Ethics Key to Fighting Global Warming
Do Oregon residents, and Americans in general, have an obligation to reduce their carbon emissions, even at great economic costs, to minimize the impacts of global warming on others? Do we have a duty to pay poor nations for the damage our emissions cause for them?
Do we have an ethical and moral responsibility to remedy this situation?
Think of it this way. How would you feel if someone did something that severely disrupted your ability to live on your property now, and permanently degraded the value of the property you wanted to pass on to your children in the future? I'm sure most people would conclude that the activity was morally wrong.
Poor nations also believe that industrialized nations have a moral responsibility to provide them with the funding and new technologies needed to help them withstand and adapt to climate change.
These equity and social justice issues will be front-and-center at next month's COP 15 meeting. About 50 African nations recently boycotted climate talks in Barcelona to protest what they see as inadequate commitments from industrialized nations to cut emissions. Many are also demanding billions of dollars in reparations for the damage rich nations have caused them.
How to people keep printing these articles in light of climategate? Do they just hope that if they don't acknowledge it then it will go away?
So based on fraudulent data the USA is expected to provide "funding and new technologies" as well as "billions of dollars in reparations" to countries that keep themselves poor.
I want to leave my children a free country where they can choose to eat meat, choose their transportation, choose how they will recreate and choose how much to heat or cool their homes. To do otherwise would be morally wrong.
13 comments:
Daniel, this climate warming crap is one big scam. The poor countries just want us to bail them out. Hell, we bailed out foreign banks, why not them? I would tell the poor countries if they don't pay us, we will increase our co2 output. Since we would have to downgrade our lifestyle, we need to be compensated. They are poor and used to being poor, we are not. If they don't like it, they can live on another planet.
What also bothers me is the FACT that very little of any aid we send to Africa will finds its way into the hands of the ordinary people. The local dictator-thug-warlord will help himself to most of it and nothing will really change - except our standard of living.
My fifty cents:
Do Oregon residents, and Americans in general, have an obligation to reduce their carbon emissions, even at great economic costs, to minimize the impacts of global warming on others?
One word: No.
Do we have a duty to pay poor nations for the damage our emissions cause for them?
What about their duty to pay us for the damage their emissions cause us?
Do we have an ethical and moral responsibility to remedy this situation?
As opposed to an unethical and immoral responsibility? Is there a necessity to pursue solutions without problems?
Think of it this way. How would you feel if someone did something that severely disrupted your ability to live on your property now, and permanently degraded the value of the property you wanted to pass on to your children in the future? I'm sure most people would conclude that the activity was morally wrong.
Paging Dorothy English...
Poor nations also believe that industrialized nations have a moral responsibility to provide them with the funding and new technologies needed to help them withstand and adapt to climate change.
Children also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
These equity and social justice issues will be front-and-center at next month's COP 15 meeting.
Oh, so it's a "social justice" issue, rather than a "climate justice" issue, or even an "economic justice" issue. Nice to see they're still getting some mileage out of that quaint little euphemism.
About 50 African nations recently boycotted climate talks in Barcelona to protest what they see as inadequate commitments from industrialized nations to cut emissions.
50 African nations? Really? Isn't that like, the whole continent plus a couple of islands? So they want us to live in the stone age just like them, rather than us giving them a hand up to lift them out of poverty? And their main, pressing concern is "emissions" from halfway across the globe, which may or may not raise the temperature of the Serengeti one lousy degree (Celsius or Fahrenheit? Or would you prefer Kelvin?), rather than say, oh, clean drinking water? Glad to see they've got their priorities straight.
Many are also demanding billions of dollars in reparations for the damage rich nations have caused them.
Pikers! I'm surprised they're not demanding trillions, given the Halfrican-in-Chief's (Kenya's hometown boy) proclivity toward spending any amount of money that doesn't have less than 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point.
We do.
But in the sense that we share our technology.
How much carbon did we and Europe produce during the industrial revolution? A Lot.
Now, we have better tech, we share, so that developing nations, like China and India, will produce much less carbon/waste/whatever as they industrialize.
Then, when Africa, South America, etc, start to modernize, they will benefit from the technological advances China/India made and share.
Anon 9:39 PM
I love this:
Children also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
That is too funny..
Ric in Or, china is not making technological advances, it is being given to them by clowns in our country or they are stealing it. Clinton let them have missile technology. We are being sold out by our own idiots and we let it happen.
It really hasn't hit you yet -- and this has absolutely NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with politics -- that your children will live to see a day when we do NOT have enough oil to sustain the lifestyle Americans live today. That is not an opinion, that is a horrifyingly inconvenient truth, and so far, I haven't seen any emails to refute it. I do, however, see a lot of asses; the asses of people whose heads are buried in the sand. Yours is prominent among them. Not a pretty picture.
Anon 4:30 PM
Your education has been dumbed down. My grand children (3.5 yrs and 11 months) will never live to see the day when we do NOT have enough oil to sustain the lifestyle Americans live today.
That is not an opinion, that is a horrifyingly inconvenient truth, and so far, I haven't seen any emails to refute it.
You sound like you are an expert. I say you are a fool or con artist. My grand children may live to see the day when we don't use our own resources because of criminals like our current president and other political leaders and crooks like Al Gore.
Sorry charlie, here is a statement from the following link:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG414.pdf
Go to page ix.
The largest known oil shale deposits in the world are in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil
resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable. For potentially recoverable oil shale
resources, we roughly derive an upper bound of 1.1 trillion barrels of oil and a lower
bound of about 500 billion barrels. For policy planning purposes, it is enough to
know that any amount in this range is very high. For example, the midpoint in our estimate range, 800 billion barrels, is more than triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, 800 billion barrels of recoverable resources would last for more than 400 years.
Where did you get your education from, a comics book?
Just some inconvenient facts and information for you flat worlder. Did you leave your brain at birth?
Tell you what, Dave. Let's revisit the topic in thirty years, if we're both still around. Should be an interesting discussion. I'll mark my calendar. Daniel, could you keep this blog going until then? Dave and I have an appointment with destiny.
anon 4:46, I'm in.
Anon 4;46 I just proved (if that is you from 4:30pm) that you were wrong with the amount of oil that is available to our country with facts. We have huge amounts of oil. This country was blessed with huge amounts of natural resources and now we are not using them. We are using other people's natural resources and sending them huge amounts of our national wealth. That is the dumbest policy on any level. We are destroying our children's future.
Dave, the bottom line on which we all MUST agree is that:
1) We live on a planet.
2) The natural resources on that planet are finite.
3) We'd better get our shit together.
I'm marking my calendar. Seriously. Thirty years from today, if this blog's still here, you and I are going to have a conversation about the state of things. Bring sun screen.
Anon 8:17 AM
1. I agree with you that we live on a planet.
2. Not all natural resources are finite. Trees are not finite. We can grow them as soon as we use them.
3. I agree we need to get our shit together. However, you and I have a different definition of what that means.
I would like to see this country use our huge resources. The over hundred year supply of oil and all the coal we have (I don't know how much we have, it's a lot).
Then, I would like to provide incentives so people will invent or create better and more efficient ways to use those. I don't want to give the government the life or death power over our lives and businesses that they will have with health care, cap and trade and the copenhagen treaty will give them. I like the idea of solar and wind also but they are not cost efficient or reliable. There are also some mini nuke plants that OSU and toshiba and maybe other people have came up with that are very promising. I want to have our country given the time to respond in a responsible manner, not have it crammed it down our throats which we cannot afford right now and the technology is not there now.
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