Properly funding Amtrak is defunding it's money losing routes and extracting the profits from the NE into the general fund.
Your anti-Amtrak bias is showing. If you did defund Amtrak and let it close routes, wouldn't it need the profits from the NE to use for operating the NE?
Give me a legitimate argument why we should be subsidizing Amtrak's daily operating expenses. Because of Congressional interference and failure to follow the 1997 law we have a situation where taxpayers are paying up to half the cost of a ticket for those almost 1 million riders who ride the northeast corridor on a daily basis.
Well, on 9/11, when all planes were grounded, Amtrak looked pretty good. Could the infrastructure in the NE handle an extra 1M commuters? 30% of the bridges there are already classified as sub standard and past their useful life. If the infrastructure can't even be maintained for current levels of use, how will they fare with increased use?
Besides, Amtrak is like the post office, it is a private entity that is extremely regulated by the government. It might make great business sense to stop Saturday delivery for the post office or for Amtrak to cut routes, but they aren't allowed to do so. It's also ironic that most major cities will pay more to build a stadium for a professional team than Amtrak gets in its government subsidy.
Again, why single out passenger trains? Why not all manner of transportation, include air? There is far more spent subsidizing these other modes of transportation than Amtrak gets. There is a reason why every other western country subsidizes rail (and air) transportation and at a far greater level than the US -- it's called the common good.
Silver is just as worthless in an environment where nobody has anything. If things really go to hell, it'll be whomever has water/shelter/food, so don't bother hoarding precious metals as they won't be so precious if you can't get clean water.
On a small scale, you are correct. Simple bartering for goods and services works well. Unfortunately it doesn't scale up and some common means of exchange is always developed, whether it be silver, gold, sea shells or even bitcoins.
Real Estate will always be worth something. Even if we decide that precious metals are worthless (maybe someone invents a Star Trek replicator), land will always have value. At the very least you can farm it and feed yourself and your family.
It may always be worth something, but not necessarily anything close to what you paid for it. As for land always having its value, tell that to the people in Centralia, PA or Times Beach.
Almost nobody uses trains outside the Northeast and along the West Coast. In those areas, the trains are very heavily used, and used by all walks of life. The reason why Amtrak looses money each year is because they are forced to support the "fly-over" states which have little ridership.
Those states you refer too defer that cost. Also, the reason Amtrak is forced to support the "fly-over" states is because it is cheaper than building airports and providing air service.
And before somebody says, people choose to live there, that's their problem (or something to the effect), one could turn that around and tell the people of the northeast to grow their own food and drill their own oil because they choose to live there, too.
I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?
Here's just one article that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.
Here's another article highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.
Why should you subsidize truckers and airports? It costs $3M to build 1 mile of interstate. Sure it looks nice on the back of all those semis that they pay $6,000 in fuel taxes. Too, bad, they don't tell you the damage they do to the pavement is far greater than that. But, of course, if we didn't subsidize the trucking industry and made them pay the real cost of transporting goods, then prices would go up and you, the taxpayer would still be paying for it, plus a profit percentage on top of it.
Why focus on passenger rail as the problem. Most airports are heavily subsidize in the US. Yes, carriers pay gate fees, but those fees do not cover the true cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure.
Face it, Amtrak, highways, airports, etc. are subsidized by the taxpayer because they ultimately benefit the taxpayer.
Why the FUCK are my tax dollars going to support this idiot organization? Why the FUCK are my tax dollars being wasted on a train service that almost no one uses? If some tiny number of dumbasses cannot afford a car or refuse to just because they prefer to eat granola and hug trees, then let them PAY FOR IT THEMSELVES.
Of course, the incompetent democrat in the white houseopposes all common sense, but at least there is one party working for taxpayers instead of against us.
Instead of defunding Amtrak, maybe it's time to properly fund Amtrak. You seem worried about your tax dollars, but don't seem to mind the billions of them spent on subsidizing air travel and highways and even waterway traffic. What is really lacking in the US is a cohesive transportation policy.
But, hey, it's easier to shout "Defund Amtrak" then it is to actually fix the infrastructure and transportation problems in this country.
