Theory on Partisan Opinions of Global Warming

I've had a theory for awhile and it won't be very well backed-up because I developed it in my head. But it has basis in reality.

Conservatives are against Global Warming. They don't think it's real, they don't want to regulate businesses to protect the environment, they don't want to increase taxes for anything related to it. Why?

I think they don't want to regulate the businesses because they never want to regulate businesses, and that's fine. But why deny Global Warming, why choose not to protect your environment even not for Global Warming but just for pollution and deforestation?

Here's my line of thinking. Please don't feel insulted. We all know my mind is very liberal and I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way.

Conservatives are generally religious. Generally Christian. Christians are generally Creationist. They don't typically support evolution to the fullest extent. Perhaps their religious beliefs transcend into them not caring about the environment as much as someone who does believe in Evolution or someone who thinks religion is unimportant compared to the planet.

On the other hand, liberals are sometimes eager to regulate businesses for the greater good. They may tend to want to protect the environment more for future generations and would rather overspend and overshoot and still succeed in protecting it, than not giving enough help and having something terrible happen.

Feel free to flame me. But it's been on my mind and it's just a theory. I don't even know if I think it's true or not.

tis a good point well made. people who are in the business of making money off the back of others have no care for the environment. A capitalist society is unsustainable as it requires the production of surplus which means we need to keep removing more resources and creating more junk.

reply to post by woodwardjnr


I agree. A ream of paper taken from the trees will last for maybe a year. We'll write on it, print it, and eventually throw it out. But the tree we took it from could have lasted hundreds and hundreds of years.

Here is where "you don't get it".

Conservatives are against "CAP & TRADE" because it is nothing but a scam to make a few people rich. Enron (remember them) was a huge proponent for Cap & Trade because it is nothing but another speculator paper game that will do NOTHING to reduce CO2.

So, Bottom line without posting a book, CAP & TRADE is a SCAM that the financial sector, environmental groups and the political elite want enforced to both Scam Money and Power (we can tell everyone what they can and cannot do in the name of "saving the planet")

So, It doesn't matter if you believe Global Warming is real or not if the "so called" solution is nothing but a money and power scam that will do NOTHING to reduce the "so called" problem.

F you really believe CO2 emissions are a problem, then there is a solution but it will not be implemented because all the Govt cronies, the finance industry and paper traders want the "Cap & Trade / Carbon Credit" scam to make money. Real solutions for taking care of excess CO2. Very "Green" scientist have provided solutions but the money men and power nuts want their Cap & Trade scam. You see, it will never go away because they will never "solve" the problem... that is the whole idea... keep a problem forever, keep your money rolling in.... Disgusting so many people are buying this load of crap.


Below is an article from "Mr Green" James Lovelock the man whos work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban. He has a solution if we really want to do it but even he says it will not happen because of the SCAM! The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms.

www.newscientist.com...

2009 promises to be an exciting time for James Lovelock. But the originator of the Gaia theory, which describes Earth as a self-regulating planet, has a stark view of the future of humanity.

He tells Gaia Vince we have one last chance to save ourselves - and it has nothing to do with nuclear power

Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?

Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside. What about work to sequester carbon dioxide? That is a waste of time. It's a crazy idea - and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.

[edit on 27-6-2009 by infolurker]

[edit on 27-6-2009 by infolurker]

reply to post by infolurker


So why don't they increase taxes under this and use that money to support agencies and organizations that are creating programs and solutions to the environmental problems?

I just don't see why we have to have all this filler business.

Why don't we just find alternative energy sources and stop cutting down trees and stop polluting? Give people the tax money to find new ways to get done what they need to get done.

Because that is not the goal.

The goals are money, power, influence, control. You have to want to solve a problem to solve it. The politicians are owned by the special interest groups who's interest is gaining more power, influence and control.


Most special interests have sided with either the "D" side or the "R" side... either way "we the people" are the least important factor in how policies are formed.


[edit on 27-6-2009 by infolurker]

I posted a comment this morning about how hard it is to really know which side, if any, is right about the warming of the planet. I tend to agree with the OP that the christians could care less about the future since they think Jesus is coming back and the planet is going to be burned up and somehow resurrected. Yet the post above mine makes a powerful point, they could solve this but they don't want to.

I think that the don't care attitude is prevalent everywhere not just industry. I just moved to a large complex and the dumpster in our area has two big trash cans for recyclable items. I am just about the only person out of the 7 buildings using it that ever puts a thing in there! If we can't get ordinary people to care enough to rinse out a few cans and put paper in a recycle unit they how the hell can we expect greedy businesses to do anything either.

Makes me sick really, this is our home and it is a beautiful place that is soon going to turn a corner that we may never recover from.

George Carlin says it the best!!!

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by ravenshadow13


Conservatives are not for forcefully doing it.

