Capitol Energy
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Why is the issue of climate change and energy so political?
A recent New York Times article discussed a proposed bill to reduce the impact of climate change, as well as reorganize how the US uses energy. One of the first things the article said was how the bill was likely to meet stiff opposition from Republicans.
Why? The US Environmental Protection Agency clearly says on its website that we are largely to blame for global warming. Similarly, we know that fossil fuels (coal and oil in particular) take millions of years to create, and are terrible for the environment, and that we will eventually run out of oil. We can agree upon those things, so why is it such a political issue to discuss how we will change that?
Some of it I can understand, I searched online for predictions on when we will run out of oil. Many “greener” industries predicted within the next few decades, while businesses such as Shell say that we’ll “never” run out of oil. Obviously, their immediate profit is more important than anything else, so we can effectively ignore those two extreme opinions.
Anyhow, the fact of the matter is, that when we will run out is debatable, but that we eventually will is not. The Spanish empire collapsed when its gold mines all dried up, mines that its entire economy was based on. As one of my professors joked “good thing we learn from history and haven’t based our economy on a nonrenewable resource you dig out of the ground!”
At what point will we realize that us not destroying the planet is not a political issue, but a human one? This planet is where we live, and unfortunately for us, the only planet we know of where we can live. So destroying it is obviously not in our best interests. While how we go about fixing the mistakes we’ve made is a political issue (I suppose), the fact that we need to fix it is not. Washington needs to pull its head out of its own behind, stop brainwashing everybody that the Right or Left is attempting to destroy your world and everything you love, and actually fix the problem.
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