04-04-2013, 11:46 PM
Conservation was once a strong element in conservatism, and certainly in the Republican Party. It's not a matter of liberal vs conservative, except that a lot of liberals or "progressives" find common cause with environmentalism at a certain level. Unfortunately, that level can often be a kind of reflex anti-corporate and anti-business consciousness that automatically blames BP and Monsanto for all the ills of this earth. The idea that nuclear power is bad for the environment is silly, but it goes along with fright about immediate damage to us humans, so it has a lot of supporters. Large environmental organizations get a lot of members and money from that group of people, so they don't dare take a rational, scientific point of view. Instead, they recite the mantra "solar, geothermal, biodiesel" without taking the time to calculate how much, how soon, or how expensive.
I've been following the Solar I project since it first got started, and I used to point out that it took a lot of land, truck trips, overhead wiring, and the assorted damage to the desert in order to generate a few hundred thousand watts. (For those who have not followed this approach, it involved building hundreds of large mirrors on swivels, and pointing them at the top of a tower which could store the heat, and out of that process, generate some electricity.) It's not impossibly stupid, but there may be other, less damaging approaches, particularly the use of solar electric panels, which have come way down in price and can be distributed a lot more easily.
There has been a bit of progress in terms of internationally regulating the oceanic fisheries, but I don't know whether it will be enough in the long run. It seems to have done well in terms of the whales, but that is completely different from the cod and tuna fisheries.
I think the real tragedy has been the failure -- resistance, actually -- to warnings about human population growth, warnings that became widely publicized in the late 1960s, and have been dangerously prophetic. Paul Erlich (The Population Bomb) misunderstood some economic issues, and famously lost a bet with a famous conservative economist over long term trends in prices of metals and so forth, but the overall damage to the surface of the earth continues. If we had half the population, we wouldn't be looking at the same level of global warming, just to take one obvious example. But somehow the population problem is never brought up nowadays. One culprit in this failure is those same environmental organizations, which hide from the topic for fear of attracting even more anger than they already do.
I've been following the Solar I project since it first got started, and I used to point out that it took a lot of land, truck trips, overhead wiring, and the assorted damage to the desert in order to generate a few hundred thousand watts. (For those who have not followed this approach, it involved building hundreds of large mirrors on swivels, and pointing them at the top of a tower which could store the heat, and out of that process, generate some electricity.) It's not impossibly stupid, but there may be other, less damaging approaches, particularly the use of solar electric panels, which have come way down in price and can be distributed a lot more easily.
There has been a bit of progress in terms of internationally regulating the oceanic fisheries, but I don't know whether it will be enough in the long run. It seems to have done well in terms of the whales, but that is completely different from the cod and tuna fisheries.
I think the real tragedy has been the failure -- resistance, actually -- to warnings about human population growth, warnings that became widely publicized in the late 1960s, and have been dangerously prophetic. Paul Erlich (The Population Bomb) misunderstood some economic issues, and famously lost a bet with a famous conservative economist over long term trends in prices of metals and so forth, but the overall damage to the surface of the earth continues. If we had half the population, we wouldn't be looking at the same level of global warming, just to take one obvious example. But somehow the population problem is never brought up nowadays. One culprit in this failure is those same environmental organizations, which hide from the topic for fear of attracting even more anger than they already do.