Bear with me here as I try and ask this question. In regards to the global warming debate, I get why the industries and therefore the politicians that represent them are fighting against it for at least the short term reasons of costs and legislation that will hurt them. What I don't get is what do these same people think the so called "liberal radical left" will get out of it? If they really think the left is making it all up, what is the reason? I am not asking for rhetoric here but some sort of real answer.
I do know it is more than likely it is just their way of keeping the fight going but what do they claim the left has to win by creating the so called myth of global warming? What evil does Al Gore and company have planned according to Cheney and co.
Jonathan, I'll try to answer your question directly, but I'm speaking for myself, not "the Right".
There are many incentives for politicians, regardless of affiliation, to want a moral blank check to enact policies that will enrich them and boost their power. Who stands to gain from promoting the popular perception that government will save America/the world, not figuratively but literally, from polluting industry? From Islamic terrorists? From _(insert threat proposal)_? Politicians and bureaucrats and the industry of fund-raising lobbyists, special interest groups, and think tanks do. Want to raise money? Invoke a crisis. Want to stay in power? Take the side of dealing with a crisis and paint the opposition as unwilling and ill-equipped to address it.
Now I'll speculate a little.
On a simple, Darwinian level, strategists on the Right do not want to concede the (popularly perceived) moral highground on addressing an issue as emotionally charged as global climate crisis to the Left, because it renders election/reelection more difficult.
On another level, some on the Right perceive that a significant number of proponents of anthropogenic global warming theory advocate increasing government control over the economy. This is nothing new. The institutional Left has always advocated increased government control of the economy, but now they're positioning themselves as saviors of the environment to do so. This certainly upsets the religious Right because they're not accustomed to being on the negative side of a moral contest; the "god" card may still reverberate in some debates, but it isn't the trump card in a debate over saving the world, which is a topic with the oomph needed to upstage the debates the Right wants people to focus on.
Finally, there certainly are folks on the Right who grasp that increased taxes and fees and regulations will have a variety of effects-- increased prices for consumers, job losses, disincentives to start new businesses or to keep them in America-- considered by them far worse than the effects some attribute to global warming.
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Speaking for myself, regarding the global warming debate, there is a distinction worth noting between the science of climatology, on the one hand, and, on several other hands, the presentations of the science of climatology (1) by politicians seeking re-election, (2) by bureaucrats seeking increased budget allocations, (3) by leftist and right-wing special interest groups raising money using the issue of global warming, and (4) by scientists seeking new or increased funding for their research from the government.
The science is far less conclusive than the presenters of the science listed above, far less certain than most of the people who take sides on this issue on message boards like this one.
Scientific propositions are different from political causes; they do not prevail because of a majority. Evolution is true because it accurately describes phenomena in the world. Global climate change is a reality, but I believe that we're still lacking accurate theories about the proportions of influence exerted by solar radiation, greenhouse gases (which may or may not be produced by humans in sufficient quantities to constitute "the" deciding factor in climate change), and other factors. The science isn't even conclusive about global warming being a net negative for human beings.
Science is being polluted by "intelligent design" advocates on the religious right and by "humans-are-the-primary-drivers-of-catastrophic-global-warming" on the environmentalist left.
I adopt a skeptical, "first do no harm" rule about public policy. So, before I would implement any public policy solutions based on athropogenic global warming theory (-ies), I'd conduct a study designed to identify which of models upon which catastrophic predictions are based can reproduce accurate forecasts, not 100 years from now, but 2 years, 5 years, 10 years from now. And I'd have such a study funded anonymously to keep the findings as impartial as possible. I'd say this would be a good start.
Topic: Global warming, I need an answer (Read 11449 times)
