Quote: Original post by LessBread

My thoughts exactly.

It's not a hoax but that comic does list the kinds of things the deniers are opposed to - energy independence, rainforest preservation, ...

Quote: Original post by LessBread
It's not a hoax but that comic does list the kinds of things the deniers are opposed to - energy independence, rainforest preservation, ...

I wouldn't say that they're against those things. Its just that fixing our lifestyles to break dependence on fossil fuels is going to be difficult and expensive. People don't like making sacrifices. Kinda like an obese man being told by his doctor that he needs to lose weight.

I think they are opposed to those things for the simple reason that the solutions they propose have no hope of achieving those results. For example "drill baby drill" as the solution to energy dependence. They may claim to not be opposed to those things, they may even claim to be working to achieve them, but beneath all that rests the desire to perpetuate the vested interests of the status quo.

Energy independence                Energy dependenceRainforest preservation            Rainforest exploitationEnvironmental sustainability       Environmental destructionGreen jobs                         Dirty jobsLivable cities                     Unlivable cities Renewable resources                Nonrenewable resources Clean water                        Dirty waterClean air                          Dirty air Healthy children                   Unhealthy children

Powerful interests are making money from business as usual. That how we got where we are for better and worse. They don't want to give that up and they'll do what they must in order to keep the money flowing towards them. For example: GAO: Coal industry debris fillling eastern Kentucky hollows.

Quote:
Coal companies got approval to fill hundreds of hollows in Eastern Kentucky during the last decade, according to a new federal report.

Such fills, called hollow or valley fills, often bury stream areas.

Regulators gave coal companies permission to put up to 2.15 billion cubic yards of spoil — rock and dirt left over from mining operations — into 1,488 fills in Eastern Kentucky between 2000 and mid-2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report issued this week.

Nearly all those were hollow fills, which one official explained are smaller and located higher in the watershed than valley fills, the report said.

The report also covered West Virginia, where coal companies got approval to build nearly 500 fills to dispose of 2.7 billion cubic yards of spoil.

Coal companies do not build all the fills for which they get permits. The report did not count how many of the fills companies actually created.

Opponents of surface mining said the report offers further evidence that mining has caused widespread environmental damage in the two states.
...
Tierra Curry, a Knott County native who is now a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said there have been conservative estimates that 2,000 stream miles in Appalachia have been buried under hollow fills and valley fills. Mining also removes mature forests from large areas, she said.
...

Here is one positive development from the "scandal": Temperature records released to debunk climate change claims (8 December 2009)

Quote:
The Met Office today released temperature records from more than 1,500 climate monitoring stations around the world in the latest efforts to debunk claims by sceptics that global warming data was manipulated by scientists.
...
The results from the monitoring centres released today is very similar to the complete set of data records from around 5,000 stations which the Met Office's Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) use to measure global land temperatures in the "HadCrut" record.

The data released today, a subset of the total from the 5,000 sites, is not a new global temperature record and does not replace the HadCrut record or other analyses from Nasa or the National Climatic Data Centre in the US.

The Met Office said it would release the data from the remaining station records when it had permission from those centres to do so.

And scientists said they would publish "as soon as possible" the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global record.
...

If all the problem was that we wanted clean air, clean water, no deforestation, and so on, you won't get anybody complaining as everyone wants those things. The problem is that to many people it appears that the climate change issue is being used to promote a political agenda, regardless of how it would effect our way of life.

In todays society we need energy. Clean sources of energy such as wind and solar are currently much more expensive than fossil fuels, and the costs aren't going to be comparable for quite a while. Mandates on emissions will increase costs, and make it harder to compete with developing countries like India and China (Which have stated they aren't going to cut back their industry.)

Any hint that the science has been tampered with makes it that much harder to convince someone that it's acceptable to sacrifice for the cause.

It's clear from the GAO report referenced in the link I dropped that some people don't want those things, so we shouldn't maintain the pretense that everyone wants them. The climate change issue is being used to promote a political agenda, namely the perpetuation of the status quo. In other words, those who deny the science are using the issue to promote their political agenda and they are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year lobbying for their agenda [1] even though that agenda foists hundreds of billions of dollars in costs on the public and kills 20,000 people a year in the United States alone [2]. Worse still that agenda threatens to increase global public costs by trillions of dollars [3]. And their obstruction threatens the future economic viability of the United States which is slipping away as other nations win the race to create clean energy technology. So, I say it again, they don't want clean air, clean water and so on.

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
I still don't get this supposed "liberal politicization."

The Democrats stand to gain .... what exactly that would compromise their objectivity?? Are we supposed to believe that the super-powerful scientist lobby is outclassing ExxonMobil and the rest of the energy industry? Where exactly is the compromising upside for politicians who support an issue that doesn't exactly fire up masses of voters and doesn't make the deep-pocketed lobbyists happy?

^^Did any of the denialists come up with an answer for this one...?

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
I still don't get this supposed "liberal politicization."

The Democrats stand to gain .... what exactly that would compromise their objectivity?? Are we supposed to believe that the super-powerful scientist lobby is outclassing ExxonMobil and the rest of the energy industry? Where exactly is the compromising upside for politicians who support an issue that doesn't exactly fire up masses of voters and doesn't make the deep-pocketed lobbyists happy?

^^Did any of the denialists come up with an answer for this one...?

It hardly needs answering The political incentive is crystal clear. It provides a reason for an increase in government power. Politicians arnt exactly averse to that.