THE number one obstacle to overcoming the problem of global warming is

[leftofthedial]

capitalism.

[nosmokes]

1. greed.

[leftofthedial]

2. same difference

[nosmokes]

10. har! sorry lotd -

i didn't see the *capitalism in the body of your post. i only saw the header and thought it was a fill in the blank... doh!:dunce:

[porphyrian]

27. That's not entirely true.

Capitalism is simply the belief that people should own private property. Greedy people gravitate towards it because it allows them to indulge their avarice. However, it doesn't mean that capitalists are inherently greedy.

[leftofthedial]

30. no greed . . .

no capitalism

the entire system would come to a screeching halt

[porphyrian]

32. That's not true at all.

Private ownership doesn't necessitate greed, just as a lack of it doesn't necessitate selflessness. You're spinning unnecessarily.

[leftofthedial]

39. capitalism isn't about private property ownership

it's about capital and using capital to make the maximum possible amount of more capital.

[porphyrian]

42. You can make up your own definitions all day long if you like.

Capitalism is absolutely about private ownership of property. In this instance, "property" is used in its broadest terms, including the means of production and distribution, but I'm still right. It doesn't necessitate greed. You're propagandizing unnecessarily. Capitalism itself is not bad. The people who abuse it are.

Edit: typo

[Gwerlain]

3. ...opposition to nuclear power.

ETA: time to make a choice, children. Been cruisin' for twenty years. It's time to grow up.

[lapfog_1]

4. There are many very good reasons to oppose nukes.

But we may have little choice.

[Gwerlain]

6. It's starting to look that way.

The problems are dual:
1. Corporate responsibility and liability protection in the face of waste that is dangerous for centuries.
2. Public lack of knowledge of the factors involved, to the point where hysteria is common.

I don't find a great deal to choose from between our pResident's "nucular strategery" and the hysterical "anti-nucular" movement. They like to point fingers at one another, but I kind of see it as blindness at both ends. We need to get educated about the risks, and make sound judgments about how to mitigate them. Either that or we need to figure out where we're gonna live when Earth is 10C hotter, damn quick.

[lapfog_1]

14. One difference is that the anti-nuke faction can at least pronouce the word. -n/t

[Gwerlain]

15. Sorry, "nuke" isn't my idea...

of correct pronunciation.

[lapfog_1]

17. Nah, I was referring to our current dear leader and his use of nukular

I simply cringe every time this asshat makes a speech. Or just opens his mouth.

[Gwerlain]

21. Well, I certainly don't disagree with you there. n/t

[rman]

19. nukes, nuclear power - difference

Even though the two are related.
One is a weapon, the other is not. But i assume you already knew that.

[greenman3610]

5. well, part of that opposition

comes from the Bush admin, who will
bomb anyone that they don't think deserves
a nuke plant.

[Gwerlain]

7. Well, perhaps not ANYONE...

but just whoever you'd like to use as a rhetorical tool instead of actually discussing the real problem, huh?

Listen, nobody likes to be in a forked stick- Jane Fonda IMHO should be talking about it now. She is, after all, the prime mover in the anti-nuke movement, as the star of The China Syndrome, which is BTW one of the worst, most technically inaccurate films I have ever seen, right up there with Star Crash, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and Radar Men From the Moon.

[WindRavenX]

12. As much as I hate to admit it...

...this is a huge part of the problem. Have you heard of, I think, "Pebble Reactors"? They're much safer than my parents' generation of nuclear generators.

[Gwerlain]

16. Yes, I had a correspondant who was a proponent of them.

I really don't care as long as it follows Mom's Rules:

"Ok, dear, but DON'T MAKE A MESS."

[rman]

18. govt doesn't even acknowledge the problem, much less offer solutions,

including nuclear power. There's no opposition to nuclear power as a solution to global warming because there's no debate on the matter.
Not to mention that nuclear power does not solve global warming. Global warming is already happening, there's no solving in it in the sense of stopping it - the best we can hope for is to prevent it from getting as bad as is would get if we would not do anything to reduce green house gas emissions. And that's where nuclear power may play a modest role. But as i said: there's no opposition to nuclear power as a solution to global warming because there's no debate on the matter, because the government doesn't even acknowledge the problem.

[BlooInBloo]

8. The stupid lazy apathetic American public.

We're the number one obstacle to overcoming EVERY problem facing America.

We're the ONLY obstacle to overcoming EVERY problem facing America.

People seem to think this line of thought is too "mean" or "harsh" or something. Besides these people simply being wusses, they also fail to realize that this line of thought is the only one with a note of OPTIMISM in it - as it unequivocally asserts the POWER of the American public. By contrast, those wusses who blame entities other than the American public are pure pessimists, painting the American public as a bunch of powerless patsies, effectless against the UBER-POWER of a few old bald fat white men. What a bunch of wusses.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. The "American way of life".

