4 posts tagged “global warming”
My interest in politics goes back to a time when I thought that the president had to be named FDR and the pope Pius---this election harkens back to the seismic shift in politics that gave the nation the New Deal.
There are obviously things that are different now from back then. Notable to me is that none of the candidates have proposed making the changes that circumstance now require---the system is broken and needs to be fixed and tinkering with interest rates and tax rebates does not address the underlying problem.
This nation has abandoned its manufacturing capacity and participatory buying our way out of the problem is not going to be possible. This is not a problem but rather an opportunity to move beyond the cancerous economic system that fakes progress in terms of using up resources, polluting the environment and hauling what is left off to the landfill. We are not gong to be able to go to Wal-Mart to buy our solution. We need to rely on American ingenuity and rebuild our decaying infrastructure and construct a new one that supports an improved way of life---dingdong, free-market economics is dead.
This great nation of ours needs to match FDR’s WPA, PWA, and CCC with the building of a national energy grid and generating capacity that outdoes TVA of the New Deal. This nation needs to go totally electric with an advanced energy grid and dispersed electrical generating system that delivers free electrical power to all Americans.
This can be achieved by the dispersed production of electricity from wind, geothermal wells, solar cell and thermal turbines, surf and hundreds of other ways not yet even dreamed of. Such a system can be backed up by on-line fuel cells and turbines that run off of electrolytic generated hydrogen that is produced from a peak-demand-plus system. There needs to be no concern about efficiency---daily more energy bounces around us than can only be fractionally captured.
Like the dramatic developments of World War II, we need to make this happen within a period of 4 years. As a great people, these can be the most exciting times of our lives. This will allow us to free ourselves from hostile international entanglements. Go electric, totally electric.
Economic growth to what end? Regardless of whether the state’s means are to be justified by their ends, the Machiavellian problem becomes one in which the means and their measure become ends within themselves. Thus, we have growth not for the greater good, but growth regardless of for what or for whom.
If free-market growth were to occur biologically within our body, we would call it malignancy and either attempt to control it or get rid of it altogether. From a perspective of Mother Nature, we humans could be considered the pathogens that she would pluck from planet Earth and send to the land fill, or mutate into beneficial elements that have self control.
Oh, so Mother Nature, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, is but an invention of our imagination, however the Good Earth is not and we best attempt to keep it that way.
“We have met the problem and it is us,” ~ Eco Pogo.
A good deal of “scam science” comes out the propaganda mills in Washington and Washington that Karl Rove used to give us George W. Bush—these operations are rather ridiculously called “think tanks.”
These are “rent-a-mouthpiece” operations that make their members big bucks by telling the general public anything that will serve the religious, corporate and political interests of those that buy them. Thinks-tanks such as the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Discovery Institute will be happy find that privatization of Social Security is a wonderful idea, global warming is a scam, efforts to save the Florida Everglades are unnecessary, invading Iraq was a great idea, and Creationism-Intelligent Design only took God six days to do.
You too can start your own tax-exempt Think Tank. Just put some pages out of the web that attack something that is rational, include one or two nice pictures, list a bunch of folks as experts (either living or dead), and include an easy way for people to send you money—they call it getting involved.
If your think-tank cause is not supported by scientific research, just say that it is. If experts in the field have come to censuses about something that you do not like, just say that they have not.
And be sure to make it look like you are not someone out on a broken limb that is sawing it off—insist that there is a groundswell of opinion that is with you. This astorturfing should be supported by expert opinion from someone in or Forest Lawn Cemetery (oops, that cemetery is too close to Hollywood—list another one).
Remember, you are not trying to convince real thinking people that you know what you are talking about; you are just trying to get some fellow culturopaths to go along with you and send money or at least repeat your shtick.
Maybe some folks, particularly the religious right, remain ignorant of the disastrous consequence of global warming because its gradual increase is keeping them as blissfully unaware as a frog that has been placed in cold water that is gradually brought to a boil. Before the frog realizes it, he is in hot water.
It could be just a part of God’s master plan, and we are already in hell and God is gradually turning the heat up.
