One of the most annoying aspects of the global warming/climate change debate is that it has passed from the purview of scientific researchers to politicians. I suppose this shouldn't surprise us; if the proponents of anthropogenic climate change are correct, we need to make some changes and quickly, and they will not be easy ones.
The most important -- and painful -- of such changes would be to wean ourselves from our addiction to petroleum and other hydrocarbons. My take on such an action is that it is the right thing to do regardless of its putative impact on climate change. The reasons for this include:
- Hydrocarbons pollute, whether it is oil spilled during extraction, transit, or refining; coal dust in mines and everywhere else; acid rain; and smog.
- Hydrocarbon extraction impacts the local ecology, whether from disruption of migration patterns, scars from open-pit coal mining, and destruction of aquifers from heavy chemicals used in the extraction processes.
- It causes my country (the United States) to spend its money overseas, thus impacting our balance of trade, and most of that money goes to people who don't like us very much -- and some of it goes indirectly to people who really don't like us very much and try to kill us (and sometimes succeed).
- Because we're addicted to foreign sources of hydrocarbons, we have spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives to firght in support of (and sometimes against) our petroleum dealers, which has developed a toxic foreign and military policy which has turned major portions of the world against us.
Climate change
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