[WindRavenX]

11. Oh yes. Particularly suburban sprawl

And the quest to have the greenest lawn in the whole neighborhood! :eyes:

[nam78_two]

13. ding ding ding-we have a winner.nt

[donheld]

20. THE number one obstacle to overcoming the problem of global warming is

The huge piles of snow up and down every street in the Denver metro area. :evilgrin:

[ripple]

22. Ignorance to the problem.

As Dr. King once said, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientous stupidity".

[Xenotime]

23. America

[Odin2005]

24. I totally agree.

The main problem we have is that capitalism, at least in the American form, discourages short-term pain even if that pain leads to long term gain because the short term pain angers shareholders who are only in it for the $$$. there has GOT to be a better way of doing things.

[leftchick]

25. There are 3 countries building 850 NEW Coal-Fired Plants

An article from 2004 no less. Yes it is indeed capitalism/corporatism and I can not think of a worse group of money grubbers to be in control at this critical juncture in our history....

<snip>

New coal plants bury 'Kyoto'
New greenhouse-gas emissions from China, India, and the US will swamp cuts from the Kyoto treaty.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

So much for Kyoto.
The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions hasn't gone into effect yet and already three countries are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.


The magnitude of that imbalance is staggering. Environmentalists have long called the treaty a symbolic rather than practical victory in the fight against global warming. But even many of them do not appear aware of the coming tidal wave of greenhouse-gas emissions by nations not under Kyoto restrictions.

By 2012, the plants in three key countries - China, India, and the United States - are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons.

The findings suggest that critics of the treaty, including the Bush administration, may be correct when they claim the treaty is hopelessly flawed because it doesn't limit emissions from the developing world. But they also suggest that the world is on the cusp of creating a huge new infrastructure that will pump out enormous amounts of CO2 for the next six decades.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1223/p01s04-sten.html

[MamaBear]

26. Cheap oil.

When oil rises to a price that reflects its (albeit slowly) growing scarcity and its potential damage to the environment, people will rush to find a better way.

As long as oil is cheap, we'll burn it like there's no tomorrow.

Which may end up being the case. Conservation, biomass, alternatives, solar -- we have lots of things to REALLY try before we turn to poisonous nuclear reactors.

Cheap oil is suicide.

[renie408]

28. No. Short term thinking is the biggest obstacle to overcoming global warming.

Capitalism will probably be the biggest spur for solving the problem of global warming. My fifteen year old son has been looking into environmental engineering as a career choice because during a career thingy at the school, his class was told that there was going to be a large and long term need for people in that field.
I think that the chances for entrepreneurial opportunity in the area of SOLVING the problems created by global warming will be wide open.

[leftofthedial]

31. capitalism rewards short-term thinking

[gulliver]

29. Maybe "unregulated" capitalism.

Check out "An Inconvenient Truth" if you haven't yet. It is not to be missed. One of the things Gore points out is that jobs vs. environment is a false choice.

[The Traveler]

33. A failure of imagination

Capitalism, fascism, communism ... these are all just different approaches to organizing human effort. All are predicated to some degree on what I call "the big world" hypothesis ... the view that the world is so big it represents an inexhaustible store of resources and is relatively unaffected by human activity. When you think about it, and place yourself in the historical perspective of Marx or Smith the assumption does not seem unreasonable.

Of course, we know (unless we choose to immerse ourselves in denial) the assumption is false. New organizational methods must be imagined before they can be tried, and economists and other thinkers have been too busy defending the old methods to think of new ones. I've been bitching about global warming and the collapse of aquatic systems for thirty years, but most political types come from legal or business disciplines and they don't speak the language of science. A few can get it (e.g. Gore) ... but most still do not, and most of those that do get it an abstract level, not a gut level.

We have damn little time. My own suspicion is that it is too late to arrest or reverse the effects of global warming. Climate change is in our future. Hell, it is in our present. We are looking now at damage control ... how best to organize ourselves preserve human life, remaining bio-diversity, and civilization. This is a tall order. I am not optimistic. Still, we must be determined to try, or must stop pretending to love our children.

[Jcrowley]

34. That's an excellent post

n/t

[SoCalDem]

37. and the idea that "bigger/more" is better than "enough/smaller"

I saw a special on tv a while back where a french lady was lamenting the fact that she could no longer buy garlic grown locally. Apparently there is a farmers' market in the little town she used to live in, and still visits. She rode her bike to the market to buy fresh goodies to cook with, and noticed that all the garlic had little stickers on each one that said "China". She asked the vendor why they no longer had garlic from the garlic farm right next to the market. The vendor told her it was "cheaper" to buy the garlic from China, so they had to quit buying the local garlic.

