The young eco-acolytes were earnestly indignant that industry should survive at all, eager to twitter the latest environmental theory, and wag their fingers at how ‘polluted everything is’. My boss warned me in a hushed whisper these Next Gens had been programmed by academic ex-hippie druid rice-bowlers. So I got one of them aside, chatting about the old days when rivers were on fire, and lakes glowed in the dark, and cities were entirely invisible behind a choking blanket of thick smog. I wrapped by saying, ‘You have no idea how good you have it now.’

She gave me a withering lecture on the ‘looming disaster of global warming’ then sternly warned me, ‘You need get an *attitude adjustment*.’ After that, all my work was side-lined and higher-reviewed, and ‘returned for more study’, which is how the rice-bowlers rob capital funds to feed their new hires and pensions operating budget. Study it to death, urgently, hypercritically, end-of-world-if-we-stop’ly. The New Carbon Caliphate Taliban.

Wasn’t that a line from Mao’s Little Red Book? ‘Attitude adjustment’? Then didn’t they starve 60 million elders?

“If we can’t find the middle of a generation-long concern like climate change, one where modest steps are sufficient for the moment ….”

You see, most people don’t take the time to synthesize all the research (I suspect you’re in this camp) and therefore most people don’t realize that without a giant, radical leap to a zero-carbon economy as urgently and rapidly as possible (no time left for “modest steps”), we “risk” (risk = probability x magnitude of an event) runaway global warming (due to positive carbon feedbacks, which have already kicked in throughout the Arctic and in tropical peatlands) that has the potential of making this planet inhospitable to life.

Why, in Earth’s name – or in the name of all our children and future descendants – would we want to risk that with “modest steps”? Why are we so willing to perpetrate progenycide when moving to a safer, cleaner, healthier, more equitable and more peaceful perpetual-energy-based economy will be so exciting? So fruitful? So job-creating?

No, dear sir, this is no time for dancing modest steps in the middle. We need leaps and bounds toward a future that will sustain the “bio” (life) in our biosphere.

I don’t really disagree with you. Environmental law today seems be about controlling or punishing progress as much as it is about helping the environment. Any objective analysis of our environment shows great improvements. There is much less pollution today than there was 20 or 30 years ago despite the fact that populations have continued to grow. Environmental law is often used to strongarm developers into doing things like using union labor. The laws don’t serve the environment, consumers, or producers so what purpose do they serve?

JT,

Read the above. Any objective measure shows pollution levels have lowered dramatically over the last few decades. The latest satelite temperatures shows that we are currently 0.11 degrees above the average over the last 3 decades. How are we not leaving behind a good environment for those that follow? The climate has always changed. There is no ideal temperature. 1,000 years ago it was warmer than it is today. Yet mankind survived when it was much less equiped to deal with any kind of change. There is a great deal of evidence that warmer would be better. Certainly if you had to pick cooler or warmer you would pick warmer. That is before you get into ALL of the unknowns you are talking about in regards to this issue.

I founded, ran, and sold a successful quick printing shop from 1977 to 1988. A major reason I go out of that business was because of the ever more expansive definitions of “hazardous waste” and California law interpretations that would reach back and hold me responsible if the commercial disposers of same that I paid to handle it instead dumped it in some creek.

I just did not see such unnecessary complications to my “risk” of doing business as acceptable in the long run. There was NO statute of limitations on such risk. OK?

Why are not conservatives the most cautious in this regard? Why are we not more focused on maintaining the freedoms and choices of future generations, not to mention the property values of coastal landowners? Where do we get the moral authority to change our descendant’s climate by even one half of a degree? If right wing Republicans (of which I count myself) thought about the issue this way, they might take a different course.

My personal view agrees in many respects with Mr. Easterbrook’s. Human induced climate change does exist and we (the U.S.) should develop revenue-neutral, market-drive methods of reducing our dependence upon fossil fuels. That view makes sense for energy independence as well as climate change.