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Should Science Be King In Politics?
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
Surely this subject will instil nothing but the most civil, logical, and objective debates. After all most debates about climate change somehow morph into a left versus right debate, and it's that transition that's really hard. But now we can have the debate in parallel to each other. Throw in the libertarians, and I'm positive that we will all get through this one with not a swear in sight.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Start a "The Scientific Party" and let the democratic process do it's work. If there's a demand for such thing, it will be.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
This, and the fact that politicians talk stuff that people understand. Make people learn science, politicians will have to.
Simple, really. Not realistic, but simple.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The world is run on emotion as much as logic. Anyone that thinks logic can be king either has never been married, or is rapidly headed towards a divorce...
The two solutions that are in line with both past experience and economic theory are:
(A) cap-and-trade, where the government sells a limited number of pollution permits, allows the buyers of those permits to trade them, and then sends inspectors (funded by the proceeds of the original sale) to ensure that nobody goes over the number of permits they have. This was successfully used to reduce SO2 emissions back in the 1980's and 1990's.
(B) A CO2 tax, where the more you pollute the more you're taxed. This gives companies a financial incentive to reduce their emissions, and means that those that do reduce their CO2 emissions aren't at a competitive disadvantage from those that don't. Again, inspectors are needed (funded by the tax) to ensure that nobody cheats.
Both of these basically rely on putting a price on pollution, and then making sure nobody cheats on paying that price. It's enforced by the government because nobody else can - nobody owns the country's air, and nobody reasonably could.
I am officially gone from
thats a bigger belief and wishful thinking than anything else.
Read radical news here
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
While I can see many will knee-jerk themselves into an emphatic "YES" to scientific superiority in government, there should still be a place for philosophy and morality in politics as well. And in some cases, philosophy should trump science.
When you might ask? How about in terms of macroeconomics? It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again. Yet it goes against our values to not take care of our most vulnerable who are unable to care for themselves.
It also makes little scientific sense to protect individual rights to the extent that we do. My friends over in Europe and Asia often point out that the banning of hate speech has a demonstrable effect on reducing bigotry. Yet our non-scientific culture values free speech.
So, science should play a big role in determining the fundamental facts of a political discussion, but after that it is all about values and philosophy.
from the full article: " 'If there is a problem, surely there’s some brainiac who will invent a solution.' Call it the faithful’s faith in the faithless."
so true.
Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
We base policies on science, not sentiment, we insist on people being accountable for their actions, and we maintain that markets, not mandates, are the path to prosperity.
If you based your policies on science, then why isn't it a completely open process? Anonymize the names (if any) and release the numbers (especially who pays what in taxes from which areas) behind your policy making. Of course you don't and on top of that, paltry though it may be, we have to wait until Obama to get that ball started rolling.
Oh, yeah, accountable of their actions? Yeah, you rich bastards love to hold each other accountable for your actions -- especially your financiers.
You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority.
Oh, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. You're not really a conservative. You're like Zell Miller who is a Democrat only by label and paperwork.
Your proposal, though noble, is a fool's errand. I believe this has been tackled before and the real problem is that you can always find more and more ties to pollution or non-renewable resources being used to make your product and get it to the consumer and then even after that you have the whole usage of it followed by proper disposal and returning the resources. That cheap Dell computer your secretary is playing Bejeweled on? Yeah, that's a nightmare.
What if we attached all of the costs -- especially the hidden costs -- to all fuels?
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board. For now you're basically scratching the surface of a very deep and complicated rabbit hole that is hard to trace backward for many reasons. Some of them supply line problems, some of them scientific problems, some of them statistical problems and some even privacy problems for the users.
Companies already try to regulate themselves by paying a so called 'carbon tax' by being 'carbon neutral' or by planting just an assload of trees so they can say X trees for Y products sold. But you know, that's all really neither exact nor assuredly truly undoing all that is done in their dealings. And while they might tell the public one thing, I don't think they believe it.
Could someone please enumerate every true cost of getting one gallon of gasoline into my car tank? What about what happens as I use it? What about what happens after I've used it?
And the best part is that at some point, as you noted, loss of life is going to be on that list of true costs. Whether you're buying an Apple iPhone that some worker committed suicide while making at the Foxconn plant or BP's little explosion killing 11 oil well workers, you're going to have to say at some point that 1 human life = X million dollars in cost. And that makes people really uncomfortable. It gets even more uncomfortable when whoever deciding that cost considers nationality in influencing that ratio.