The farmer who "used to grow" the local garlic has had to change his crop, and now grows flowers which he sells , and they are shipped overseas.

What bothered her was that the extra small change that was saved surely could not make up for the fuel burned by ships carting the garlic and flowers all over the place, and she did not buy the garlic after all.

In America we USED to be okay with the fact that peaches/oranges/tomatoes/melons/cherries were SEASONAL crops. We relished them when they were cheap and plentiful in their season, and then we missed them when they were gone, but we had other things to enjoy.

We have been morphed into people who need EVERYTHING..ALL THE TIME..and at any price, apparently, because now that everything is available all the time, everything continues to cost a LOT all the time. When was the last time you found a bargain on "in season" produce?

We also used to value well made products, and we willingly spent money to maintain and repair them. The goal was to make things last a long time. Now we toss anything we even get tired of, broken or not, and buy a bigger/better/smaller/faster/shinier gizmo.

WE are the problem... all of us ..globablization is breaking our budgets and our spirits and our world

[The2ndWheel]

41. Cheap energy

"We have been morphed into people who need EVERYTHING..ALL THE TIME"

That's the price of progress. Everyone is fully entitled to the right to have anything that anyone has. India and China have as much right to our way of life as we do. Obviously it'll never work, but it ain't stopping voluntarily.

When every aspect of our lives is related to endless growth, there isn't much you can do. To stop now would be to kill billions. To not stop now, and wait for the wall of limits to finally hit(as it has done with every expanding civilization), it'll mean the death of even more billions.

Other than everyone on an individual level just slowing down, and not feeding the machine, there isn't a damn thing we can do to stop this train.

[The Traveler]

43. You make very important points

And one of the things enabling this kind of long range shipment of goods that can be grown or manufactured locally is relatively low transportation cost. One wonders at what point rising energy costs knock down that particular house of cards. I wonder how many tons of greenhouse gases per year to ship locally produceable goods around the world? Climate change imposes costs on the people, but those costs appear on no balance sheets. They just get dumped on the public. The common man winds up subsidizing the rich's migration of production to this year's cheapest labor market.

"We have been morphed into people who need EVERYTHING..ALL THE TIME..and at any price, apparently, because now that everything is available all the time, everything continues to cost a LOT all the time."

And the longer that goes on, the more difficult it will become to adapt the system.

"WE are the problem... all of us ..globablization is breaking our budgets and our spirits and our world".

The individual has been reduced to a unit of production and consumption, conditioned with the imperative to do as much of both as possible, and granted no recognition of inherent value by the upper class. The working class goes along with this, desperate for the newest wide screen TV or gizmo. ("I totally don't know what that is, but I want it.") We cannot go on like this forever.

[Jcrowley]

35. And Militarism

The U.S. war machine is the world's greatest polluter. As the U.S. Government engages in endless preemptive war, the Pentagon injects the poison of environmental terrorism all over the globe. The U.S. military generates nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute — 500,000 tons of toxics annually — more than the five leading chemical companies combined. The 2004 $401 BILLION DoD budget exempts the armed forces from the Endangered Species and Marine Mammals Protection Acts.

Every year the U.S. military uses enough energy to run all U.S. mass transit for 22 years.

An aircraft carrier uses 150,000 gallons of fuel per day.

A fighter jet consumes as much fuel per hour as the average U.S. motorist uses in two years.

[The Traveler]

36. Yeah.

Very good points. Though I am an advocate of a strong national defense, this aspect of the costs of maintaining excess capability needs to be understood. Would we need as many guns/airplanes/carriers/tanks/etc if our approach to the world was less hegemonistic?

[piedmont]

38. Yeah, the Soviet-bloc countries were SOOOOOOO low-emission!

:eyes:

It's not capitalism-- it's failure to understand the consequences of burning fossil fuels (early on) and refusal to see those consequences (later on). That refusal could be driven by greed for money in a capitalist system, or greed for power in a communist (or other) system.

[malaise]

40. Well even Bush is finaly acknowledging that

polar bears are under the threat of extinction. Things must be really bad. Oh yes they have been for ages and Bush has been in the state of Denial.

[Nikia]

44. I agree

I cringed when I heard that bush said that China needs to further embrace consumerism. I thought about how much they are suffering from pollution and other bad environmental effects already.
It also made me think about American consumerism already. It is good for the economy for people to be constantly buying disposable items rather than buying fewer things that last longer, but it is horrible for the environment. It is cheap to buy from overseas, but it wastes a lot of more energy and causes more pollution than producing closer to home.
Capitalism for now is the enemy. If there is no outside intervention, capitalism might do some good when their profits start suffering and consumers are dying off. Until then, we need to tackle these problems before the solutions become profitable.