betting on the future...
As we soak in the grandeur of what is the changing of the guard in Washington, I was most struck by Obama's cry for us to accept the hard choices with aplomb (my paraphrasing) and one of the hard choices that we have to make is what we will do about climate change. Some of these will be easy choices such as my call on my Facebook status:
Charles asks in the spirit of the challenges ahead of us. Take this small act. Don't use a disposable cup if you have an alternative available
But on the bigger issues, we need to ask are the arguments false ones. This is explored by Tim O'Reilly in blog post that if we pursue a greener path, we win in all cases. Pascal's wager is interestingly about God, and believing in God. If you believe and you are wrong, the cost is nominal. If you don't believe you are in God and you are wrong, well it's Hell, literally. And that is the bet with the environment.
Another way to look at this is that critics often claim that regulation will wreck industries, think mandatory Close Captioning or unleaded gasoline. But in both cases, things did not break down.
This is a post worth reading, for the hard choices are sometimes hard because we imagine them to be.
posted by Charles @ 12:29 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
The only reason people argue against global warming is because they want to get away with over consumption or continue the status quo without feeling guilty. It is not a matter of one scientific position against another scientific postion. After all, people argued for years that cigarettes were not that bad. It took decades of research to convience people otherwise.
While people have took a hold of the recent cold snap in the Midwest - which is not that out of the ordinary as it is depicted - they forget that in California and the rest of the Southwest it is incrediably warm. It was near 70 here in Modesto. Oh, Los Angeles was 88 last week - about 20 degrees above normal. We have not had a "normal" winter for several years. Rainfall has been below normal for the last 14 years.
i've tried to use "climate change" instead of "global warming" because it isn't always about someplace getting warmer -- even if the planet is, on average -- but about weather getting more extreme in both directions. hotter hots, colder colds, drier droughts, bigger floods, etc.
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