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• Monday, June 30, 2008 01:42 AM

  Fuel and the politics of ignorance

  As an Australian citizen, interested observer and recent visitor to the USA, I found this article and the responses to it to be fascinating. The most alarming element of all of the above is that even the progressives and moderates seem to be missing the most important point. You folks aren't just making these decisions for US citizens... as one of the top 2 polluters in the world, your policies on alternative solutions need to address the needs of a growing and increasingly affluent world population as well. Carbon emitted by the US citizenry, military & corporations does not simply sit over the USA. It ascends into the atmosphere and diffuses out over most of the northern hemisphere - and eventually, over the south as well.

  While my duly elected government is not exactly guilt-free on this issue, they have at least now signed up to Kyoto and are working towards building on the innovations of previous decades in the alternative energy sector. In other words, we've accepted that our decisions affect our neighbours (including many of the rapidly shrinking oceanic states that are threatened by rising ocean levels) and we've started to orientate our economy towards a solution.

  On the other hand, the USA - which can bring an R&D budget the size of our GNP to bear on future energy research - is standing by and haggling over Roe vs Wade and the relative merits of teaching intelligent design in classrooms. If the US government offered even MODERATE incentives to corporations for developing new clean energy solutions the problem could probably be solved in under a decade.

  Meanwhile the God-botherers (who seem to have only a sketchy handle on the doctrine of divinely granted free will) are wheeling out the bible saying "God will save us", clapping their hands over their ears and singing psalms as if this will make the bogey man they created through their own (free) decisions go away. Maybe this is natural selection in action, but when these people stand behind the first amendment and demand their right to be heard on the floor of Congress, they're holding up the rest of us.

  Has anyone considered that the delaying tactics of the religious right might simply be a delaying tactic while they create a path to the fulfillment of their much-vaunted "day of salvation" and the respective damnation of the unbelievers to a millenium of hell on earth? I'm not sure how they think they're going to get to the heavens... maybe 14400 people could get into a "New Ark" if they started building now. Oh... but they'd need new energy sources to get it into orbit, right? *pfeh* Would this count as a terrorist act? I wonder.........

  Yours from Down Under

  Jeremy Huppatz

  —Gedulous Read Gedulous's other letters
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