My work here is dung.
Less 'learn science' than 'learn the scientific method' and its application to everyday life. Or just critical thinking in general.
Too many people stop learning at the end of high school/university. If they just memorize some state of the art science related facts at that time our situation will not likely improve as new facts are discovered.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Examples
Bad: There is plenty of evidence to support this (*goes on to show evidence)
Good: Nope that is wrong!
Bad: Here is the explanation for why this is a problem
Good: God wants it this way
Valid science's biggest weakness in politics, is a shortage of 5 second soundbites that work. (and before you say less then 1% of voters know what E=MC squared means.)
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You clearly don't live in the United States. A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president, and damn near essential for any other federal or high-level state elective office.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The problems are many though.
Conservatism is usually an expression of:
1. Tradition-keeping
2. Protection of the already powerful
3. Fiercely challenging new ideas
However conservatism changes with its constituents, and across different nations, this core of conservatism tends to be in direct opposition to the changes brought about by science.
What support of science in conservative circles usually means is: Science has made us strong, we should support what science has done to make us strong, but oppose anything else it may do.
So yes, we may see some support for an HPV vaccine with more conservatives if this view becomes more common, and I hope it does - but the interests of the already powerful is still what matters, not wherever the scientific method leads.
Ryan Fenton
"former ... representative Bob Inglis"
I've heard a lot of politicians talking sense, but they are always *former* office holders.
No human with skin in the game can tell the truth (the whole truth). It is against nature.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Bob Inglis was my (republican) congressman until the tea-partiers ran him out on a rail during the primaries. He was accused of not being sufficiently conservative. On fiscal and economic policy he was consistently conservative, but not so much on social issues. In other words, he is pretty much a Liberterian, and has not shifted his positions since leaving office. I do not know him personally, but he appears to be a thoughtful, principled man.
He was originally elected in the Clinton era, promised to limit himself to two terms, and kept that promise. He was succeeded by Jim DeMint, and was persuaded to return to congress when DeMint was elected as a senator.
Republicans are often accused of being dismissive of science and beholden to religion. I agree with this view. However, from my point of view as a non-religious person, the Democrats are the same, but in different ways. They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science. Environmentalism should be labeled a religion and treated as such. Also, Democrats propound economic theories of "fairness" which demonstrably lead to worse outcomes for the people they claim to represent. Remember, Republicans are no better.
For myself, I believe global warming is happening, but I am unconcerned about the consequences. So I am more worried about the response to global warming, than I am about the warming itself.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
I read, "I'll limit government agencies to only be able to see corporate shell games and call it consumer protection".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
No, not quite; It would get very few things done... nearly all of them the RIGHT things. Government is meant only to be the collective tool belt, replete with powers of leverage and enforcement, wielded by the citizenry for the benefit of the citizenry. One isn't meant to play with tools, nor use them any more often than any give job calls for.
In order to make any moral decision at all, you need to know the consequences of those decisions. People who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so. (The latter being obviously problematic, because most people don't know about their ignorance or delude themselves about their knowledge - and there is a selection bias in politics that favors those who are overconfident about their knowledge and judgment.)
Imaging a simple moral dilemma. Choice A: Ten people will die. Choice B: 5 people will die.
The decision is simple - you take B.
The problem? Well, you're wrong. Choice B was based on a popular myth that three of the people involved would not be in any danger - but actually they would die. B would cause the death of 8 people. Choice A on the other hand has only been represented by the media as being extremely dangerous, but a sober scientific assessment would have led you to the conclusion, that only 2 people will die.
Yes, there can be science - even successful science - without moral judgment. Which is a problem and it is highly visible. But there can be no true moral judgment without science. Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
Unfortunately, pomp and circumstance can easily hide a lack of knowledge about the consequences of decisions made by those claiming (or claimed) to be moral authorities. That includes, unfortunately, the whole debate of climate science that usually sees a lot of discussions among people who hold a claim to moral authority but don't know the least bit about the science. Instead, they rely on biased reporting of the science to make and justify their "moral" decisions.
More likely what will happen is the government will manipulate the "science" to its own ends. We have already seen this happen. Making "science" the be-all end-all will just make it worse.
I agree that we should tax the externalities of fossil energy use directly, rather than use cap and trade to the same ends. Cap and trade was originally a Republican idea, since it involves a market mechanism (the "trade" part), rather than being a pure government program (as a tax is). But a carbon tax is favored by James Hansen (the NASA climate scientist much hated by Fox), and it's the most direct route to the result.
