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Al Gore on Climate Change: 'We Are Going to Win This Thing'
http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2014/04/15/21808-al-gore-on-climate-change-we-are-going-to-win-this-thing/"The "barriers" to doing something about climate change are business and political interests that profit off of fossil fuels — "dirty energy that causes dirty weather." He compared fake science from polluters stating that humans are not to blame for the climate to tobacco companies that used to hire actors to play doctors who denied cigarettes were dangerous.
"That's immoral, unethical and despicable," he said of both."
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This is the fight to pick with every denier you come across. Climate change is man-made. will argue that it's debatable, that the scientists don't agree, ridicule the thought that we are responsible for this, and fight with every tool at their disposal on this point. By 'them' I don't mean just your cousin the denier, but the CO2 industry that has bought their way into his mind. It's not arguable. The science is 99.99% in agreement.
As Al Gore said at his talk at UH, if 99.99 heart surgeons said you were in dire trouble, would you argue for the .01st?
This is the one argument that we must always push past the comfort point, that distressing moment when we realize we're in a convo with a denier. I've walked away from hundreds of arguments in the past, telling myself that there's no changing their minds, that it's a waste of breath, that I value the relationship, etc. Not on this topic.
Climate change is man-made. It's not volcanoes and it's not sunspots. There is no evidence that supports either assertion, and there are at least 10 trillion reasons why they fight.
When the argument that climate change is not man-made falls, the simple fact will be bared that to keep on this path without change is to doom the future for our own selfishness.
Once people accept that climate change is man-made, there's no supportable reason to steal the future from our kids and their kids.
Here's an interesting read on why they fight.
http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism
Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.
Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.
In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.
Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”
IMUA (ONWARD, roughly)
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