First frame the question as “Should we destroy our current economy in the vain hope of offsetting a small fraction of China’s (and India’s, etc.) carbon output growth?”
Then it’s pretty easy to understand why that idea doesn’t sell to the archetypical disciple of Limbaugh, et al.
Here’s a history tidbit I think is illustrative …
Back in the 1960s every major corporation was totally against any kind of environmental regulation. By the 80s many had realized that producing mass quantities of waste was economically wasteful too.
Now they have heavily embraced the “reduce” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle”, and partly embraced the other two. They’re still not fond of cost impositions, nor would I ever expect them to become so.
Bottom line to this digression: Their 1960s worldview blinded them to sources of economic advantage available from simple cost-cutting. And this was the educated elite of American corporate management. How could they have been so blinkered? Turns out it was easy to be so blinkered.
How much more difficult for the “common clay” to get the much more subtle ideas associated with AGW & mitigation today?
GMOs and, on a much smaller scale but with the same emotional response, mandatory vaccinations.
Both are areas that involve science that the people don’t understand, or attempt to understand, while they keep saying there’s not enough evidence and no consensus on safety when there actually is. And both get people really, really angry, as opposed to engaged in rational discussion and attempts to genuinely gain new information.
Anti-vaxxers. Not all liberals but I think the overwhelming majority are. A few are religious nuts. My daughter lives in ultra-liberal Park Slope, Brooklyn and the percentage of kids who have not been vaccinated is quite high. She makes damn sure her son has all his vaccinations.
I buy the oil and coal company explanations more than the world-view ones, although both could be in play. But Fox spews forth its garbage without end and I assume they are being paid to do so by coal/oil. Of course, anthropomorphic climate change is a hard sell in WV, TX, and OK.
Then there is a religious objection, or rather two of them. One is that god won’t let anything really bad happen to us (how much evidence is there for that?) and the second is that we are approaching end times so nothing we do matters.
But you need to have an understanding of the action and function of virii and such in order to be in that field. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to know anything about virii and not understand evolution.
also—nuclear power.
It is a basic tenet of the liberal religion that nuclear power is of the devil. And any who dare speak of it shall be shunned by the rest of the congregation, lest the evil spread amongst them.
That one has been argued a lot on these boards. I think we came to the conclusion that while a very small subset of greens are against all nuclear power, most liberals aren’t against it.
So I guess you’re not aware of the whole microevolution/macroevolution thing? The main Creationist argument against evolution is that changes between “kinds” (roughly corresponding to species, but sometimes fudged a bit) are too complex to ever happen.
Not that the evolution of viruses is all that important to a neurosurgeon. His job is to work on the brain without screwing other things up. While there are some viruses that can cause brain problems, he doesn’t need to know how they evolved.
He can perfectly well believe they are just the result of sin and decay.
I’ve never thought of the anti-vaccine crowd as being particularly liberal. But I’m a Republican and do question the extent to which global warming/climate change is happening. And I do find it nearly impossible to get unbiased scientific information about it one way or the other.
But in terms of making me angry, let’s use the anti-vaccine / climate change analogy as an example. The reason anti-vaccination people make me angry isn’t just because they’re being ignorant, uneducated, or tinfoil-hat conspiratory. It’s because they are being deliberately destructive to society. Vaccines are one of the greatest discoveries and achievements in the history of humanity. They allowed society to progress immensely simply by reducing mortality, i.e. allowing population increase. And this, whether anti-vaccinators admit it or not, is the core of their problem. They believe that humans are the cause of all suffering everywhere and maybe the answer is that we shouldn’t have been allowed to multiply and populate as much as we did, so maybe this is nature’s way of ‘balancing’ things by having it turn out that vaccines were not a great discovery, but were in fact more like some kind of horrible Nazi doctor experiment gone wrong.
That, for me, is where anger comes into it. Liberals run the gamut of being anti-human to anti-American to anti-Christian to anti-white etc. and it’s all based on the idea of self-hatred. So in terms of climate change it’s the idea that it is a foregone conclusion that humans, and especially Americans, are utterly destroying the entire planet, it’s only a question of how quickly. That, like the stuff above, is based on nothing more than self-hating, liberal guilt.
