Posted by
arandomguy on Wednesday, March 07, 2007 11:00:47 PM
At the EU summit currently in progress, leaders are pledging to sign an agreement that would cut greenhouse emissions by 20% within 13 years, by 2020. This would apparently show Europe's commitment to stopping global warming, which is apparently caused by my SUV. There is a fight about it of course - some countries don't want the resolution to be binding, and there are several odd conditions applied as well.
Al Gore was over there today, explaining that the EU has an "absolutely critical leadership role to play." Gore also said that, "I'm trying to get my country to change its policies but in the meantime the
European Union is absolutely key to helping the world make the changes it must."
Now, if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and it doesn't effect my wallet by doing so, then I say go for it. You can do whatever you want. If the EU wants to press these kinds of hardships on its citizens, then it can very well go ahead and do so (though I think it's foolish). When these ideas begin to affect my pocketbook however, that is when I begin to get extremely upset.
Furthermore, this idea that global warming is caused by carbon emissions has some gaping holes, and some things I feel it ignores. I'm not a trained scientist, and I'm certainly no expert in weather patterns or climatology. Yet I do have what I consider to be a good degree of logic and common sense, and through that I have deduced the following.
1) Either the earth is warming, or it is not. If it is not, then we have no problem. Let's assume, for the sake of argument that it is.
2) Something must be causing that warming. The possibilities I've heard are A) cycles, or B) Carbon emissions. The third, which I feel is over looked I shall postulate as #3.
3) There is a big, gigantic, super humongous, huge, flaming, super-heated, hot, ball of gas not far from our location. Said big, gigantic, super humongous, huge, flaming, super-heated, hot, ball of gas is our heat source. Thus it follows that when our heat source goes up or down, the earth which depends on this ball of gas, shall experience temperature fluctuations.
I'm not a scientist, but that seems much more logical. Especially when you consider the following.
4) There was an ice age long before SUV's.
5) Said age ended long before there were SUV's.
6) After Carbon emissions surged in the 1940's, 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's, when people drove big cars with leaded gasoline that just spit crap into the atmosphere, the global temperature actually went down. Only now is it starting to rise, after we have taken measures to cut back our carbon emissions from those of the 1950's levels.
7) If you take steps to make something better, that thing should not get worse.
So I don't really understand how carbon emissions are destroying our environment. I'm not sure anything is destroying our environment, but if something is, we should stop trying to kick people out of their cars, and start figuring out solutions to the problem.