This would be so much easier just to tell a company they'll get 25% less taxes if the mass produce a green car or product.

What they do now is purely for money.

And I don't even believe in global warming. But I do see local warming in cities and see the benefit in cleaner cities.

But you do not need government in this. Taxes is the key. Voluntary change is the key.

The more you force something, the more people resist and the more they will not listen to you.

You want to raise taxes? That's your problem.

Punishment never works. It just encourages dissent. Rewards work.

[edit on 28-6-2009 by Gorman91]

In a word? PROGRAMMING. This isn't limited to conservatives. THEY tell you that the world has heated and cooled many times over the course of it's existence and then try to say, "No global warming because Canada had a record frost this year."

THEY say that "Man hasn't caused global warming so why should we change"? Here's an analogy. Lightning strikes a tree in your back yard. There's a fire. Is it beneficial to throw gas on the flames just because you didn't start it? We may not be responsible for GW but we ARE exacerbating the problem. That hurts us all.

Why is this happening? PROGRAMMING. THEY are telling you this because money and power can be lost on this issue. Big oil. They're #1. Electric companies. HUGE money makers. What if everyone went solar? WAIT!!! I heard this one before. It would cost the average household $20,000 to equip a house with solar. Think about that. I spend about $2000/year on electricity. In 10 years I won't have to pay for coal generated electricity EVER AGAIN!

Sorry, I was wrong. It's about 2 words.... PROGRAMMING and THEM. And don't think that they don't have their fingers all through Washington. THEY do.

reply to post by intrepid


Nope. As I said. It's because punishment and force are not the way. Incentives are.

Rather than force some companies out and others in, or tax like crazy, or destroy current jobs, simply lower the taxes of oil companies and businesses that do green things.

Reward. Don't punish.

Would you rather the government punish you for producing carbon, or would you rather they lower your taxes if you bought green items and did green things?

Reward. Do not punish.

Simple as that.

Originally posted by ravenshadow13

On the other hand, liberals are sometimes eager to regulate businesses for the greater good. They may tend to want to protect the environment more for future generations and would rather overspend and overshoot and still succeed in protecting it, than not giving enough help and having something terrible happen.

While I truly believe your heart is in the right place and I have many liberal friends who are some of the nicest people I know, there are several problems

Who regulates the people who regulate?

Who makes sure that those who decide what is bad or good are held up to standards befitting their positions?

Since the topic is on the environment, this brings up an excellent example, Al Gore. Mr Gore is on the verge of becoming a billionaire should the new cap and trade bill passes. Gore lives in a giant energy hogging house and flies around in a carbon spewing private jet.

Al Gore constantly pushes his global warming theory and constantly pushes that we the public use less energy and pay more for that energy we use. Yet he turns around and spews more carbon than thousands of average citizens.

This is the case with many environmentally active elite. They spew all kinds of carbon for their daily lives yet constantly push for more environmental regulations that will cost us, the regular people, even more.

The reason why they push for this is because for the global warming elites, paying $7 a gallon gas and double electricity rates hardly hurts them but it severely limits our freedom.

Now if the Earth was truly in great danger, should not Al Gore and the global warming elite be forced to travel around in crammed planes and dinky cars as well? Shouldn't they be forced into some energy quota to offset the fact they can absorb higher energy costs? Obviously those that are pushing for cap and trade as well as other environmental regulation are not suffering and sacrificing themselves.

And why is it that active debate about global warming seems to be so regulated itself. Why do scientist that show facts and question man made climate change as well as demanding any proof of said climate change get punished by being de-funded or discredited? Why is it that the debate is "over"? Is it cause Al Gore said so? Why has "global warming" suddenly being called "climate change"" Is it because the last 10 years there was no real warming and that the original premise has been proved laughable?

Liberalism has the same flaw as capitalism. That flaw is the human desire for more power.

Liberalism requires regulation in order for the greater good and greater freedom (supposedly). But the regulators start becoming the elite class and start implementing more regulation in order to preserve control through restriction or dependency. This growth in the number of regulators increases many times over and what we get is a government class with poor effectiveness ( there is a reason why education sucks in this country) and lack of accountability. There becomes a vast pyramid of control led by a few elite and served by a large complex of minions that don't actually do anything but suck resources from the public, the same thing that liberals fight against in the first place if it is a private institution.

While free market capitalism produces the bad stuff like nasty monopolies and dumping of toxins into rivers, these things have been broken up in the past and are always possible to break up. It is always possible to punish a company or person, even though it is sometimes difficult. There were days of robber barons, tycoons, and monopolies in the past, but it has been dealt with.

Big government institutions, complex regulatory bodies, economic command systems, and giant bureaucracies are historically more resilient than monopolies or whatever unfettered capitalism can bring about.