What do you expect them to say? But really, the PTC system wasn't turned off for shits and grins. It was still being installed and waiting final calibration and certification. Besides the NTSB is still trying to explain the sudden acceleration (twice) as the train approached the curve. One thought is a software glitch with the onboard system. If that is shown to be the case, then PTC wouldn't make much of a difference.
Heroin was an over the counter cough rememdy for most of this country's history. Most of the people who used it did not become addicted to it. Addiction is a biochemical disorder in the production or action of various hormones, not a physical property of chemicals.
Heroin was "invented" in the late 1800s as a less addictive alternative to morphine. By 1920 it was strictly regulated as a response to the 200,000 heroin addicts in the US. As such, heroin was readily available for maybe 50 years in the US and it was indeed addictive, which is what caused congress to act with the Dangerous Drug Act.
Addiction is not a biochemical disorder. It is a biochemical process. Opiates, by their very nature, trigger responses in the brain that lead to addiction. It does not matter that some people can become addicted more readily than others. Heroin was an attempt to alter the physical property of morphine to make it less addictive. It worked, heroin IS less addictive than morphine, but it is still easy to become addicted to it. This is not because of a biochemical disorder in the brain, but because of the very way our brains work.
One's parents don't have to use heroin for their offspring to develop an addiction to it.
No, but your parents still need to pass the genes that help you enjoy heroin and get addicted to it. Some of the people with those genes would try heroin, and if they got addicted and didn't have children they wouldn't pass those genes on. Over the long run, the population would genetically drift towards having less heroin-addictive genes.
Except that many things are addictive without a genetic predisposition. So even if all of the people with some sort of addiction never bred again, there would still be addictions. Most addictions do not have a genetic trait as much as we want to be able to say it's not our fault.
There are approximately 254.4M registered vehicles in the US and of those about 6M are in an accident each year. That equates to 2.4% of the registered vehicles are in some sort of accident. From the AP report, 4 out of 48 autonomous vehicles were in an accident which equates to 8.3%. Based on the information presented, autonomous vehicles are 3.5 times more likely to be in an accident than non-autonomous ones.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. -- unknown, but known not to be Mark Twain
being that many of them won't pass on their genes, nature will take care of it
No, it won't. Regardless of whether somebody addicted to porn or video passes on their genes, future young men can still develop the addiction. One's parents don't have to use heroin for their offspring to develop an addiction to it.
And, en-route, invented electronic engine management, catalytic converters and everything else required to meet those targets, which is now all compulsory equipment, standard and included on all cars. Not a bad thing at all.
If you're worried about it, test old cars regularly and take them off the road. If you don't, then you're not worried about it.
Cars, in locales that have emission testing, are only required to meet the emission requirements in place for the year manufactured. This is a good thing, because otherwise, emission standards could be tightened and everybody would be forced to buy a new car. Since older cars have a finite life, the problem of poorly running old cars will eventually resolve itself. When that occurs, the studies will show that overpowered high horse-powered cars and SUVs are the major polluters. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a desire to limit those.
If the car was too much of a POS, you couldn't get the credit.
So all they did was take a bunch of relatively clean cars off the road, but left the dirty ones.
Cash for clunkers wasn't about pollution. It was about bailing out auto companies. Both initially by the government subsidizing the purchase and later by removing late model vehicles from the used car market causing used cars to increase in price to a point where new cars were seen as an attractive option.
Ironically, the upper middle class would have purchased new vehicles anyway, but the lower middle class and the poor were priced out of the "good" used car market and had to stick with what they had or replace it with somebody else's clunker.
Cash for clunkers is a prime example of unintended consequences of a government program when quick fixes are implemented without looking at the long term effect.
And if capitalism decrees that workers older than 40 should not be allowed to work any longer, we should salute capitalism because it has achieved optimum performance? Capitalism does a lot of things well, but it does a lot of things poorly as well. It underlies uninsurance companies cherry picking only healthy people, leaving government to pick up the tab on the uninsured and sick leftovers. Them includes many of those over 40 which no longer have jobs.
Actually, capitalism is blind to age, it is about supply and demand. On the other hand the actual managers involved in the decisions have their own bias and prejudice. Capitalism may cause many problems, but ageism isn't one of them.
If you can afford tuition of $28,750/yr for elementary school, then you don't need a charity to subsidize the cost for you. This is nothing more than the 1% helping the other 1%. The promise of trickle down is merely a teaser for the other 99%.
Because there is a pattern, and the pattern is that the peaceful "moderates" do not control and exclude the violent "extremists".
Condemning 1.6B Muslims, because they can't reign in a some violent Muslims seems a bit extreme. In the US, it is innocent until proven guilty. Go after the extremists, no problem, but leave the innocent alone.
Nobody said that Muslims should get special treatment, but then again, it sounds like that is what you are proposing. We don't single out all Christians because Timothy McVey was one or the Westboro Baptist Church are. So, why should we single out all Muslims because of the actions of a few? If if there were a million Muslims who were extremists, that is.06% of the estimated total Muslim population in the world.
As for other religious groups shooting or killing others because of religious mockery, one only has to go back a few decades to Ireland or Croatia to see exactly that. As for atheists doing so, one only has to look at China and the former Soviet Union.
Should we condemn all Chinese because of the actions of small percentage? No, of course not. So, why should we condemn all Muslims for the actions of a small percentage? It seems like doing so is the very different treatment you are complaining about.
There are something like 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Many in countries that that value free speech. Maybe what you meant to say was that terrorist groups like ISIS or Al Qeda are incompatible with a society based on free speech. Of course that ignores the PM who wants to ban the Quran, so maybe society is not really based on free speech but acceptable speech, instead. Of course, then who is to decide what is acceptable or not?
However, it is no more accurate to use ISIS as the definition of Islam than it is to use Quakers as the definition of Christianity.
As for poking them to show who loves freedom and who does not, that sounds more like bullying versus exercising freedom.
...is there an end in sight to the madness associated with the representation of this religious figure?
I was taught that a wounded animal is more dangerous than one that is not. There are people who are greatly offended (wounded) by the mockery of their strongly held beliefs. Why keep poking them with a stick and acting surprised when they strike back?
Of course, even poked, that doesn't make their reaction acceptable (shootings), but then again, shooting somebody for their shoes or purse or wallet or color of their skin or what they believe in, etc. is hardly acceptable, either. Those acts of violence occur all the time and at a far greater statistical rate than over the this. It's just that the media doesn't fixate on them.
Just like not all cops are bad because some are, neither are all . Banning the Quran, as the PM wants to do is not the answer. A book is not the cause of this problem. If people in his country or here are being induced to do violence because of it, then something else is wrong and unless you figure out what that is, you can't solve the problem.
Instead of trying to predict riots, wouldn't it be better to prevent them in the first place? Putting effort into righting the injustices that cause the riot would be the best thing for everybody.
Pope John XXIII said "If you want peace, work for justice." Seems to be some wisdom there.
The difference being? Both are ultimately driven by fear.
Well, the creationist is making his decision of what to do about climate change out of ignorance. The other is consciously putting financial gain over the common good.
Assume that climate change is a natural phenomenon. If we choose do ignore it then there is no harm. If we choose not to ignore it, it can have negative impact on the economy and the accumulation of wealth.
Now, assume that climate change is because of human activity. If we do nothing, then there are catastrophic consequences. If we so something, we can mitigate those consequences at a cost to the economy and the accumulation of wealth.
So, if as you say, the science is not accurate enough to say one way or another, then we can't really look at the cost of guessing right, but instead, must look at the cost of guessing wrong.
If we guess wrong, we can hurt the economy and the accumulation of wealth or we can have catastrophic changes in the planet's environment, which will ultimately also disrupt the economy and the accumulation of wealth.
As such, if science can't determine the cause, is it not most prudent and logical to take steps to prevent catastrophic changes to the environment even if that means unnecessarily disrupting the economy? After all, the economy will recover, even if we guess wrong, but the life on this planet, may very well not.
I think it's time to stop calling these people "skeptics". They are science denialists, just like creationists. Skeptic would imply that they have found fault with the current science and attack that line of reasoning, but they don't. Instead, they have already come up with the conclusion that climate change is no issue and it is not caused my man, which goes against all current evidence.
The difference is that creationists deny science because of their faith. These guys deny science because of greed.
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Properly funding Amtrak is defunding it's money losing routes and extracting the profits from the NE into the general fund.
Your anti-Amtrak bias is showing. If you did defund Amtrak and let it close routes, wouldn't it need the profits from the NE to use for operating the NE?
Give me a legitimate argument why we should be subsidizing Amtrak's daily operating expenses. Because of Congressional interference and failure to follow the 1997 law we have a situation where taxpayers are paying up to half the cost of a ticket for those almost 1 million riders who ride the northeast corridor on a daily basis.
Well, on 9/11, when all planes were grounded, Amtrak looked pretty good. Could the infrastructure in the NE handle an extra 1M commuters? 30% of the bridges there are already classified as sub standard and past their useful life. If the infrastructure can't even be maintained for current levels of use, how will they fare with increased use?
Besides, Amtrak is like the post office, it is a private entity that is extremely regulated by the government. It might make great business sense to stop Saturday delivery for the post office or for Amtrak to cut routes, but they aren't allowed to do so. It's also ironic that most major cities will pay more to build a stadium for a professional team than Amtrak gets in its government subsidy.
Again, why single out passenger trains? Why not all manner of transportation, include air? There is far more spent subsidizing these other modes of transportation than Amtrak gets. There is a reason why every other western country subsidizes rail (and air) transportation and at a far greater level than the US -- it's called the common good.
Silver is just as worthless in an environment where nobody has anything. If things really go to hell, it'll be whomever has water/shelter/food, so don't bother hoarding precious metals as they won't be so precious if you can't get clean water.
On a small scale, you are correct. Simple bartering for goods and services works well. Unfortunately it doesn't scale up and some common means of exchange is always developed, whether it be silver, gold, sea shells or even bitcoins.
Real Estate will always be worth something. Even if we decide that precious metals are worthless (maybe someone invents a Star Trek replicator), land will always have value. At the very least you can farm it and feed yourself and your family.
It may always be worth something, but not necessarily anything close to what you paid for it. As for land always having its value, tell that to the people in Centralia, PA or Times Beach.
Almost nobody uses trains outside the Northeast and along the West Coast. In those areas, the trains are very heavily used, and used by all walks of life. The reason why Amtrak looses money each year is because they are forced to support the "fly-over" states which have little ridership.
Those states you refer too defer that cost. Also, the reason Amtrak is forced to support the "fly-over" states is because it is cheaper than building airports and providing air service.
And before somebody says, people choose to live there, that's their problem (or something to the effect), one could turn that around and tell the people of the northeast to grow their own food and drill their own oil because they choose to live there, too.
I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?
Here's just one article that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.
Here's another article highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.
Why should you subsidize truckers and airports? It costs $3M to build 1 mile of interstate. Sure it looks nice on the back of all those semis that they pay $6,000 in fuel taxes. Too, bad, they don't tell you the damage they do to the pavement is far greater than that. But, of course, if we didn't subsidize the trucking industry and made them pay the real cost of transporting goods, then prices would go up and you, the taxpayer would still be paying for it, plus a profit percentage on top of it.
Why focus on passenger rail as the problem. Most airports are heavily subsidize in the US. Yes, carriers pay gate fees, but those fees do not cover the true cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure.
Face it, Amtrak, highways, airports, etc. are subsidized by the taxpayer because they ultimately benefit the taxpayer.
Why the FUCK are my tax dollars going to support this idiot organization? Why the FUCK are my tax dollars being wasted on a train service that almost no one uses? If some tiny number of dumbasses cannot afford a car or refuse to just because they prefer to eat granola and hug trees, then let them PAY FOR IT THEMSELVES.
Of course, the incompetent democrat in the white houseopposes all common sense, but at least there is one party working for taxpayers instead of against us.
Instead of defunding Amtrak, maybe it's time to properly fund Amtrak. You seem worried about your tax dollars, but don't seem to mind the billions of them spent on subsidizing air travel and highways and even waterway traffic. What is really lacking in the US is a cohesive transportation policy.
But, hey, it's easier to shout "Defund Amtrak" then it is to actually fix the infrastructure and transportation problems in this country.
What do you expect them to say? But really, the PTC system wasn't turned off for shits and grins. It was still being installed and waiting final calibration and certification. Besides the NTSB is still trying to explain the sudden acceleration (twice) as the train approached the curve. One thought is a software glitch with the onboard system. If that is shown to be the case, then PTC wouldn't make much of a difference.
