Possible.
Nah. Instinct is only a small part of my skepticism of catastrophic AGW theory. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand, given your profound ignorance. 
[Plink!] That the best you got?
Nah, I added a during the edit window.
Speaking of China, Here is an article which claims the following
It sounds like an overstatement to me, but still it does make one question those who support the Kyoto treaty.
You’re dating yourself here.
Ahh, but that could change if the proper government and market incentives were mandated, couldn’t it?
Status quo isn’t necessarily good for our future.
Again, the book, stupid though it may be, has absolutely no bearing on the reality of global warming.
Those oceanfront cities that will be presumably underwater are just that…“presumably” under water.
I still think the jury is out as to what the Earth will do regarding the threat of global warming. Just because the ice caps and glaciers are shrinking now doesn’t mean they will continue to do so ad infinitum.
Heck, we may have a nuclear winter to look forward to to refreeze those biatches back into their places!
Or, we could just go on ahead and bomb the ice caps with precision munitions and break up the ice caps now, just to save some time.
I cannot read the title of the thread without thinking that hail is taking over the world. Nice pun.
And, being in the restoration business myself, bring it on, babe!
Has it occurred to anyone that eco-fascism, or whatever you’d like to call it, simply couldn’t win? Where would these would-be philosopher kings get their power from, and how would they sustain it? How could a movement dedicated to emasculating the basis of modern wealth and power possibly impose it’s will on a renegade, reactionary power willing to keep on polluting and enjoying the local, short term benefits thereof? What could a global eco-regime resort to? Trade sanctions? In the end, the only way to stop someone who says “Fuck You!” and backs it up with machine guns, tanks and missiles, is to have more machine guns, tanks and missiles. And how do you have that without wealth?
Yeah, everyone knows that authoritarian governments are so much more concerned about the ecological consequences of their decisions. I mean, look at Russia. Look at the Congo. Look at North Korea. Look at China. They wouldn’t have the paradise conditions that they have without authoritarian power.
There is no hope but to throw away the outmoded concept of freedom, and place our entire fate in the hands of whoever wants to rule the world.
Sign me up!
Tris
Just to play Devil’s Advocate here, I see a lot of people slagging the ability of an authoritarian government to resolve environmental difficulties, based on the track records of modern authoritarian governments, but has any authoritarian government made ‘greenness’ a goal? If they weren’t working with environmentalism in mind, I can’t see how you can point to their records as failures. I am thinking of another ‘big problem’ people were talking about a few decades ago; the ‘population bomb’. China actually did a decent job of slowing population growth, if I understand correctly. I didn’t bring this up to start a debate about how they did this - I disagree with their methods and I didn’t come here to cheerlead for China - but their population control efforts seem to have been somewhat effective (Again, don’t try to debate me about the consequences of their program, I never once said I approve of it and I will probably agree with just about every critical thing you have to say). Who is to say that China’s government, with their heavy hand and disregard for human rights, wouldn’t be able to force a ‘greener’ China?
Exactly. A Green dictatordship is about as viable as a pacifist dictatorship.
… unless it’s a dictatorship by druids, who enforce their reign of terror through copious use of Plant Growth and Summon Nature’s Ally spells. And even then it probably wouldn’t work, because druids suck.
Looks to me like there’s also some people in denial over authoritarian red China’s shift to free market capitalism.
China’s environmental record sucked back in the days of the great leap forward. It sucks today. With such evident and long term lack of will to keep things clean, there’s no obvious way to use China to make the case that one economic system is inherently better at dealing with environmental issues than the other.
It’s actually strongly debated whether the one child policy has had much of an impact on China’s population growth rate. Cite. One of the problems China has in even being able to know how many people they have is that people tend to hide their additional children from the census takers.
I think a better example, if you want to point to dictatorships that could “get her done” would be the free market reforms enacted in Chile under Pinochet. But even there the effectiveness of the reforms is disputed, and ironically the government effected these reforms by giving up power (privatizing industry, deregulation) rather than exercising it.
I am thinking that an envirocratic government might be more like Iran or Saudi Arabia instead of China or former East Germany.
Anyway, like other people say, the problem is that, for the time being, CO2 emissions = wealth & power. People, governments, and nations (for the most part) have a lot of aspiration towards wealth and power. Common sense says that authoritarian governments have at least as much aspiration towards wealth and power as any other kind of government.
That’s absolutely true. However, the ultimate question the prescriptive one: Realistically, exactly what can or should be done?
Our constitutional democracy weathered a civil war and the great depression, among other things. I see no reason to assume it can’t handle global warming.
Given my belief that catastrophic AGW theory is BS, I’m not gonna dispute you there.
I can think of one reason why your point is probably moot - globalization. The world has never been as interconnected as it is now. What China and India do affects all of us. Your country and my country could do everything absolutely right with regards to CO2 emissions and still have that completely negated by other countries. Your country is on the brink of an economic collapse, and it is affecting my country and most other countries. We’re all in this boat together.
What, like with SUV drivers being publicly stoned? (Interesting prospect . . .)