Tuesday November 29, 2011, 6:58 am

"The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren't wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.
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This is an excerpt from the Alternet article first published by Naomi Klein in The Nation. To fully understand the above paragraphs a reading of the full article is needed.

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 7:20 am
noted, thank you

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 1:01 pm
noted....capitalism is evil, its all about yourself, your wants, GREED, and it doesn't matter who are what is destroyed as long as the capitalist gets what they want.....humanity is killing the earth, there is no other place for life....

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 4:52 pm
Since the industrial revolution began about 150 years ago, the damage to the natural world has been catastrophic. Our capitalist system (as it is now designed), will eventually use up all of the earth's natural resources and pollute and destroy everything else.

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 5:26 pm
Well, we all know how CONservatives Hate Trojans..;)

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 5:37 pm
"Anyone who thinks that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist."
Sir David Attenborough
Noted, shared and thank you Kit

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 6:59 pm
The danger is real and uges NOW.

Let's continue doing what we can do.

Alone, we can do almost nothing.
Together we are changing our world.

Courage and onward, Rainbow Warriors!

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 7:19 pm
What a great idea...I've been thinking too small!

Tuesday November 29, 2011, 7:33 pm
Noted thankyou....

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 4:40 am
Thanks for the article.

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 5:34 am
I agree Terry. It is a great idea. Perhaps we need to refocus.

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 6:01 am
It's amazing what poor education will do for you, or better said won't do for you. Among the major crimes here is the inability to think, poor analysis, inabliity to ask the right questions, not asking for factual information, inabliity to discern fact from fiction.......all create a dependancy for others to make decisions for you.

American is so vulernable to each and evey loud mouth attention grabbing emotional whim because it seems impossible to make even simple decisions, not to mention ones that influence the quality of life or even survival decisions. The most obvious example of it is the republican presidential campaign, these candiates would be laughed right out of public view, outlandish and bazaar representations more in line with freak show entertainment.

If we follow their logic, then perhaps mother nature is a communist conspiring against capitalist wellbeing. The left has convinced mother nature to politically align itself with communist doctrine? Denial of global warming and the human hand involved in it is a psychotic denial of reality. What at this sensitive point in time we should let the psychotics navigate?

Thanks Kit, good article, important topic.

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 8:04 am
Noted - thanks.

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 9:28 am
Thanks

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 10:01 am
Thank you Kit. Your statements are well thought out and the conclusions based on the available evidence. Too Bad that the deniers are blind and deaf to reality.

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 10:37 am

We have forgotten that science is not political, it is science and has no opinions only study, experiment and results. The results and observations are all around us, therefore to distract us from reality, to focus on anything but the money behind the curtain the same old flimflam, duplicity and chicanery are dragged out to protect the status-quo and fool the public into a fear state. "The commies are coming." No, in fact the weather is changing, there is massive growth of deserts, a shrinking of the polar caps, crops are already being affected, our air is filthy, our water polluted and as long as a profit is to made, it will go on - unless we stop them.

Knowledge is power!

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 1:39 pm
"We have forgotten that science is not political, it is science and has no opinions only study, experiment and results."

Right...we have forgotten that. AND...we've also forgotten that, to Christians, they have "DOMINION" over the plants and animals...and so, Genesis gives them the "right" to trash the planet as they please.

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 3:43 pm
smart

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 5:45 pm
Noted.....thank you for sharing with us....

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 8:27 pm
Money trying to kill Mother Earth . it will never stop *sadsadsad*

Thursday December 1, 2011, 12:57 pm
ahh.. Conservatives. Aren't they a great bunch -.-..

Thursday December 1, 2011, 1:14 pm

yeah, Victoria but the question is a great bunch of what?