But the representative's claim that not raising the minimum wage is favored by science or the facts is nonsense. It's wishful thinking that keeping wages down results in more jobs. We're in an America now where wages have been broadly suppressed for 30 years - over which median income has been nearly flat while per-capita GDP has doubled, with almost the entire gains going to the super-rich. So where are the jobs? On the scientific side, comparisons of similar regions with different minimum wages, and before-and-after comparisons of places where minimum wages have been raised, find absolutely no support for the claim that there will be higher unemployment where minimum wages are higher. None. The evidence, while not conclusive, leans the other way. It certainly isn't "science" then to be against raising minimum wages. It's just what the people who would rather stiff their workers on wages indulge in as wishful thinking. They want it to be true. And if your logic is simple minded, it will seem as if it should be. It's not.
For one thing, when more people are paid more, the can spend more, which supports greater employment all around. That logic is perhaps too complex for the Republican mind, because it's a second-order effect - it depends on the whole local economic ecosystem's health, rather than the immediate profit to the firm that just hired a worker at a low minimum wage. But complex systems are like that - you get effects out of them that aren't predicted from studying their parts in isolation. The Republican argument against a higher minimum wage follows exclusively from studying a part in isolation.
So do the Republican arguments against moving to forms of energy production without such dire "externalities." So yes, price in the cost of the externalities with taxes (even though there's no exact math capable of application in setting those taxes), lower the income tax, and capitalism will find a way. Republicans generally doubt that capitalism is smart enough to find a way unless the current economic landscape is kept in stasis. They call this "lessening uncertainty." The modern "capitalist" Republican is as addicted to stasis as the leaders of the old Soviet Empire. Heaven forfend America should ever again have to embrace progress and change. How could we compete in such a landscape, where oil and coal companies don't rule us forever?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Representative Inglis became former representative Inglis when he lost in the GOP primary in 2010 to run for re-election. That is what political parties tend to do to people who think on their own...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science.
Agree with the majority of what you wrote, although that one line is horribly wrong.
Hang out with a geologist, like my former roommate, and even if you don't talk geology all the time, simply having to think about the topic will educate you.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related. The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum. Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that. Doesn't mean it won't be bad for the fools who didn't plan for it, but it does mean its (unfortunately) pocket change compared to expected geologic evolution.
Environmental catastrophe always has, and always will, occur. The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better". Nope, its still gonna suck, its just if we torture ourselves and destroy civilization before hand, we can make it worse and increase the total suffering of humanity, if we try really hard to implement hard core environmentalist agenda.
Part of it is what used to pass for environmentalism has become common sense. Don't dump industrial waste into your drinking water is common sense, not "modern environmentalism". All thats left of environmentalism is the watermelon types, green on outside, red on inside.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Breeding shall now be restricted to once every seven years. For some of us this will mean less mating. For some of us it will be much much more.
Calling it "basic logic" implies that at some point in time most people had it. But that is false - they never did.
The soundbite is not the fault of politics per se. It's the fault of a worthless news media that fragments every story into bite sized chunks so that they can get back to commercials as quickly as possible. Unless it's worthless celebrity news or even sports, then the entire segment is a commercial and can run as long as needed.
Have you ever read celeb magazines? Nothing is longer than 100 words. This isn't the fault of news media, it's the fault of human nature. We live in a world of constant information and our brains can't process it all. 5 second sound bites are all that stick in the flood of information. Can you blame news media for not wanting to write/broadcast things that 98% of the population won't remember or won't even bother looking at?
There is no shortage of 5 second soundbites that work, they just happen to hand out a straw man to your opponents on a silver platter. For instance: "WE WILL ALL DIE" works to get people to care about climate change. Of course, that statement is false and ridiculous, but nuance in a statement will never fly against the lack thereof. Reasonable people cannot be heard by the masses unless they resort to the same type of rhetoric as their opponents, in which case they cease to be reasonable, but start being effective. Pretty unfortunate, really :(
We're not talking about "politics", we're talking about governing.
