Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Welcome to reality.

There are no energy sources known to mankind that are as cheap and as abundant and reliable.

It's not as if finding alternatives isn't the holy grail that offers riches to anyone who can find them. The global resources that are going into trying to find alternatives -- precisely because of the focus on climate change -- has been huge, drawing that money away from other uses.

Someone posted something a while back on this thread about how wind and solar are providing more energy in this country than coal, and I think the assumption by people was that "policy" was somehow at work.

When the reality was more about natural gas having become cheaper than coal to fire power plants. That is what this is about. By and large people want energy. The "realistic" option for the vast majority of those people is what gives them that energy abundantly enough and the cheapest. If people feel that the cheapest energy is so destructive to the planet at this point that it should be outlawed, then the conversation isn't about what the realistic option is that is just as good. It's "this is how much more it is going to cost, these are the limitations we'll have to deal with, and this is what it means for the standard of living you have come to enjoy."

 

People choose to buy those huge SUVs and trucks. Auto manufacturers are responding to demand. Supply doesn't dictate that demand. If people wanted mopeds, they'd produce mopeds. And with gas at $3.50 a gallon, people are still buying big SUVs and pick up trucks. I'd put their actual decisions ahead of random subjective opinions about what makes sense for them. Because other people know what gives them utility better than you or I do.

Again, if the message is that we can't have huge SUVs and trucks because they are doing harm to the planet. ... making auto manufacturers a boogie man sits better than, "When you buy that huge pick up truck, you are destroying the planet."

The reason we haven't chosen to spend a lot of money societally building extensive (and expensive) public transportation systems isn't that someone didn't centrally plan the world the right way. It's simply because people want their own vehicles. Their lives are better with their own cars. Relying on public transportion may be ecologically better (and that should be addressed honestly, too, as to how much ecologically better it realistically is), but it comes with a monetary cost, a time cost and a convenience cost that most people with their own cars don't embrace. That is the reason they choose to have their own cars and not fund sprawling mass transit systems (that would come at the expense of those personal vehicles).

It's OK to just talk about the decisions most people make as, "You are destroying the planet when you buy that car. It may be more convenient, it may be cheaper, it may be more expedient today, but we are creating a long-term and irreversible cost with the decisions we're collectively making."

 

People have been inundated with information about climate change. Globally, they are using more fossil fuel energy than ever.

 

What exactly does it say to you?