<Climate change rant.

I think everyone, Left and Right, is being a bit too polarized on the climate change issue.

Everyone can agree that we are burning fossil fuels. Common sense says that can't go on forever because there is a limited supply of fossil fuels. Even if there were an unlimted supply of fossil fuels, a bit of inference would show that we can't burn them forever. Everytime we burn a fossil fuel, we consume not only the fuel, but oxygen from our atmosphere which combines to create either carbon dioxide or water. If we were able to burn an infinite supply of fossil fuels forever, sooner or later we'd consume all of our oxygen.

So whether AOC & company are right or not, sooner or later we need to transition from fossil fuels to something else.

The real issue is how to do that without destroying our civilization or our world.

AOC & company propose the absurd notion that we should switch from plentiful coal to less CO2 intensive fuels like natural gas and that we should spend boatloads of money to try to keep the climate from changing. They say we only have a few years left and that it may be too late anyway.

I don't know what you see where you live, but I can observe signs of the climate changing here in my local mountains. Glaciers are smaller than they used to be, and trees are growing higher up the mountains that they were back in the 70's. That's just what I can see locally. Whether that's man-made or not, it's happening. People have always adapted to changes. If something is changing, we should / must adapt.

Instead of arguing about whether or not climate change is a hoax, I think we'd all be well served to look at it from a resource conservation perspective.

Natural gas is specifically important because we derive much of our fertilizer and chemical industry from it. Fertilizer feeds us.

Oil is important because it is the basis for our plastics and transportation industries.

Burning oil and gas instead of coal is stupid from that perspective.

Proposals like the Paris Accords would cause more international shipping . . . which burns oil to fuel the ships. That makes more CO2 than localized production would . . . and it burns up a precious and irreplacable resource, oil.

AOC and crowd see a problem but only see one, draconian and impractical, solution. What they don't see is that their solutions will only make the problems worse.

We could actually talk to environmentalists and eco-nazis if we approached this from a different perspective.

We can't stop the burning of fossil fuels without starving ourselves and creating a host of other problems. What we can do is build infrastructure to deal with an ever changing world. If glaciers are melting and snows falling at higher elevevations, and if weather patterns become less predicatble, we need dams or underground storage to hold water. We need aqueducts to move that water, and we need power sources to make all that happen. If sea levels are rising, we should consider moving our coastal cities . . . gradually and as old buildings and infrastructure wear out.

This isn't a binary issue. There's a lot that Left and Right could agree on.

Even if there is no climate change, saving what oil and gas we have is a good idea. Even if there were no climate change, building dams and aqueducts will make us more able to grow food.