It's not just the political system that's broken, it's us. Precious few citizens of any country except maybe Finland and a handful of others actually understand how their society works.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation. As if running a business had anything in common with running a government except they are both organizations. If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case. In fact, I'd say that "business experience" or "experience" in general (other than experience dealing with people) is highly overrated. Right now, there's going to be only one person running for president in 2012 that actually has on-the-job experience as president of the US. Does that make him automatically the best person for the job? Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
I think the notion (mentioned by someone else in these comments) that understanding "science" in the most basic sense of the word, as a system of understanding that things have explanations and effects have causes would be extremely important in government. Certainly more important than the current notion, that the guy who has the most money gets to rule. I would have thought we were disabused of that notion a few centuries ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related.
I strongly disagree. It's like history.
"History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the kings' bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly."
-- J. H. Fabre
> we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls
Actually voter fraud is quite rare. There's been something like a couple dozen cases in the last decade or two, and most of those were just mistakes (eg: people voting in the wrong precinct). Election fraud, on the other hand, is a real reason for concern. With recent revelations on the weakness of electronic voting machines, that seems a far greater hazard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
We had 8 years of a science-and-fact-loving conservative government, after which we had a doubled national debt, two wars, an economic crisis second only to the Great Depression, the demonizing of evolution, and oh yeah, a new attitude in the country that climate change was questionable and that it was probably the scientists that were to blame. Please excuse me if I remain skeptical that a single former representative is going to change much.
There is a reason why Mr. Inglis is a "former" Representative - his commie ideas about actually believing the scientists were clearly not well received by his former constituency.
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
This gets back to the myth of US politics. The traditional modern Republican party isn't about conservative values; it's about ruling for the benefit of the richest fraction of a percent of the population. If you look at what Republicans actually *do* instead of listening to what they say, it becomes glaringly obvious that their political philosophy is that the proper role of government is to ensure that the rich get richer faster than they would without having a government around to help.
The problem for that political philosophy is that there aren't enough rich people to win enough elections to rule a republic. So they have to convince half the population to vote against their own best interests. That's where "conservative" comes in. Appeal to White bigots and sanitize it by calling it "the Southern Strategy". Throw an occasional bone to the religious right so they'll vote for your politicians. Pretend there's some scientific doubt about evolution. Stir up Anglo-Saxon bigots and call it "Immigration Reform" - historians will someday call it the Southwestern Strategy.
Mr. Inglis is just objecting to the current race to the bottom. When I wrote "traditional modern Republican party", that was to distinguish the old guard from the nutters they've been suckering into voting for them for at least 50 years, but who are now taking over the asylum. You reap what you sow, kind of thing. But lots of "traditional modern Republicans" don't like what they're reaping. A lot of those nutters don't think ruling for the rich is their top priority.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As much as I love science, it simply cannot be king, for several reasons. I used to think Science may one day replace several branches of philosophy, but I now realize this can never be the case.
Firstly there is the ethical consideration. Science describes reality as it is, it can inform decisions, but it cant tell us how the world Ought to be (normative ethics). Science can describe human ethical decision making, and suggest improvements, but it can't 'objectively' value them.
Secondly there is the epistemological limitation. The scientific method can predict and inform us of many things, but many of the most relevent systems with regard to politics (Social, Economic, Biological, Ecological, Intellectual sytems for example) are highly complex. I would not go so far as to argue that science cannot say anything about them, but when there is no room to repeat experiments on this scale, its likely scientists will have no concesus on many such issues. Additionally, the complexity of such systems makes prediction pretty much impossible, except maybe for very short time scales. There is something to be said about epistemic arrugance when we repeatedly attempt to predict numbers as 'simple' as GDP and cannot do so.
Both empirical measurement and theoretical decision making are extreemly difficult in this field, although they are improving. A big issue is model robustness (which is hard to achieve in complex systems). In empirical measurement, the statistics are not always so obvious (power law distributions are extreemly sensitive to sampling error).
Thirdly are practical issues which need to be worked out. What is considered an accepted scientific result? Assuming it is an accepted result, what do we do about it? Who decides? What about transparency? Do people even want this to happen?
In the end of the day WE are king, and science is our servent and advisor. When we start to think its the other way around, we have not only lost our freedom but also real critical thinking, which streches far beyond science and can doubt science itself.
Your post reminded me of a quote from Sagan's book "Demon Haunted World (Subtitled: Science as a candle in the dark)";
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United State is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You can't have scientists running policy on global warming. If the world is warming, they'll propose anything scientifically possible to do something about it.
But how about someone who will tell you the economic impact of those actions? How about someone who will tell you the social impact of those actions? How about protecting freedom while implementing the actions?
