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发帖数: 10729 | 1 By John Stossel Published January 22, 2014 FoxNews.com
The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress, says this year, there will be
a major policy battle over "climate change." Why?
We already waste billions on pointless gestures that make people think we're
addressing global warming, but the earth doesn't notice or care. What
exactly is "global warming" anyway?
That's really four questions:
1. Is the globe warming? Probably. Global temperatures have risen. Climate
changes. Always has. Always will.
2. Is the warming caused by man? Maybe. There's decent evidence that at
least some of it is.
3. But is global warming a crisis? Far from it. It's possible that it will
become a crisis. Some computer models suggest big problems, but the models
aren't very accurate. Some turned out to be utterly wrong. Clueless
scaremongers like Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Cal., seize on weather disasters to
blame man's carbon output. After Oklahoma's tragic tornadoes last year,
Boxer stood on the floor of the Senate and shrieked, "Carbon could cost us
the planet!" But there were actually fewer tornadoes last summer.
4. If the globe is warming, can America do anything about it? No. What we do
now is pointless. I feel righteous riding my bike to work. That's just
shallow. Even if all Americans replaced cars with bicycles, switched to
fluorescent light bulbs, got solar water heaters, etc., it would have no
discernible effect on the climate. China builds a new coal-fueled power
plant almost every week; each one obliterates any carbon reduction from all
our windmills and solar panels.
Weirdly, the only thing that's reduced America's carbon output has been our
increased use of natural gas (it releases less greenhouse gas than oil and
coal). But many environmentalists fight the fracking that produces it.
Someday, we'll probably invent technology that could reduce man's greenhouse
gas creation, but we're nowhere close to it now. Rather than punish poor
people with higher taxes on carbon and award ludicrous subsidies to Al Gore'
s "green" investments, we should wait for the science to advance.
If serious warming happens, we can adjust, as we've adjusted to big changes
throughout history.
It will be easier to adjust if America is not broke after wasting our
resources on trendy gimmicks like windmills.
Environmental activists say that if we don't love their regulations, we "don
't care about the earth." Bunk. We can love nature and still hate the
tyranny of bureaucrats' rules. We do need some rules. It's good that
government built sewage treatment plants.
Today, the rivers around Manhattan are so clean that I swim in them. It's
good that we forced industry to stop polluting the air. Scrubbers in
smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars made our lives better.
The air gets cleaner every time someone replaces an old car with a new one.
But those were measures against real pollution -- soot, particulates, sulfur
, etc.
What global warming hysterics want to fight is merely carbon dioxide. That's
what plants breathe. CO2 may prove to be a problem, but we don't know that
now.
The world has real problems, though: malaria, malnutrition, desperate
poverty. Our own country, while relatively rich, is deep in debt. Obsessing
about greenhouse gases makes it harder to address these more serious
problems.
Environmentalists assume that as people get richer and use more energy, they
pollute more. The opposite is true. As nations industrialize, they pay more
attention to pollution. Around the world, it's the most prosperous nations
that now have the cleanest air and water.
Industrialization allows people to use fewer resources. Instead of burning
trees for power, we make electricity from natural gas. We figure out how to
get more food from smaller pieces of land. And one day we'll probably even
invent energy sources more efficient than oil and gas.
We'll use them because they're cost-effective, not because government forces
us to.
So let's chill out about global warming. We don't need more micromanagement
from government. We need less.
Then free people -- and rapidly increasing prosperity -- will create a
better world. | s******8
发帖数: 7105 | 2 大气中的二氧化碳如果到达1%， 人就开始不适应了。 猛烧煤、油加上气候变化 ， 植
物死亡， 最后人类灭绝。 呵呵。 |
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