Pirate's Cove

Forcing people to comply with things they don’t believe in is love!

How Gay Marriage Suggests A Strategy For Climate Change

The iPhone shows how rapidly society can change if it wants to, a California energy commissioner said last week, and gay marriage shows that change can happen in public policy too.

Climate policy could be next, said David Hochschild, the environmental commissioner on the California Energy Commission and an architect of Proposition B, San Francisco’s successful $100 million solar initiative.

No one was forced to purchase an iPhone by The Government, though some people were forced to comply with gay marriage or risk being run out of business, harassed, and fined.

“There was gay marriage nowhere until 2004, then we saw that state by state by state by state it got adopted, and now of course it’s in all 50 states. Over a very short period of time. You go back 12, 13 years and you ask how many people think gay marriage is universal and I think most people would assert, it’s not going to happen,” Hochschild said during a Stanford University seminar last week.

“I think there’s actually some lessons for the climate movement in what happened with marriage equality, because they framed the movement in terms of love: Government has no place to get between two people who love each other,” he said. “I actually think climate change is the same thing. It’s about loving the next generation, and I think that is a good way to think about it.”

See? It’s about about loving, forcing people by Government decree to accept gay marriage, and the same should be done with ‘climate change’. So, for love, people should be forced to

• pay taxes, fines, and fees
• accept higher energy costs
• accept a higher cost of living
• have their movements restricted through various policies on fossil fueled vehicles
• purchase higher priced appliances because government will no long allow the old ones to be fixed
• give up lots of freedom and liberty to centralized government

Government!

The iPhone is his model for change potential: “It’s gone from basically not existing to being ubiquitous in a decade,” he said. And he thinks cigarettes model the country’s addiction to fossil fuels. The smoking rate has fallen from about 50 percent in 1965 to 15 percent today, he said, in spite of early and expensive efforts by the tobacco industry to foster doubt about the science.

Again, the first is a voluntary purchase for something that people want, and see the positive benefits. The latter is something that government forced on people. Sure, smoking is bad for you. So is drinking. Interestingly, so many of the strikes against the tobacco industry was because of their lies, shoddy science, and false advertising. Sounds exactly like the state of climate science.

Remember, it’s all about the love!