Scientists can't answer that.
You mean logical fallacies or rhetorical fallacies.
e.g. Affirming the consequent == logical fallacy. Argument ad Personam == rhetorical fallacy.
Generally, logical fallacies are actually worth learning, while a focus on rhetorical fallacies tends to lead to a duel of "who is arguing wrong."
Logical fallacies are in "basic logic" rhetorical fallacies are part of "critical thinking."
Remember: When you wind up fighting about process, the status quo wins.
-GiH
The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum.
Obviously you don't live anywhere near a coast. The sea level rising a couple feet at the coastal city nearest to me, means probably 5,000 or more people whose homes have a foot of water in them. It also means a major re-planning and rebuild of a lot of the dock structures for the shipping port, and re-planning/rebuild of many of the structures at the local marina and launch docks for recreational boating. It also means a major change in coastal erosion patterns, wildlife, and navigability for the surrounding area due to the creation of highly shallow flat areas that are nevertheless waterlogged / "under water."
Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that.
Volcanic eruptions suck. Earthquakes suck. Tsunami suck. On the other hand, we can't prevent those - best we can do is improve our early warning systems. We CAN mitigate the damage we do to the environment, however.
The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better".
Oh for the love of... sigh. With this one paragraph you proved how completely fucking insane you are, because nobody I know who is an "environmentalist" has ever proposed such a thing. The closest to come has actually been the racist shitheads of the local Republican Party, who propose enforced limits (either economic penalty-based or forced-sterilization-if-on-government-assistance) on lower income people having babies (while at the same time denying this is anything like China's "one child policy", where only the ultra-rich are allowed to have an extra kid or two) with the express purpose of limiting the growing population of hispanics and blacks.
Your comment indicates that the lack of logic and common sense is one sided. "We have to pass the bill to see what's in the bill"? That's a gem of common sense for certain.
If we simultaneously eliminated all subsidies, we'd unleash real competition among all fuels. Markets would powerfully deliver solutions.
Have gnu, will travel.
Common sense says you don't mess with a production system with sweeping changes that could have unintended consequences. You do one change at a time, verify the change works as expected, and then move to the next one. "Agreeing with 80% of what's there" doesn't mean that the implementation is the right one. A piece of anecdotal evidence for this one specific case: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/new-study-underlines-unfulfilled-promises-of-health-care-bill/
America needs a tax on ALL GOODS, imported and local produced. It should be on CO2 emissions from where the final and largest sub-component come from. It should be a % of a total tax. If your item comes from a low or none CO2 emission nation/state, then you have no real tax. If it comes from a high, then you get most of the tax.
One of the right ways to do this, is to make it be CO2 PER SQ KM of land. Not per capita. Per capita does not take into account a number of issues (economic output, ag, etc). Neither does sq km, but it comes closer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... into the ground.
I plan to live forever. Or die trying...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Your implication is the his lack of experience led to the adoption of policies that you don't agree with. That's hardly a condemnation of his ability to be president. Overall, his approval ratings are far better the GWB's at the end of his second term - a guy who at that point had plenty of executive experience.
Obama also had no military experience and little foreign policy experience, yet even most conservatives think that he is doing well on the "war on terror."
I agree with your last point, but experience is overrated in a presidential candidate. They bring a team with them and their ability to succeed in a primary and federal election is a reasonable proof of basic competence. Now, if a candidate has experience running a large organization and seriously screwed it up, that's another issue.
"They have displayed an unabashed tendency not only to lie, but to omit important truths and to cover up after they've been caught lying."
You understand you just described all of the media, right?
On the contrary, Republicans (in particular) have been looking for it for a long time. But even so, they have not been able to come up with much evidence of it.
How hard do you REALLY think they are looking? Keep in mind that if they look to hard, they might find their own. There were reports from the 2008 primaries of Ron Paul get zero votes out of specific precincts. The people that voted for him protested loudly, and the voting authorities said, "Oh, we must have missed those." Then there was all sorts of shenanigans going on with the recounts around the Alaskan senatorial seat.
The Republicans are looking hard for fraud.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. "
The GOP has been at the forefront of making those issues into issues of denial and wishful thinking. Please.
That's because the GOP must take a populist approach to bring out the FOX News voting block. Without it they wouldn't be able to put their people in office.
I can understand why Mr. Inglis would be frustrated by the "populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking", but surprised that he didn't pause to ask himself how his party would ever win an election without it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade