[ QUOTE ]
jtr1962 said:
[ QUOTE ]
imfrogman said:
Golbal warming is just plain crap science.
[/ QUOTE ]It may or may not be but cancers/asthma from air pollution, acid rain, noise pollution from internal combustion engines (especially on airliners), toxic waste from refining oil, environmental damage from oil tanker crashes, and finally collapsing skyscrapers from burning jet fuel are all quite real. Those are plenty of good reasons to stop using fossil fuels yesterday. And then of course all those tanks of explosive gasoline everywhere are a terrorists dream. Add in the geopolitical consequences of oil use for good measure. After all that, the possibility of global warming is just the icing on the cake. I think the environmentalists shot themselves in the foot by adopting global warming as their poster child. Rather, they should show pictures of patients in a cancer ward. 650,000 die from air pollution related diseases in the US each and every year. That's 13 times the number who die in auto accidents. Or put another way, it's the equivalent of 9/11 every two days. Where's the outrage? Or maybe the general public was never made aware of this because it might cut into SUV sales.
I'm no wacko environmentalist but I want to be able to breathe knowing that what I'm breathing won't kill me down the road. While I think preserving nature is a good thing I also realize that if we worried about saving every species out there progress would come to a halt. At the same time, I don't think we should destroy the natural world if better alternatives exist. If oil were a pristine form of energy without any negatives then I would say drill the hell out of the ANWR. However, it's a filthy, primitive way to generate power. Indeed, burning anything to generate power in 2005 is. It should have been abandoned the minute commercial nuclear reactors were possible, which was sometime in the 1950s. I'll grant that nuclear power has issues of it's own, but I'd rather we have a few thousand tons of radioactive waste buried in some cave in a remote area than billions of tons of toxic wastes from burnt oil floating in the air. Long term we should be spending lots more money to develop commercial fusion which is far cleaner than fission.
What we have here isn't planning or leadership. It's simply reacting from crisis to crisis. Both parties have been asleep at the wheel on this issue for far too long. We've had warning signs since the 1970s that oil wasn't forever, yet time and again every attempt to develop alternatives, or even to conserve what we have, was stopped dead in its tracks. The SUV craze, the EV1 fiasco, and now this are but the latest sagas in that sordid journey.
There's an old saying that people get the government they deserve.
[/ QUOTE ]
Well, plenty of stuff in our environment will kill us from residual exposure but I don't see us banning all those other substances.
Hey wait... this was about the anwr right?
Oh yeah.
Drill.