I hear a Moon-hoaxer and I don’t get angry, I just laugh at the dumb hayseed rube. I see a 9/11-truther and I get a little angry (because they’re committing light treason) but in the end they’re just under-educated conspiracy nuts. Climate change radicals make me angry because they are not holders of an opposing viewpoint, they are anarchists who think the answer is to tear down society and turn back the clock a century or two simply because humans have been so successful as a species in the past few dozen decades.
On what basis do you make that assumption? Fox’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, is a publically traded company. One can review their recent financial statements here.
Please point out where you find evidence that Fox is “being paid to do so by coal/oil”.
It it possible to rationalize nearly any belief if you put your mind to it. Ben Carson clearly has a superior mind because he is capable of simultaneous acceptance of all sorts of contradictory, non-factual, wackadoodle beliefs while still being an expert neurosurgeon.
It’s rough to get an accurate head count. Many people won’t admit to a survey that they’re anti-vaccine, or they don’t consider themselves anti-vaccine, but instead anti MANDATORY vaccine (there’s a Libertarian contingent there, and Libertarian’s don’t fit the Liberal/Conservative dichotomy well.) Others will say they vaccinate but don’t. Still others will say they don’t vaccinate, but do. So there’s a bit of a chasm between what people say and what they do. If you look at what people say, the representation is about 60% Liberal. If you look at which states have the lowest vaccination rates and who they vote for, the Liberal bias becomes a bit stronger - but of course that’s assigning everyone in the state the same label of “Liberal”, as well as confusing Democrats with Liberals.
Much like climate change deniers, there are different reasons people don’t vaccinate. Some don’t vaccinate because they don’t think vaccines are needed anymore because who gets measles today? Probably not correlated with Lib/Con. Others because vaccination is inconvenient, which correlates with living in a rural area more than anything else, so that skews them Conservative, with exceptions, of course. Some don’t vaccinate because they trust in herd immunity to protect their kids and don’t want to take the small risks of vaccination, even though they know the risks are small. I have no idea if those correlate to Lib/Con and can’t even really speculate on that. The group that most correlates is the one that gets the most press: the college educated women of Colorado and California (and other places) that tend to be urban or suburban, wealthier than average and don’t trust doctors or Big Pharma. That’s overwhelmingly your Liberals, and the group I think most compares to climate change deniers. It’s a small group, but they make a big noise.
Which is exactly how we feel about climate change deniers.
Conservative here. That really is it. I agree with global warming, but no one has yet proposed any kind of solution that wouldn’t be completely devastating to the American way of life. I’m waiting for some genius to figure it out, (stratospheric sulfate aerosols?) and until then I don’t want to be constantly scolded by left-wing liberals for driving an SUV to work and using incandescent light bulbs.
Yes, we are. See CAFE standards for one (which didn’t apply to trucks, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the government tells us we have to drive clown cars, if we’re allowed to drive at all).
And here we have an example of intentionally demonizing advocates of planning for and taking action to mitigate anthropogenic climate effects as anarchists and saboteurs of true, equivalencing them with Moon-hoaxers, WTC conspiracy theorists, and treasonists; rather than making any effort whatsoever to address the large body of actual evidence it is dismissed as “nothing more than self-hating, liberal guilt.” Nice work, pal.
So, the American way of life is all about using as much energy as possible?
Actually, you may be onto something. I’m really disappointed that we let to those socialist heathens to the north beat us in this area of American primacy. There are too many damned Priuses on the road not burning nearly enough fuel!
Stranger
This is just like Hail Ants arguments, and they are really underwhelming. Once we compare the costs of doing nothing against the costs of doing the proper thing.
And as a Republican scientist can tell you, there is less of a reason now to think that it would be devastating to the American way of life.
[QUOTE]
Some people say transitioning to clean energy will simply cost too much - "leave it to future generations." In Edinburgh, Scotland, Richard Alley explains that if we start soon the cost of the transformation could be similar to that which was paid for something none of us would want to do without - clean water and the modern sanitation system.
[/QUOTE]
The sad reality is that that part of the conservative anger is also manufactured: the same denier groups out there also convince many conservatives about the lie that doing the proper thing will destroy our economy. In reality the other big 800 pound gorillas of the economical world are realizing that they should not follow Sampson (in this case the fossil fuel companies) into killing himself and all other corporations in the effort.
BTW, you are making an excellent effort of explaining things over here** Stranger On A Train.**
The worst part of it is that once there are significant effects from climate change, the religious are just going to say it’s God’s wrath on the liberals who allowed the decay of society. There won’t be any way to ever get through to these kinds of people.
