The Great Global Warming Hoax

Many Americans seem to have adopted a position that the only reason to avoid the proliferation of fossil fuel use in this country is that such action reduces greenhouse gas emissions and limits global warming and climate instability.  Our current administration seems to be capitalizing on this position by invalidating climate change through any number of strategies including simply deleting it from the face of the federal government and its many agencies.   

So, for the sake of argument, what if global warming and climate instability are simply hogwash or worse, real but not caused (or controlled) by human activity?  What if all the scientists who’ve identified climate change as a real, human induced phenomena are wrong?  What if they have been paid off all these years by a secret underground Tree Huggers association?  What if most scientists (and engineers) are genetically related to lemmings and are willing to put aside truth to fall in line with the great climate change hoax?

Even if that were true, it doesn’t change the fact that fossil fuels are not good for the American people.   Air pollution, dominated by none other than fossil fuel use, causes hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in this country ever year.  Do the lives of these people mean nothing compared to the economic prosperity promised by the unfettered mining and use of fossil fuels?  

Mining and burning coal leads to the loss of tens of thousands of work days every year due to illness and premature death.  Do the hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of dollars lost as a result amount to nothing compared to the economic prosperity produced by mining, drilling, and fracking everything we can, as fast as we can, from American soils and rocks?

While domestically extracted fuels may be better than dependence on foreign supplies, our fossil fuels, just like every single country in the world, will eventually dwindle and disappear.  When that happens, every single country in the world that has not reduced per capita energy consumption and increased alternative energy production will suffer.   Why would Americans want this suffering to come sooner rather than later?  Why do we want to take that risk for what amounts to economic prosperity that is both short term and not necessarily a certainty?

It seems like all political parties in the U.S. agree about the need to protect our children.   Rapid expansion of fossil fuel production does not protect our children.  It trades an uncertain short term gain for an increased risk of a devastating future for our children… one where air pollution surpasses all other causes of premature death, one where restricted or expensive energy resources choke economic growth, and one where we no longer have an opportunity to make wise choices regarding renewable energy sources as we do today. 

Of course, if climate change emerges as true, then permafrost melt intensifies, methane emissions proliferate, climate instability ramps up, natural disasters escalate, and food supplies dwindle.  In this scenario, we won’t have as many children to worry about.   No one wants this outcome, yet we seem to be willing to ignore or dismiss science that predicts such as an outcome when it doesn’t agree with our short term plans for economic prosperity.

Either way, with or without climate change, rapid expansion of fossil fuels seems risky, short-sighted, and unwise. 

Is it possible for us to take our eyes off the Great Global Warming Hoax and focus on the forest, rather than the trees... and, in so doing, create a better future for not only ourselves but future generations whose economic prosperity and safety are just as important as ours.