To me, capitalism is a lesser evil and the corruption that occurs from capitalism is and has been proven, much easier and less bloody to defeat. Besides it is much harder for a monopolist to tell me what to do than a bureaucrat unless the monopolist owns the bureaucrat. Capitalism and free markets tend to be more open to dissent and thus more allowing of a public to fight back against any attempted tyranny than a controlled and regulated society.

Ironically, liberalism is used many times in order to create monopolies that suck resources from the public in order to feed the wealth and power of a select elite. Communism seems good and fair on paper but in reality, an entire economy is completely controlled by a small group of brutal dictators with near infinite power and wealth. In fact, liberalism is used many times by corrupt capitalists in order to gain extreme control. Bankers have been using the vast pyramid of government regulation in order to gain the huge amounts of power they have today. Companies like Monsanto use bureaucracies like the FDA to basically run over more organic farmers and seed companies.

Environmentalism is turning out to be the same thing. A few select elite that can absorb high energy costs while the rest of us starve. A few select elite become billionaires through their carbon credit firms while the rest of us are forced to ride bikes. A few select elites will be able to control the entire economy while we have to beg for food.

Catholics are not creationists. Catholics are about 50% of the Christians in the world. I'm not a creationist. I have 500,000,000 year old fossils in my room. If you study the climate change of that 500,000,000 years, or to be simple, 50,000 years, it is obvious that the recent "global warming" is insignificant. Please, go to a library and learn about it. It's extremely interesting that "global warming" has been the hype when in fact, we are about to go into an Ice Age. The facts are there, plain & simple. It's like "evolution" being so clear yet creationists still exist to deny it. The "global warming" hype is a false religion, used to control people's lives.

It's true that the world's population is rising, but the details show that urban areas grow while rural areas are losing people, and nature is taking over. The Congo jungle of Africa is growing quickly, especially with wars & disease on top of migration to the urban cities. In many parts of the world, nature is taking over again. The idea of "global warming" deals with the lie that the human population is too large for this world. It is a religion that can ignore millions of Africans dying because "there is just too many of them," even if Africa could feed 10 billion people, and with their natural resources should be the wealthiest continent, yet is the poorest continent.

The "global warming" religion wants to stop using foreign oil, yet doesn't have a solution. Drilling for Alaska's oil might kill a polar bear, and they are more valuable than American troops. The religion denies admitting that oil will still be used in the next generation, and wants the troops to come home, but oil is money, and since we can't drill our own because of radical environmentalists, we're stuck in the Middle-East.

The "global warming" religion ignores the fact that China is polluting the world more than all other countries put together. Why should we stop our small amount and destroy our economy (?) while China sells us cheap crap we don't need, while we should boycott China if "global warming" was real.

if you need more examples, let me know.

www.currentconcerns.ch...

open your eyes

reply to post by ravenshadow13


I think that you're close. I think the difference is that the fundamentalist sector of the right wing doesn't think that it's possible for humans to screw up God's creation, and that God wouldn't allow anything to happen that would threaten his creation.

I know of plenty of right-wing intellectuals (the type of people who work in think-tanks) who believe that global-warming is an obvious phenomenon (look at the 5 year moving averages of temperature, mapped topographically, over the past 150 years) and that, whether it's cyclical or man-made is fairly irrelevant if it's posing a threat to humanity. From this perspective, two questions emerge: 1) Is global warming something that we should be worried about; and 2) If global warming is something that we should be worried about, then how should we approach this problem.

I think that the politicians are (on some level, to avoid cognitive dissonance) distracting us, so that we don't figure out the special-interest angle that infolurker pointed out. The neo-conservatives have actually convinced half of the population that significant climate change flat-out is not taking place, data be damned; and the progressives have convinced the other half that their pie-in-the-sky solutions are the right way to tackle the problem.

Meanwhile, BOTH sides have turned this into a political issue, rather than a scientific issue. Politicians are not the people who should be having these debates, because they aren't qualified to analyze scientific research.


[edit on 22-7-2009 by theWCH]

reply to post by theWCH


"I think that you're close. I think the difference is that the fundamentalist sector of the right wing doesn't think that it's possible for humans to screw up God's creation, and that God wouldn't allow anything to happen that would threaten his creation. "

That can't be. At least, not logically. Because humans destroy God's creations all the time. Look at murder. Look at cutting down trees. Look at eating meat, then. But especially look at murder. That's the ultimate destruction of God's prized creations by humans. And apparently God allows it.

I'm not saying you're wrong because it is different to look at the Earth that way. I just don't know the answer. But humans... I mean. They invented guns, they invented nuclear weapons, there's no way someone can honestly say "It's impossible for humans to destroy God's creations."

reply to post by intrepid


You're right. I mean, we know the oil companies are part of the reason why cars aren't being built to be more efficient or run on other fuels even though the technology is at a point where they really can be built that way.

What a lame excuse though. What a dumb reason. Risk the quality of the planet, the future of earth, so some executives and companies can get their jollies.