They’re doozies, from Slate, which is moving quickly towards the nutbaggary of Salon
The Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself About Climate Change
In March 2012, in a large-windowed conference hall on the snowy campus of the University of Calgary, I heard two simple questions. The man asking them was trying to help his audience get the most out of their day by giving them a clear understanding of where they, and others, stood when it came to action on climate change. To that end he asked them:
Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?
Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?
The two questions posed that morning by Robert Socolow, a physicist from Princeton University, seem to me a particularly good way of defining your position on geoengineering. So take a moment to answer them, if you would.
After that we get lots of yammering, strawmen, and the inability to provide unimpeachable facts that Mankind’s release of CO2 is the primary/sole cause of the current warm period.
As to the first, I’ll ask, if your answer is “yes”, what are you doing in your own life to drastically reduce your own carbon footprint, even making it neutral?
For the second, are you willing to further give up your modern lifestyle, decrease your wages, increase your cost of living, and see future generations live lives more akin to those in 2nd and 3rd world nations?
The question, “Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?” is a good one, and it is close to the imperative one, “Can we reduce CO2 emissions, along with other pollutants, by significant amounts and still retain an industrialized economy?”
It is a good idea to reduce emissions, regardless of whether they contribute to
global warmingclimate change, because it is always a good idea to try to live cleanly. The question is whether we can do so and maintain a first world standard of living, and this is the question the ecofascists ignore. So many of them are so egocentric that they just cannot see that the policies they advocate would cause a great many other people — never themselves, of course — to fall into poverty, to have lowered standards of living.If there is a way to generate the power we need more cleanly, it will eventually be found. Unfortunately, the ecofascists don’t seem to understand that what will eventually be found has not been found yet, and that we can’t base our future on an as-yet undiscovered technology.