No, the first one can be a perfectly rational argument.
The economic cost for the United States to take environmentally sound position X is not worth it, primarily because (fill in your blank here)
A) No one's actually sure what the best solution is, investing in current solar technology on a large scale is a bit of a fools errand.
We know exactly what we need to do, Strife. The problem is flooding the atmosphere with C02, destabilizing Earth's climate. The solution is replacing major C02 sources with non-C02 sources and reversing the deprivation of Earth's plant life.
Solar is most definitely not a fools errand, and neither is wind. Replacing existing sources with them is a process, but it is a necessary process that we must take. Now. We must take it now because taking it later will do us little good. Even if C02 emissions were reduced to zero right now, on November 12th, 2012, we will still have accumulated two degrees of warming by 2050. Prevention is easier and better than curing the disasters we will face if nothing is done.
B) The rest of the world (*cough* exempt developing countries *cough*) isn't going to make these kinda limitations, nor follow them.
Very soon, it will be the more economical choice to protect the environment. We are not divorced from Earth's ecosystem, and its collapse will not benefit our civilization. Right now, coal and oil are only so cheap because the
the government is propping them up. Without these mass subsidies we would all see just how "economical" this stuff is. The rest of the world will fall in line, one way or another.
C) Helping the environment in the long term by a few fractions of a percent isn't worth the short term negatives on people.
Right now, due to unregulated hydraulic fracturing and fractional distillation operations in the United States, there are entire towns of people slowly accumulating permanent brain damage and living with poisonous, explosive tap water. There are toxic lakes of runoff where not even bacteria can live and mountains blown in half. In places where there are nearby coal plants the asthma rate for schoolchildren goes from 1 in 30 to as high as 1 in 2. And I think I need not remind you of how well our deepwater drilling has gone.
The idea that we'll have to suffer to make some minimal gains for the environment is fiction, disseminated by those who built their fortunes exploiting Earth. Protecting the environment protects us, because we life off of it and inside of it.
We aren't talking about just saving a couple of species, Strife. When one part of our ecosystem goes, the rest has to adapt in unexpected ways or also die. If we don't do anything to mitigate this projections indicate seven degrees of warming and over three meters of sea level rise. New York City and most of the state of Florida will be permanently underwater under those conditions, and most life on Earth will go extinct. Humanity is unlikely to fare well in such a state. In the best case scenario in which we do nothing, Earth's population will be reduced to about one billion as modern agriculture fails. This is of course assuming that no one picks up guns and starts shooting at people to protect/acquire food supplies, which we both know isn't going to be the case.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 763860 times)