So the 500 page massive global warming bill, which nobody thought would actually get passed, and even if by some large-scale lapse of judgment did get passed, Bush would veto, got killed today. Proponents argued that it was important to codify their religious beliefs into US law so as to force them upon the rest of American. Opponents pointed out that the bill would do nothing to help man-made global warming even if it was a real problem, and would just export money and jobs out of the US. Both sides claimed victory, of course, with proponents expecting to re-launch another version of the bill when they have more believers in Congress, and a more liberal president.
So far business as usual. However, one thing I found interesting was that one of the most accurate and insightful comments about the garbage legislation came not from a Republican, but from a moderate Democrat who voted against it. The Democrat, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, commented that the end-result of the bill would be to export pollution and US jobs. If he thought about it a bit more, he might have added "paid for by US businesses, kinda like forcing the rest of your industrial base to dig their own graves before jumping in."
Man, you know your liberal legislation is bad for the country when even the Democrats can't stomach the obvious long-term negatives. Republicans, of course, ridiculed the bill, but were in turn ridiculed by the liberal media to marginalize their concerns as partisan. Meanwhile, both parties successfully continued to ignore the 800lb gorillas of massive debt, almost extinct industrial infrastructure, job losses, and inflation, not to mention the leveraged derivatives still off the books of various financial institutions totaling well over the entire national debt, and the complete inability to reduce systemic risk and/or prevent systemic collapse. Nice job guys, good to see it's business as usual, no matter what happens to normal people.
Friday, June 6, 2008
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I am not knowledgeable about the global warming bill. According to your post, this bill would not have been a good way to deal with. So nothing's getting done. Is that a good thing? The costs of global climate change could be higher than the other things you mention.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's good that an ineffective bill was defeated. But what about the costs of dealing with environmental changes in the distant future?
If you look at my historical posts, you'll note that I'm not really a believer in "man-made global warming." This is primarily because of the complete lack of evidence showing that global warming is man-made, but also a little because of the small amount of evidence showing that it isn't man-made.
ReplyDeleteAs such, efforts to deal with climate change should be accurately termed "terraforming" (as opposed to environmental preservation), since if global warming is a natural phenomenon, our attempts to prevent it are active environmental manipulation. Now, if it were me in charge, I'd probably think long and hard before actively messing with the environment, not pass knee-jerk legislation to do whatever some non-scientific religious group thinks we should do... wouldn't you?