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1
- #41
moltenmetal
Chemical
- Jun 5, 2003
- 5,504
Back to "what do the Greens want":
I have absolutely no patience for anyone who makes public policy decisions on the basis of religion. I don't care what religion you're talking about, regardless whether the supernatural force being worshipped is a god or an ecosystem. "Environmentalism" too often is a religion, full of absolutes and lean on reason.
All of life is about compromise and choices amongst various options with benefits and harm associated with each one. When "absolutes" are brought into the decision-making process on public policy, and the "public" doesn't have a uniform, shared set of beliefs and values, the process is really tough and some people's feelings are going to get hurt, period. But we have to make decisions, and we have to do that as rationally as we can.
Engineers have to be pragmatists. Being a pragmatist doesn't mean that you assign a zero value to an unobstructed landscape, an old-growth forest or a planet with a mean temperature not affected significantly by human activity, merely because these things are "hard" to assign a monetary value to them. That too is a mistake that has been made far too often in past. Rather, it means that we have to assist in pointing out the costs and benefits of ALL options, including the "do nothing" option.
In the case of wind power versus fossil fuel consumption, clearly wind power is the hands-down winner if you value human health and net environmental harm. But conservation wins against BOTH of these.
Pragmatically, we humans have to figure out how to live here on this planet without consuming finite resources in the wasteful, wanton, addicted way we currently do. Is that a value judgment on my part? Yes! But it's not based on some abstract notion of "absolutes"- it's simple arithmetic. There are nearly two billion people in China and India, and if they start consuming fossil fuels and similar resources at the rate that we do in the so-called "developed world", the emissions from this consumption will have us drowning in our own filth. Enormous human misery will result.
I have absolutely no patience for anyone who makes public policy decisions on the basis of religion. I don't care what religion you're talking about, regardless whether the supernatural force being worshipped is a god or an ecosystem. "Environmentalism" too often is a religion, full of absolutes and lean on reason.
All of life is about compromise and choices amongst various options with benefits and harm associated with each one. When "absolutes" are brought into the decision-making process on public policy, and the "public" doesn't have a uniform, shared set of beliefs and values, the process is really tough and some people's feelings are going to get hurt, period. But we have to make decisions, and we have to do that as rationally as we can.
Engineers have to be pragmatists. Being a pragmatist doesn't mean that you assign a zero value to an unobstructed landscape, an old-growth forest or a planet with a mean temperature not affected significantly by human activity, merely because these things are "hard" to assign a monetary value to them. That too is a mistake that has been made far too often in past. Rather, it means that we have to assist in pointing out the costs and benefits of ALL options, including the "do nothing" option.
In the case of wind power versus fossil fuel consumption, clearly wind power is the hands-down winner if you value human health and net environmental harm. But conservation wins against BOTH of these.
Pragmatically, we humans have to figure out how to live here on this planet without consuming finite resources in the wasteful, wanton, addicted way we currently do. Is that a value judgment on my part? Yes! But it's not based on some abstract notion of "absolutes"- it's simple arithmetic. There are nearly two billion people in China and India, and if they start consuming fossil fuels and similar resources at the rate that we do in the so-called "developed world", the emissions from this consumption will have us drowning in our own filth. Enormous human misery will result.
