[Vision2020] Krugman: The Truth, Still Inconvenient

[Paul Rumelhart]

On 04/04/2011 09:15 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:
> That 3 & 4 are plants seems debatable. Less replace them with:
>
> 3'. Mankind has some influence and impact
>
> 4'. We'd be better off with less pollution and fewer CO2 emissions
>
> Does this make me a skeptic? Fine.
>
> The issue is what can/do we do?
>

I would agree with 3, and most of 4 (I'm ambivalent towards CO2, until 
I'm convinced, but fully behind lowering pollution).

What can we do is the essence of the problem, and is why I think global 
warming has such a foothold.  It's easy to blame the fatcat oil 
executives smoking their cigars and orchestrating the demise of 
civilization for their own twisted amusement.  Or to blame the idiot in 
the Hummer that aggressively sped past you.

If it's just Mother Nature, then what can we do?  The only thing we can 
really do is keep our heads down, try not to anger the gods, and prepare 
ourselves as much as possible for disaster to strike.  And that's the 
key reason this topic strikes such a chord with me.  If the emphasis 
were on preparing for food shortages, evacuations, flooding, etc, I'd be 
OK with it.  It never hurts to prepare.  But that's not where the 
emphasis is.  It's on carbon credit swap schemes and other exotic 
financial systems.  Some of them brought to you by the same people that 
gave us Enron.

Based on just that bit of knowledge, I'm skeptical that anyone other 
than some grassroots folks that are admirably trying to save the world 
from doom (like Ted) is really serious about this.  Where are the 
warehouses full of grain to hedge against climate changes that might 
cause short-term famine?  Where are they building seawalls or dikes in 
case the water comes up higher than it ever did before?  Where are the 
nuclear engineers starting to break ground to build new nuclear reactors?

I think our focus is on the wrong thing, and that if it changed to 
preparedness instead of emissions reduction, we'd all be better off.  
And you'd probably get more people on the bandwagon to boot.

Paul