Imagine if we had spent the last 20 years fighting global warming instead of in Afghanistan

[kpete]

IMAGINE:

[calimary]

1. Heartbreaking.

[Blues Heron]

2. The Bush Family has caused so much death and harm

Shame on them

[spanone]

3. K&R

We always have enough money to go to war..

[Darwins_Retriever]

4. We have the world's best technology to fight one

and limited technology to fight the other.

And you do realize fighting global warming will be like fighting a war, there will be contractors controlling the war on climate change.

[Wounded Bear]

5. The mind boggles...nt

[brooklynite]

6. Meaningless meme...

The military doesn't fight global warming, so what it is ordered to do has nothing to with what the Governments other policies are (I'll observe that he's apparently blaming President Obama in part for this failing). As for why we were in Afghanistan, because their Government allowed and harbored terrorists who attacked us. If President Gore had been in office, there's no doubt we would have sent troops into Afghanistan as well. And once we were there, the same internal and geo-political problems would have kept us there longer than folks here wanted.

[sarisataka]

8. Exactly

I don't recall anyone back in 2001 saying ignore 9-11, we need to focus on global warming.

[SWBTATTReg]

7. Never still would have ever happened still, if it wasn't Afghanistan. It would have been

some other Country, some other issue, any other issue, other than global warming. I fear that a significant global climate event will be the only catalyst that will drive human behavior.

[2naSalit]

9. What we have are the rewards of greed...

Which will destroy us all in the end.

[Lunabell]

10. Imagine

[Politicub]

11. This kind of public rumination is not helpful.

Of course there are lessons to learn from wasting money on a protracted war, but the idea of how different things would be “if only” is a form of soothsaying.

No one know how things would have changed or developed had we not wasted so much money in Afghanistan.

Another view is that nothing would have been different in regard to climate change at all. Why? Afghanistan was financed by increasing the national debt. Money wasn’t reallocated from a fictional climate fund to finance the war.

The meager moves made to address climate (subsidies for electric cars, etc.) were met with resistance. I don’t understand how anyone can reasonably believe that the public would have cared more about the environment regardless of Afghanistan.

The war was sanitized for the media and conducted mainly out of public view, anyway. It didn’t dominate the political conversation.

That’s why defeatist rumination like this silly tweet is a waste of time. It helps nothing.

[bahboo]

13. totally agree....

[Raine]

17. Exactly! nt

[Peacetrain]

12. If only!!!! nt

[Champp]

14. "Ha ha. You so funny" - Republicons

[jalan48]

15. The fossil fuel industry had their thumb on the scale for this decision. Unlike the average citizen

they have the power and resources (campaign contributions) to help determine public policy.

[RANDYWILDMAN]

16. Try 40 ! Reagan took the solar panels that Carter put up, down

I felt like some invisible hand was always pushing our world towards more oil use and I never understood why ?


The MIC can go fuck themselves, if the russians pulling out of Afghanistan in 1979 was a not big burning sun warning sign, I don't what was.

[hunter]

18. Electricity would cost 35 cents per kilowatt hour...

... hillside and oceanside vistas would be covered with ugly wind turbines, and we'd still be burning more fossil fuels than we did in 2000.

The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels. It's a lot like smoking. Someone who goes from a two pack a day habit to a one pack a day habit, making up for the difference by vaping, is still a smoker

If, twenty years ago, we committed to shutting down all fossil fuel extraction within twenty years, starting with a ban on all new oil, gas, and coal mining on the very first day, and then sticking to an aggressive shutdown schedule for the next twenty years such that the entire fossil fuel industry was shut down this year, then we might have accomplished something.

Obviously that didn't happen.

People still believe solar and wind power will magically displace fossil fuels, or that vaping an chewing gum will replace smoking. They won't.

We are addicted to our high energy consumer lifestyle and we refuse to accept nuclear power which is the only "carbon free" energy source capable of supporting a similar lifestyle.

France closed its last coal mine about twenty years ago. Why? Because they built nuclear power plants.

Germany is still burning coal because they rejected nuclear power. Places like California, Germany, and Denmark have aggressively pursued non-nuclear carbon free energy sources and have become entirely dependent on natural gas. The problem is so bad in Germany that they are building pipelines from Russia so they can import natural gas from a corrupt nation that will use this dependency as political leverage.

There's enough natural gas in the ground to destroy this world as we know it. Gas power plants combined with supplemental wind and solar power will not save us.

I used to think we could save the world by abandoning the high energy consumer culture but that's not going to happen. A world economy powered entirely by non-nuclear, non fossil fuel derived energy probably can't support the existing human population, let alone the affluent consumer lifestyles many of us now enjoy.

My own "save the world" plan is to aggressively promote free birth control, realistic sex education, the empowerment of women, and the replacement of fossil fuels with nuclear power.

If anyone here says anything abut Chernobyl or Fukushimi in their replies, I'll say beforehand that these accidents demonstrated how humans going about their ordinary business are worse for the natural environment than the worst sort of nuclear accident. There's going to come a point very soon now where Chernobyl tourists are doing more damage to the natural environment than the radioactive fallout.

It's just stupid to reject nuclear power out of hand while ignoring things like car accidents, deaths by air pollution, and a severe overpopulation of fossil fuel burning affluent consumers.