The Environment Thing

Some green news is in the air this week that got me pondering the environment a bit. Charles Krauthammer had a pretty good column in the Washington Post on May 30th that stuck in my head a bit- he claims to be a global warming agnostic and political commentaries aside, he does make a point worth making-

Why global warming? To me, it's a lot simpler: we have one planet, we should take care of it. If we all resolve to do that, then hey, problems like climate change get solved and we get a cleaner world- everyone wins. I tend to be a bit jaded on the issue of global warming, because I remember 20 years back when everyone was flipping out over the hole in the Ozone Layer that was going to kill us all. And ten years or so before that, people were warning of new ice ages, overpopulation and the end of oil by the year 2000.

And yet we're all still here. The problem the Left has with the environment isn't that it promotes it but rather it focuses on the wrong thing. It shouldn't be about the supposed scientific debate (and no, I don't really buy the whole consensus thing on climate change- the scientific community has never really agreed on anything in its life. Claiming such a thing is bullshit. Talk to ten different scientists get ten different answers- and the Left's insistence on politicizing the issue doesn't do a damn thing to actually solve it.)

The Left needs to refocus the issue as not one of saving the sky but rather one of national security, plain and simple. The less oil we use, the less money the Middle East gets and the less money the terrorists get. That's how the equation adds up in my head.

Plus, we get a better world to boot.

Republicans tend to push the idea of drilling domestically to actually get some oil at home instead of from Saudi Arabia, which makes sense logically. Inevitably, that sentence is followed by some nod towards 'buying time to develop green energy technologies for the new generation.' Problem in my mind is if we say that, we actually have to do it otherwise we just tear up National Parks for nothing.

We do probably need a couple of decades to develop green technology, but we need stop-gaps otherwise we just keep burning fossil fuel. Nuclear plants spring to mind immediately. (My one objection to 'An Inconvinient Truth' was that not one word was said about nuclear power. Clean, efficient and a perfect non-fossil fuel, CO2 belching stop gap until we get green technology and power in place.)

Clean coal is also on the minds of people- and more domestic drilling. Regulators deferred a choice on the Big Stone II plant in South Dakota today (they want to put power lines in. Environmentalists are fighting it.) And there's also a new oil refinery (the first in thirty years) in the offing out in South Dakota as well.

But like I said: less oil we use the better and a cleaner world instead of all this fuss about global warming benefits us all. It's time to take the politics out of global warming.