Hi everyone! I'm just an average working guy with a family, and no advanced education, who has only developed an understanding of climate and environment issues during the last 10 years. Prior to that, I was pretty conservative in my thinking on most issues, and a lot of my resistance to manmade global warming was due to the fact that the carbon problem is not going to have an easy quick fix like the aerosol problem a couple of decades ago.
I think that's why a lot of people on the right, who are strongly attached to laissez-faire economic theory started becoming more resistant to global warming in the last 20 years. If it was just a matter of switching from oil to some already available (and cheap) energy source, there would be no Koch Brothers, related oil barons, and their assorted disinformation campaigns. BP already took a look at going green ten years ago and decided there was no money in it (or at least not as much as oil) and decided to double down and just drill deeper...like in the Gulf of Mexico for example.
But, I am not only skeptical about dirty energy industries; my skepticism also includes what is being called now "Big Green" or Green Capitalism. Can we keep running economies based on a capitalist model, or any other market-driven economic model and still reduce carbon emissions? Not to mention deal with the other related problems of capitalism's need for endless growth like resource depletion, topsoil erosion, declining availability of fresh water? I don't see it as a possibility, especially when our growth-dependent economies are combined with a global population that is much larger than can be supported without oil-based industrial agriculture.
So, what are the solutions? And is it possible to achieve any meaningful results in time, considering how many people will resist even slight changes to the way we do things now? I have spent too much time arguing with rightwingers that I used to be allied with, and want to spend a little more time reading what others have to say who are at least onside with environmental issues...and that's why I'm here.
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