On Aug 25, 12:40 pm, "znobo" wrote:
"Fran" wrote in message

...
On Aug 25, 10:42 am, (Edward A. Falk) wrote:



In article ,
Kyoto = Nonsense wrote:

1. They hate people.
2. Most are rabid socialists.
3. They often try to dress like oddballs, ostensively to be "different"
but end up looking nearly identical with one another.
4. They want the West to be destroyed.
5. Believe that everyone but themselves is responsible for their lot in
life.
6. Often, they are science-illiterate luddites.
7. They tend to use twice as many recreational drugs as the average
person.
8. They suffer from mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety
to
schizophrenia.
9. They cannot tolerate dissenting opinions.

I consider myself an environmentalist, and none of those things apply
to me.

My primary desire is simple: I want the human race to exist forever.
This can't happen if the earth is made uninhabitable before we colonize
outer space, and it doesn't look like the latter is going to happen
any time soon.

It's not enough to keep the earth habitable for humans, it needs to
be kept habitable for the species we depend on. The ecosystem is not
so robust that we're incapable of wrecking it.

Other issues: environmental catastrophe is bad for the economy. The
extinction of commercial species is bad for the people who depend on
them, even if someone else got rich making that species extinct. There
used to be a commercial fishing industry in the S.F. Bay. Not any more.

I believe that things that are unique and beautiful should be preserved.
We would have wiped out the Bald Eagle, our own national bird, if DDT
hadn't been banned. Yes, it cost farmers some money, but what price a
national symbol?

Most people who object to environmental regulation are people who want
to externalize their own costs onto someone else. Look up Minamata
disease. Chisso Corporation made a lot of money processing methyl
mercury and over 2000 people living downstream paid the price. Union
Carbide saved a bunch of money by locating their insecticide plant
in a place where regulations were lax, and over 18,000 people paid
with their lives.

Every time there's a lake you can't swim in because it's polluted,
or a forest you can't walk through because it was clear-cut, or a
fish you can't eat because it's contaminated, you're subsidizing
someone else's business.

And that's the core of what environmentalists want. They want
businesses to not make messes they can't or won't clean up.

Precisely ... the commons are worth protecting. They should not be
lightly alienated.

The situation is even worse than you describe since our knowledfge of
the minutiae of the systems on which we depend is only partial. We may
well be destroying not merely the unqiue and the beautiful that we
know of but a great many things of which we know nothing and yet might
be of extraordinary value.

The most rational strategy if we concede we have only partial insight
is to tread as lightly upon the planet's ecology as we can
======================================

Agreed, but what has this to do with the global warming scam?


It has nothing to do with any scam but much to do with protecting the
ecosystem services (including those we don't fully understand and
therefore don't want to unwittingly mess with) delivered by the
current biosphere.

Fran