The Environment

Sorry for the delay, I've had a busy 2 weeks. I'll try to be on more.

I don't know that this is a totally political thing, but the more I know about environmental issues, the less I care. Personally, I don't like the idea of humans contributing to animal extinction, that's a different issue, but when it comes to the atmosphere and ice caps melting and climate change, I don't give a crap.

People talk about "saving the earth." Saving the earth from what? The earth isn't going anywhere. The core isn't about to implode. We need to talk about saving ourselves. I'm not going to deny global climate change, obviously we're causing it or at least speeding it up, causing glaciers and the ice caps to melt at a faster rate than they were. And of course there's the issues of global flooding and much less drinking water, but really, I don't care. It's not something anybody can stop at this point, I mean, are we going to convince the developing world to stop developing? Are we going to all stop using fossil fuels in an instant? No. So why not instead worry about how to deal with the changes that will happen? We already know the weather is going to be less predictable. We are on the verge of losing the gulf stream, which will make parts of Europe much different than they are now. That's what we need to deal with. It's not stopping.

But all in all, I really don't care. The changes will be relatively slow, we'll deal with them. The earth has survived more extreme changes for billions of years. It might be expensive and unpleasant, but if you're reading this there's a good chance you are pretty rich compared to the average person in the world. Being relatively rich allows us to deal with these problems. The developing world will take the majority of the pain of global climate change. The more and more I know about how the world and the environment reacts to changes, it seems like climate change, even if we caused it, is so natural that I'm willing to let it happen.

And hey, there are a few good things about climate change, too. Once we get rid of all the ice in the north pole, it'll open up new shipping routes, that will save us some money. We should probably harvest some of that fresh water, though, we will definitely need that. It is not energy efficient to convert saltwater to fresh water. A lot of animals will go extinct, but there are plenty of animals that thrive in human-controlled conditions. Pigeons, crows, raccoons, squirrels, lots of insects. Do you think it was normal to just see a squirrel running around a forest when there were foxes and wolves everywhere? No, but look now, they're everywhere! And raccoons never had trash bags full of stuff to eat before there were people.

The end result is, I don't care. I don't expect climate stability, so I'm not going to try to contribute to it. When the problems arise, we'll deal with them.