Among my “doomster� friends, I frequently hear that a dictatorship is necessary to meet the threat of global warming, that people will not voluntarily do what is needed if it means sacrifice or inconvenience.
They say anybody with a brain knows we need to reduce population. Climate change is caused mainly by human activity; ergo, we need to have fewer humans. The Chinese successfully dictated family size and enforced one child per couple.
However, this same regime now savages China’s soil and rivers and pollutes everyone’s atmosphere. In this test of efficiency, totalitarianism is failing its one excuse for being. And environmentalists in China face severe government repression.
Instead, I want to speak for democracy — not the fraud perpetrated on Iraq under that name by Bush and the neocons, but the real stuff.
Given good information, our people rise to whatever needs doing, be it rescuing our Louisiana neighbors from flood and corrupt governance or changing the majority of the House and Senate to block an overreaching executive.
What has failed us is not our people, but biased and shallow media that failed to inform most Americans of impending climate crises back when less drastic sacrifice would be required of us.
Recent polls show Americans overwhelmingly regard global warming as a serious threat and that we want government action to help us combat it.
The groundwork for this awareness came from the labor of not only Al Gore, but a generation of activists in academia and independent media, going back at least 30 years.
Despite oil industry-financed campaigns to “manufacture doubt,� Americans are now ready to hear the unpleasant truth and deal with it.
Our government is not. What about “mainstream� media?
— Margaret Morris, Ventura
Leave a comment