A Few Reasons to Mitigate Climate Change
In his comment to my recent piece on global climate change, Cameron Atwood provides a wonderful analysis, which concludes:
This strikes me as very much like buying insurance – if nothing happens, you lose some money in exchange for peace of mind – if something does happen, and you’re not insured, God help you.
Do you have insurance?
Exactly right. And actually, the case is stronger than you laid out, since most of the actions we need to take to mitigate climate change will result in better health for all life forms and a more civil, just and peaceful world. Not a bad bargain.
mitigating climate change is like buying insurance….
Yes, but I know many people that are insurance poor. Life insurance salespeople are notorious for over estimating the risk and overcharging for the premiums, especially on whole life insurance.
Protecting the environment from climate change may be a noble goal but is it still noble at any cost? There are many affordable environmental solutions that will incidentally reduce our carbon footprint without costing us an arm and a leg. I would include wind turbines, geothermal and tree farming with an emphasis on whole tree harvesting.
We need to go after the low hanging fruit before climbing the tree and going out on a limb to harvest energy that has a negative payback for our efforts.
Craig has listed a number of these ill devised schemes and they include biodiesel, shock absorber capture of kinetic energy to charge batteries and numerous others.