Heroin was an over the counter cough rememdy for most of this country's history. Most of the people who used it did not become addicted to it. Addiction is a biochemical disorder in the production or action of various hormones, not a physical property of chemicals.
Heroin was "invented" in the late 1800s as a less addictive alternative to morphine. By 1920 it was strictly regulated as a response to the 200,000 heroin addicts in the US. As such, heroin was readily available for maybe 50 years in the US and it was indeed addictive, which is what caused congress to act with the Dangerous Drug Act.
Addiction is not a biochemical disorder. It is a biochemical process. Opiates, by their very nature, trigger responses in the brain that lead to addiction. It does not matter that some people can become addicted more readily than others. Heroin was an attempt to alter the physical property of morphine to make it less addictive. It worked, heroin IS less addictive than morphine, but it is still easy to become addicted to it. This is not because of a biochemical disorder in the brain, but because of the very way our brains work.
One's parents don't have to use heroin for their offspring to develop an addiction to it.
No, but your parents still need to pass the genes that help you enjoy heroin and get addicted to it. Some of the people with those genes would try heroin, and if they got addicted and didn't have children they wouldn't pass those genes on. Over the long run, the population would genetically drift towards having less heroin-addictive genes.
Except that many things are addictive without a genetic predisposition. So even if all of the people with some sort of addiction never bred again, there would still be addictions. Most addictions do not have a genetic trait as much as we want to be able to say it's not our fault.
There are approximately 254.4M registered vehicles in the US and of those about 6M are in an accident each year. That equates to 2.4% of the registered vehicles are in some sort of accident. From the AP report, 4 out of 48 autonomous vehicles were in an accident which equates to 8.3%. Based on the information presented, autonomous vehicles are 3.5 times more likely to be in an accident than non-autonomous ones.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. -- unknown, but known not to be Mark Twain
being that many of them won't pass on their genes, nature will take care of it
No, it won't. Regardless of whether somebody addicted to porn or video passes on their genes, future young men can still develop the addiction. One's parents don't have to use heroin for their offspring to develop an addiction to it.
Yep.
And, en-route, invented electronic engine management, catalytic converters and everything else required to meet those targets, which is now all compulsory equipment, standard and included on all cars. Not a bad thing at all.
If you're worried about it, test old cars regularly and take them off the road. If you don't, then you're not worried about it.
Cars, in locales that have emission testing, are only required to meet the emission requirements in place for the year manufactured. This is a good thing, because otherwise, emission standards could be tightened and everybody would be forced to buy a new car. Since older cars have a finite life, the problem of poorly running old cars will eventually resolve itself. When that occurs, the studies will show that overpowered high horse-powered cars and SUVs are the major polluters. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a desire to limit those.
Up next on the news US Congress votes that pollution from cars is not a man made phenomenon, but part of a natural cycle..
If the car was too much of a POS, you couldn't get the credit.
So all they did was take a bunch of relatively clean cars off the road, but left the dirty ones.
Cash for clunkers wasn't about pollution. It was about bailing out auto companies. Both initially by the government subsidizing the purchase and later by removing late model vehicles from the used car market causing used cars to increase in price to a point where new cars were seen as an attractive option.
Ironically, the upper middle class would have purchased new vehicles anyway, but the lower middle class and the poor were priced out of the "good" used car market and had to stick with what they had or replace it with somebody else's clunker.
Cash for clunkers is a prime example of unintended consequences of a government program when quick fixes are implemented without looking at the long term effect.
And if capitalism decrees that workers older than 40 should not be allowed to work any longer, we should salute capitalism because it has achieved optimum performance? Capitalism does a lot of things well, but it does a lot of things poorly as well. It underlies uninsurance companies cherry picking only healthy people, leaving government to pick up the tab on the uninsured and sick leftovers. Them includes many of those over 40 which no longer have jobs.
Actually, capitalism is blind to age, it is about supply and demand. On the other hand the actual managers involved in the decisions have their own bias and prejudice. Capitalism may cause many problems, but ageism isn't one of them.
