good guys vs. the bad guys. Nobody with a shred of conscience should vote for any Republican, ever. The party is a deadly threat to humanity.
Note on the previous post: What some people seem to be confused about all the time is social construction of reality. Just because something is socially constructed doesn't mean it isn't real or doesn't matter. That goes for race as well as gender. Those are social realities, and they affect people's lives very much. But social reality, unlike biological reality, can change.
1 comment:
I'd love to see a debate moderator ask the candidates how long they envision the USA existing into the future, and then asking them how the policies they espouse contribute to that vision.
George W. Bush ginned up a lot of support for his little war by raising the specter of a mushroom cloud over an American city in an indeterminate future. We should now be able to talk about threats of far greater consequence to us in a hundred, or even a thousand, years.
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