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Gordon Fitch wrote:
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<PRE>Well, you're talking science, and I'm talking politics. So
it probably depends which audience whose butt is facing. One
audience is making money off this stuff, and another is paying
for it, so they have different attitudes. If you're talking
to the ones who are paying for it -- basically, the working
class, because they pay for everything -- it's a bad idea to
first exclaim "X is happening! Better do something about it!"
and then, on further inquiry, say, well, you're trying to
figure out what X is, anyway. Good science, maybe -- gets
grants and nice jobs -- but bad politics: raises taxes and
prices, produces burdensome regulations and restrictions,
blah blah blah.
But don't believe me. Just keep the act going and see what
happens. Unlike many other leftist concerns, enviro has had
a lot of public support, so far. If it turns out that people
have been asked to make sacrifices for numbers pulled out of
hats and conclusions jumped to over long distances, I don't
think the reaction is going to be pleasant. I had the same
experiences as this "optimistic environmentalist" fellow,
that is, I started out with a predisposition to believe and
went looking for accounts of the related physical phenomena
to support the arguments I intended to make. They weren't
there.
If you think _I'm_ simple-minded wait 'til you run into the
rest of the folk, who are being told, even as we speak, that
the enviros are a bunch of creeping-socialist, nanny-state-
loving power-hungry con artists who just want to take their
SUVs away because they don't have the Soviet Union to worship
any more.</PRE>
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<P>Okay. We appear to have been talking about different things, and I seem
to have misread your intentions, so I apologize humbly (and publicly) for
the invective.
<P>Though I can see what you are getting at, I don't think the public have
been asked to make any significant sacrifices for the sake of the environment.
Not where I come from, anyway (Australia). Working people make their real
sacrifices (wages down, hours up, unions out) in the name of corporate
profitability. The 'people' who are asked to make 'sacrifices' for the
environment are paper mills, pastoralists, woodchippers and mining companies
- and they never do it, obviously enough, and never will until there is
some way of compelling them to.
<P>Eric Leher</HTML>