If you can afford tuition of $28,750/yr for elementary school, then you don't need a charity to subsidize the cost for you. This is nothing more than the 1% helping the other 1%. The promise of trickle down is merely a teaser for the other 99%.
Because there is a pattern, and the pattern is that the peaceful "moderates" do not control and exclude the violent "extremists".
Condemning 1.6B Muslims, because they can't reign in a some violent Muslims seems a bit extreme. In the US, it is innocent until proven guilty. Go after the extremists, no problem, but leave the innocent alone.
Nobody said that Muslims should get special treatment, but then again, it sounds like that is what you are proposing. We don't single out all Christians because Timothy McVey was one or the Westboro Baptist Church are. So, why should we single out all Muslims because of the actions of a few? If if there were a million Muslims who were extremists, that is .06% of the estimated total Muslim population in the world.
As for other religious groups shooting or killing others because of religious mockery, one only has to go back a few decades to Ireland or Croatia to see exactly that. As for atheists doing so, one only has to look at China and the former Soviet Union.
Should we condemn all Chinese because of the actions of small percentage? No, of course not. So, why should we condemn all Muslims for the actions of a small percentage? It seems like doing so is the very different treatment you are complaining about.
There are something like 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Many in countries that that value free speech. Maybe what you meant to say was that terrorist groups like ISIS or Al Qeda are incompatible with a society based on free speech. Of course that ignores the PM who wants to ban the Quran, so maybe society is not really based on free speech but acceptable speech, instead. Of course, then who is to decide what is acceptable or not?
However, it is no more accurate to use ISIS as the definition of Islam than it is to use Quakers as the definition of Christianity.
As for poking them to show who loves freedom and who does not, that sounds more like bullying versus exercising freedom.
...is there an end in sight to the madness associated with the representation of this religious figure?
I was taught that a wounded animal is more dangerous than one that is not. There are people who are greatly offended (wounded) by the mockery of their strongly held beliefs. Why keep poking them with a stick and acting surprised when they strike back?
Of course, even poked, that doesn't make their reaction acceptable (shootings), but then again, shooting somebody for their shoes or purse or wallet or color of their skin or what they believe in, etc. is hardly acceptable, either. Those acts of violence occur all the time and at a far greater statistical rate than over the this. It's just that the media doesn't fixate on them.
Just like not all cops are bad because some are, neither are all . Banning the Quran, as the PM wants to do is not the answer. A book is not the cause of this problem. If people in his country or here are being induced to do violence because of it, then something else is wrong and unless you figure out what that is, you can't solve the problem.
If you want peace, work for justice.
Instead of trying to predict riots, wouldn't it be better to prevent them in the first place? Putting effort into righting the injustices that cause the riot would be the best thing for everybody.
Pope John XXIII said "If you want peace, work for justice." Seems to be some wisdom there.
The difference being? Both are ultimately driven by fear.
Well, the creationist is making his decision of what to do about climate change out of ignorance. The other is consciously putting financial gain over the common good.
That isn't greed, it is logic and practical.
Let's use logic.
Assume that climate change is a natural phenomenon. If we choose do ignore it then there is no harm. If we choose not to ignore it, it can have negative impact on the economy and the accumulation of wealth.
Now, assume that climate change is because of human activity. If we do nothing, then there are catastrophic consequences. If we so something, we can mitigate those consequences at a cost to the economy and the accumulation of wealth.
So, if as you say, the science is not accurate enough to say one way or another, then we can't really look at the cost of guessing right, but instead, must look at the cost of guessing wrong.
If we guess wrong, we can hurt the economy and the accumulation of wealth or we can have catastrophic changes in the planet's environment, which will ultimately also disrupt the economy and the accumulation of wealth.
As such, if science can't determine the cause, is it not most prudent and logical to take steps to prevent catastrophic changes to the environment even if that means unnecessarily disrupting the economy? After all, the economy will recover, even if we guess wrong, but the life on this planet, may very well not.
I think it's time to stop calling these people "skeptics". They are science denialists, just like creationists. Skeptic would imply that they have found fault with the current science and attack that line of reasoning, but they don't. Instead, they have already come up with the conclusion that climate change is no issue and it is not caused my man, which goes against all current evidence.
The difference is that creationists deny science because of their faith. These guys deny science because of greed.