Wildhawk

The Middle Ground with Global Warming

The closet environmentalist in me feels the need to decry the effects of global warming, but I realize that the science is just not clear, and may never be. The earth does seem to go through natural warming and cooling cycles, and while we may impact that at the margins via human activity, it's lunacy to suggest we can control the outcome through our actions.

That having been said, it's clear to anyone who cares to look that we are squandering our natural resources. The calls to simply drill more on US territory miss the point: our natural resources are finite and we're burning through them (literally) now at a faster rate than ever before. Regardless of what resource to which you refer, ultimately they are going to run out, and possibly in our lifetimes for some resources. To me, that says it's incumbent upon us to conserve and find ways to do as much as we can to recycle what's used into something usable again and spend aggressively on research into renewable sources of energy (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc.). It doesn't mean we stop using what natural resources we have, especially here in the US, but anything we can do to slow the pace of that usage is something we should be pursuing wholeheartedly.

It's good for the human race broadly because it makes our planet a safer and more enjoyable place to live, and is good for Americans specifically because we would have to rely less on foreign sources of energy (e.g. oil).