Mod 7 said:
Given the tone of some of these posts and the controversial nature of the subject, this thread will be closed around midnight tonight. It's been going on for quite some time already and it's way beside the realm of this board.
M7
Mod 7, please don't end this very interesting conversation. Don't you think it might be better just to edit out the "naughty bits" (meaning of course, the totally pointless deviation into an old argument on Moslems)?
Well....I can't believe I read the whole thing. In fact, so in depth and detailed was this exchange between Justbob and Ziggy that I had to reread some parts multiple times before I could claim to have a comprehension of even half of what they were saying. I can say without the slightest bit of sarcasm that I am humbled by the intelligence of Justbob and Ziggy.
I was formulating my own ideas while reading page after page of this thread, only to find my conclusions stated quite succinctly in the excerpt of the Stern Review posted by Ziggy. That is, the problem of CO2 emissions is of such a scale and nature that it must be handled within an international framework. This is important not only because the supposed effects of CO2 emissions are borderless, but also because the measures that must be taken to deal with CO2 emissions will effect competitiveness, so that no nation will be willing to implement measures unless it competitors are also willing to do so at the same time. As we have seen, the governments of both Canada and the US have cited economic competitiveness in their calculations on what measures they are willing to take.
Another thing that struck me while reading this thread was the repeated drawing of political orientation into the argument. It seems to me however that the problem goes beyond politics. While an argument could no doubt be made that capitalist societies have been the largest contributors to the CO2 problem since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we shouldn't forget that Socialist Russia was a highly industrialized society, as were fascist Germany and Japan. The oil companies in China are state-owned, as is eighty percent of that country's economy. In any case, if the problem is to be solved within an international framework, politic orientation needs to be put aside in the same way that it would have to be in the case of a global pandemic.
The thread has centred mostly on the global warming problem, a issue toward which "violent action" is largely irrelevent due to the scale of the problem. Ziggy, our resident "anarcho-primitivist socialist" (I'm not sure what it means, but it sounds cool), has stated this himself. However, when it comes to localized environmental issues, I personally feel that violence is sometimes the only option. There's always going to somebody who calls it terrorism, but terrorism, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Usually it is the brown-skinned people fighting for their rights that get called terrorists. Make it a white guy doing the same thing and it's called "Walking Tall".
From what I've written above, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that my opinions don't coincide much with those of Justbob. But his arguments and the material he has posted have helped me revise my own opinions somewhat. First, I'm starting to think that there might be basis to the argument that "global warming" might be too ambiguous of a concept to act upon in any meaningful way. Making the goal to keep the temperature from rising five degrees over the next century will be a formidable task for a human race that promised a decade or so ago to reduce child poverty by XX percent, only to fail miserably at that goal. Think about it, if we can't succeed at a specific target like getting food into the mouths of starving children who we see dying on our television screen week in and week out, then how are we going to succeed at limiting a temperature increase of a few degrees over the next three to five generations? It is for that reason that I think that Justbob is onto something when he says we might be better off focusing on limited issues like reducing the emission of cancer-causing chemicals into the environment.
I would like to put forth to Ziggy, JustBob, Korbel and the other great minds in the merbite community that if we consider almost all the core issues tied to global warming, we can find adequate justification to take action on each one even if global warming is considered to be unproven. For example, auto and transportation emissions: these currently stem from the reliance on fossil fuels. We know that fossil fuels, upon which our civilization is highly dependent, are finite and being rapidly depleted. Competition for oil resources is already growing fierce and China and India have barely begun to whet their appetite. Is it unreasonable therefore to propose that quick action be taken to make sure that this precious resource is used optimally? And wouldn't such action ultimately be beneficial toward solving the global warming problem, even if it wasn't our stated aim and even if we didn't believe global warming was happening? Similar concrete and immediate justifications exist for prompt action on deforestation, coal emissions and most of the so-called causes of global warming. Even if we discount global warming, we are looking at a pretty grim future consisting of oil-wars, increased cancer, increased asthma, massive species extinction and reduced sperm counts unless we take action very quickly.