We literally saw the results of unregulated burning of fossil fuels in our US cities in the 60's, 70's and 80's. As you drove toward Manhattan you'd see this brown dome over its skyline. The streets stunk of automobile and diesel exhaust and I remember returning home at night with my eyes burning from it.
I think we all can agree that pollution, in its many forms, is really bad and we should do what we can to not make it worse. In the US, we cleaned up the air over many years with pollution control devices on automobiles, regulating smoke stacks and reducing what we burn. As a kid, I remember my elementary school having an incinerator and we would bring waste paper baskets to the incinerator room where the trash would be burned! Thankfully we stopped that.
One of the resulting gasses from combustion is Carbon Dioxide or CO2. It is an inert gas but it is classified as a greenhouse gas. It helps keep the earth warm but too much of it will cause the earth to get too warm. Don't believe it? It's a fact. Look at Venus, where the atmosphere is 95 percent CO2 and hot enough to melt led.
The carbon from decayed plant and animal life has been stored beneath the earth for millennia upon millennia. We have been digging, tapping and pumping this carbon up from the ground, burning it and releasing it into our atmosphere for over a century.
Sure, there have many periods where the earth was much warmer and I'm even willing to consider that we are in a natural warming cycle but worldwide, more and more people, burning oil, gas, coal. Driving more and more cars and manufacturing in countries where there are barely or no regulations.
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| India |
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| Bagladesh |
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| Nigeria |
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| China |
So while it is not solely an American problem, we are and have been a big contributor to the problem, proportional to our population. Mostly because we are innovators and have developed technologies before anyone else. We also happen to discover the consequences of these technologies first and, to our credit, have found ways to do things cleaner and smarter over time.
So how does this become political? Democrats tend to be in favor of more regulation, especially when it comes to the environment, so perhaps Republicans believe this climate change is just a way of creating more regulation that will stifle business. On the other hand, Republicans are business friendly. Maybe too business friendly - to the point where they choose to believe what is convenient for business and what they believe will improve the economy. Big oil contributes to both parties which may explain inaction on climate change legislation.
What is really a shame is in this day of "fake news", nobody believes facts anymore. Or no one knows what to believe anymore. That is the real purpose of propaganda. There are a lot of agendas out there and the mainstream media is not always correct but most admit it when they are wrong. The fact is an overwhelming number of climate scientists believe that man is at least influencing climate change. It is already too late to prevent or stop it. It's already here but the good new is that we can lessen the severity.
Even if you are on the fence about it, when there is a credible threat, what is the prudent thing to do? Take precautionary measures, just in case. We have one earth, one planet, one home. We can do many things to combat climate change. Solar and wind energy are great, no matter if you believe in anthhropogenic climate change or not. It does not generate air pollution, which is bad no matter what. It is less expensive and it creates new jobs.
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