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UN May Ban Blotting Out the Sun
Supervillains and Mr. Burns are among those to be most affected by the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity decision on space sunshades. Even though organizations like NASA have been looking into them as a possible way to slow climate change, the UN is expected to limit research into the technology or ban it outright. From the article: "The Convention may consider banning or limiting research into space sunshades. Some question their wisdom. A space sunshade would have a rapid effect on global warming and provide time to develop more permanent measures, they say. The technique has already received serious attention from NASA and other organizations. But others, such as the ETC group, an environmental and social advocacy group, fear simply blocking the sun is a bandage, meant to cover up the problem, and allow humans to continue using fossils fuels. Another fear is that geo-engineering, as techniques like this are called, could have unforeseen consequences on the weather, ecosystem and agriculture."
The whole fossil-fuel anthropogenic-warming movement allows developed nations to generate artificial demand for techniques and IP held primarily in developed nations. Undeveloped nations that are industrializing now don't get to drink from the same accelerative well of no-concern-for-externalities industrialization that the world's developed nations did, still having to funnel money (read: power, resources) to developed nations in order to keep trade open.
Undeveloped nations that choose to disregard UN formulated rules on carbon emissions may find themselves free-trade pariahs, left out of the global economy. Only nations already in positions of power, like China, could play outside of the intellectual-property-tax-for-mandatory-technologies treaty minefield if things go the UN's way.
Sure I'm aware that it would be hard to enact carbon-production limiting rules on a non-global scale, but the effects on international markets shouldn't be disregarded as likely (and obvious) motivations for policy decisions. Add in the pleasant regulatory generation of artificial demand to continue pulling on the leash of the economies of now-faltering western nations, and it's a win-win all around.
Poor people in poor countries stay relatively poor, and middle-class people in rich countries stay relatively poor.
Of course, I believe that anthropogenic CO2 has a warming effect. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Just as you'd have to be an idiot to take the wildly speculative high-end-of-the-margin-of-error conclusions of UN funded climate researchers at face value, or think that the planet's climate has been balancing on the head of a pin instead of sitting in a self-correcting trough. That the UN pushes so hard for their solution and so hard against honest research into techniques that would give us such fine-grained control over our climate reveals a great deal about their probable motivations.
In short, these guys* are crooks.
(These guys*: United States, France, the UK, and other developed UN member nations)
Yeah, that stupid green community, always looking for their own interest. Lets not do anything or follow any logic, since they don't care about us anyway. Why do the apologist capitalists always try and project their own defects onto the people that actually try and change the world for the better?
"Their primary concern is to cause humans to stop using fossil fuels."
FUD I tell you.
Even if that study is true, how does that show anything about Fox News? If anything they are more trusting because they haven't been lied to as much.
I'm unsure that dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good idea. WW2 was drawn out specifically because of a lot of fail on our military strategy; but it was over before the bomb. I'd like to say going into this that I don't blame the politicians outright; at the very least, I don't think Congress (don't hold me to that; one or two may have deviated, MOST of them probably didn't know shit) or Truman (I'm WELL more confident in this) had proper intelligence: I think either the military made bad judgments, or the defense department (today's NSA and CIA are branches of the DOD) thought it would be more interesting to blow shit up (science experiment).
By the end of WW2, we had famous "Kamikaze" bombers. Your history class fucked up here. Kamikaze bombers weren't status quo; Japan ran out of bombs and planes and fuel, and all it had left were planes with tanks of remaining fuel in them to crash into shit. Japanese bombers routinely made bomb runs across the pacific to Hawaii; they couldn't reach California. When they ran out of bombs, they went one way; but originally they came back.
What we were told in school is that Japanese fighters could make it to California (bullshit) but never back, so they always came, launched tons of bombs, then kamikaze. What actually happened was desperation in a nation that wanted to say they were sorry and go home; their dignity was bruised, but they were beaten and ready to talk peace. Hell, the original bombing run on Hawaii was supposed to be a negotiation session: the Japanese sent us a memo, but we didn't translate it fast enough. They wanted to DECLARE their intent so we'd either negotiate or at least move assets and (especially) people out of the way.
The biggest offense of WW2 was America's useless attacks on Japan. Japan hit a military base in Hawaii. Japan hit navy cruisers, aircraft carriers if they could (which was never), naval bases, any kind of military installation they could touch. They quickly realized this was stupid: the reason a warning was sent was because Japan wanted to negotiate under pressure of declared war, as the military advisors IN Japan knew that a war with America was a losing prospect considering they could only reach Hawaii.
They expected military retaliation after this; unfortunately, what they got was "Strategic Bombing" ... no, not just military installations, but CIVILIAN installations. We blew up schools, churches, houses... that's called terrorism today. It pissed them off, too, because attacking non-combatants is an honorless act of cowardice. They were already beaten and humiliated when we dropped the bombs; nuking the shit out of something offshore with no population would have been enough of a military experiment, and they would have crumbled at that.
We broke their back, then came in and told them they were barbarians. If we would have negotiated diplomatically and with honor, we could have talked them down. They were broken, they knew they were broken. All we had to do was tell them we could fight longer and harder than they could (they knew this), we had better resources (they knew this), and we had a really nasty weapon we didn't want to lose. Expressing a distaste for the pointless, honorless act of destroying entire cities of civilians and a desire to end the bloodshed and try to move onto peaceful grounds would have appealed to the Japanese in every way; instead we continued to attack them, treated them like animals, then devastated them until their sense of honor and dignity broke in the face of such emotional stress as having everyone they know and love wiped out.
America lost that war. We failed at diplomacy. We failed as human beings. We destroyed civilian human lives and then came in to mop up the remains of a culture of beauty and philosophy, a culture that still understood the difference between a "warrior" and a "soldier." Now Japan is a land of broken, childish merchants, of bright lights and unbelievably ridiculo
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Did you catch that?
In other words, even though this would provide a fix to the problem, we don't think it's a good idea because it conflicts with our ideology (that fossil-fuel burning is wrong). This is a classic example of why the Left is out of step with the country.
What's the problem here? Is it global warming (or climate change in general) or is it over-consumption, convenience, and basically living the luxurious life of an American. If the problem is the unpleasant effects of climate change, then lets fix that. But many on the left want to enact more broad social change/social justice/social whatever... When Tea Partiers (and others) complain vaguely about "hidden agendas", this is what they're referring to.
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