[lit-ideas] Climate
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:32:25 -0700 (PDT)
Why is it not possible to tell people, look, this is the situation. If we keep
going in this direction, we're going to wind up here. And this is what here
looks like. And people will say, oh, that's a bad place to wind up.
Let's change. Instead, they have to be cajoled and persuaded, and entertained
while being cajoled and persuaded, and finally, when it's too late, they take
action. As Churchill famously observed, Americans will always do the right
thing, but only after all other options are exhausted. It's not just
Americans, it's all people. I'm reading a book on the global water situation,
and India has an estimated 20 years of water left. They know it, and the
response is, well if we don't make money wasting this water now somebody else
will. In the U.S. the Republicans have created the tea party and convinced the
poor saps that they need to eviscerate the EPA so the Koch Brothers and
whoever can pollute with impunity. In
the meantime, Texas hasn't had any rain to speak of since October, and the oil
industry wants to run an oil pipeline over the Ogalala aquifer no less (the
pipeline won't leak, no, never). And with all of that, nobody believes in
climate change, as if data were a matter of belief. Jared Diamond of course
chronicles the so called reasoning that goes into humanity's so called thought
processes. I thought this link was interesting.
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/09/al-gore-is-back
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