| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Opposing Views: The No-Spin Zone on Climate Change by Hunter Cutting, Huffington Post
Article Tags: Opposing Views
Being a parent means you get to talk to kids to about climate change. Not your own kids, of course. With them, you’re lucky if you can deduce what homework they have each night. But when their friends come over after school, that’s when you get a chance. And, encouragingly enough, I’ve found a no-spin zone in talking with kids about climate change — something I rarely encounter when talking with neighbors and colleagues steeped in op-ed page rhetoric. And it’s in these no-spin conversations that one of the important truths about climate change comes out: global warming isn’t a science problem. It’s a political problem.
There is no mystery about how global warming works or how dangerous it is. Even kids grasp the basics. The carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels is heating up the atmosphere and driving increasingly costly climate disruption. The next part is a little more tricky, but still simple: once carbon pollution gets into the atmosphere it sticks there. There’s no cleaning it up, no going backward. The math has been done, and it turns out that we have about 15 years on the current burn path before we permanently load the atmosphere with so much carbon pollution we risk truly catastrophic changes.
Naturally enough at this point in the conversation, the kids are pretty bummed out. But still they ask if there is anything we can do about it. And once again, the answer is pretty clear. This time it’s the engineers, economists, and business consultants that have done the math. Investing in energy efficiency and switching to renewable energy is not only feasible, it often saves a lot of money. Over in Germany the government is looking at a plan to switch to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. Right now, 25 percent of the German electrical grid is already powered by renewable energy.
Source: huffingtonpost.com/hunter-cutting/climate-change-politics
2013-01-22 08:47:32
Source:
