On 4/13/2011 23:34, Warp wrote:
>    I would even go so far as to say that the controversial thing is not
> what to do about it, but that many people actually oppose the rational
> thing to do. "We should stop polluting our environment and depleting
> natural resources." I don't even understand what rational reason there
> is to oppose that idea.

Not the idea. The implementation. It may be counter-intuitive to say "let 
some people keep polluting, because that will get them enough economic 
wealth in the short term that their population will demand cleaner air etc."

Sort of like saying "You should stop cutting down the rain forests" without 
recognizing that they're being cut down for farmland and people are starving 
who don't do this.

 > Is reducing pollution somehow a bad thing?

No. It's a question of how to reduce it. Let's say you even cut it down to 
where people are polluting only 30% as much as they are today. How many 
years until there's enough people in the world that we're making dangerous 
levels of pollution?

That's why people are arguing that each person should try to be "carbon 
neutral", when the obvious way to reduce pollution is to limit the number of 
children each person can have. You've seen how popular *that* idea is by how 
much they mock China for having done that successfully.

> if there was no climate change and everything was just and absolutely
> fine, we should *still* reduce pollution.

Well, sure, unless it means you, personally, starve, right?

>    Pollution causes harm to humans. That's a fact. The only controversial
> thing in this whole thing is the people who want to continue polluting
> the environment.

The controversy is what solution to pollution will cause less harm than the 
pollution itself. We could easily eliminate pollution by eliminating all 
vehicles and power plants, but the toll in human suffering of that approach 
outweighs the benefits.

I think there's little (honest) argument that the climate is changing, a 
little more argument over whether it's caused sufficiently by humans that 
reduction of human pollution will noticeably help (hard to measure 
definitively), and finally the most controversial is simply *what* needs to 
get done to actually fix the problem without causing undue suffering. Saying 
"put air scrubbers on your smokestacks and catalytic converters on your car 
exhaust" is one thing. Saying "shut down 80% of the power plants in your 
country and go back to 19th century technology" is something else.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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