I recommend everybody and their family and friends rent, watch, or buy Al Gore’s presentation on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth”
He makes a clear argument in plain English and using high quality Keynote graphics and presentation software. He seems to have done it mostly from a MacBook Pro or PowerBook by the way. (Al Gore is on the Apple Board)
The real point is, though, that you should acknowledge there are steps you can take to reduce personal pollution, mainly by driving less and using more efficient appliances and lighting.
Overall, all of us need to spend some time reviewing what we can do to help the environment. The world population has increased so rapidly in the last 60 years. It has tripled. Al Gore tells us how to reduce our carbon emissions back to levels they were at years ago (in a good way).
The truth is often very inconvenient when, as was mentioned, so many humans are depending economically on the very thing which pollutes our planet.
E.g. oil and coal are very important for practically the whole planet, and not the least the US which has even gone to war because of it, so Al Gore and his friends are walking upstream and it will take a lot of time.
I don’t think it’s as much about us decreasing our consumption or even choosing what to consume but more (or entirely) a question of evolving technology which will save us.
You should watch it for a good laugh. It’s complete fiction.
The U.N. itself, a giant promoter of the “Man created global warming” hysteria, has contradicted Gore’s claims in the movie because their worst-case scenario has the oceans rising inches versus Gore’s ridiculous claim of 20 feet.
And we now know that carbon has risen in the past after temperatures rose, not before. So an increase in carbon is the result of warming, not the other way around.
North America was under ice thousands of years ago and warmed up and amazing glaciers melted. There weren’t any SUVs or coal power plants around to create that warming, so how do you explain it? We have seen four ice ages and four different warming periods in the last 1,600,000 years, which is a tiny blip in the history of the planet.
Greenland was once green, hence the name. The Vikings settled there. How do you explain it’s now covered with ice?
The Romans grew grapes in England 100 - 400 AD. How do you explain that? The climate is too cold now.
We had half of the warming in the 20th century happen before 1940, before greenhouse gasses that supposedly cause the warming existed (well, about 2/3rds created after 1940). How do you explain that? How does half the warming happen before the cause?
The fact is human beings have a negligible influence on the global temperature of the earth.
I’m all for common sense conservation like recycling, but that’s not what this is about. Global warming is a ruse to impose the radical lifestyles of a tiny minority onto the majority.
I have city employees telling me to not buy fruit that is out of season locally because that supports the fruit that is flown in, and flying food in is bad. Give me a break.
There is a town in MA that is not going to have lights up for Christmas (they say “holiday”, which holiday are the referring to?) because they want to save the environment. LOL.
I don’t have a toilet that can go a day without getting clogged because they don’t have enough water to be functional because of environmental extremism. I remember when residential toilets worked!
We have environmentalists creating huge forest fires in the USA because the extremists create laws that forbid citizens of clearing their own land of fire-starting brush and dead wood. That’s exactly what happened in Lake Tahoe and San Diego.
Al Gore is a narcissist. He’s not sincere. He’s no better than a Christian tele-evangelist.
And when is the USA going to start shipping Iraq’s oil back home? I keep reading comments about how the USA goes to war for oil and I haven’t seen a drop of it yet. If we are such an empire, where the hell is our plunder? Instead taking plunder and imposing taxes on those we conquer, the U.S. citizens are spending billions of their money to help build schools and hospitals all over the world. What the hell? You conquer, then take their stuff!
If I were president of the USA, this is what I’d do - I’d have a speech like JFK’s speech about going to the moon, but I’d make it about nuclear energy and becoming oil independent. I’d outline a plan to build 200 nuclear power plants in the USA, all the same design, to create enough electricity so that we can disassemble every coal power plant. Nuclear plants create ZERO air pollution. These nuclear power plants would also replace every natural gas plant. I’d then promote legislation to mandate zero emission automobiles under a certain weight. We have the technology today. There is no reason that every 4 and 6 cylinder sedan and coupe in the USA today isn’t electric. The natural gas could then be used to power trucks and busses, which it already does in many cities.
BTW, France has around 90 nuclear power plants, all the same design. It was a brilliant move on their part in the 80s, after the oil embargo of the 70s. Around 80% of their electricity comes from nuclear power.
No wind mill or solar panel is going to power the USA. If solar panels were an option, we’d have them on millions of houses today. We don’t.
Nuclear safety has been advanced a huge amount in the last 20 years.
The toxic waste a family of four creates in 20 years of nuclear power is the size of a cigarette lighter. But a single 500-megawatt coal-powered plant creates 315,000 tons of waste per year.
But the Democrats won’t do this because they are beholden to the wacky environmentalists who think nuclear is evil. There is no other power source that will replace oil and coal power plants. None.
Republicans won’t do it because they are beholden to the auto makers and oil companies.
It’s going to take the free market place. The Toyota Prius was a huge hit. I’m willing to bet that a $20K electric car that gets 200 miles per charge and can go 70 Mph would be a bigger hit. There is already one that gets 245 miles per charge and goes 135 miles per hour. It’s just too expensive.
