@Finn dAbuzz,
Quote:You do realize, don't you, that he's not bound to govern in accordance with your wishes?
I believe he
is bound to explain the reversal of any of his long-held positions — not in accordance with
my wishes — he owes it to the people who voted for him.
Quote:What he said on the campaign trail is meaningless unless you are going to hold all candidates to what they say.
If he begins to accept the prevalent understanding of CC then he will need to explain it to his followers because he had previously rejected the science. Otherwise he will appear to have been sucked into the dismal swamp of DC politics.
Quote:
No it doesn't if humanity is on the verge of extinction.
Well, we're
not on the verge of extinction. Many species of plants and animal are, and many natural systems — weather patterns, ocean currents, glaciers — are undergoing rapid (on a geological time scale) transformation. It is posited that these will affect human societies at some point in the future, but I doubt that they will lead directly to extinction. The calculus was that developing countries would be able to shift over to new energy technologies within an allowable window of time. And, as I pointed out, but you chose to ignore, China and India have made commitments to developing renewable energy and are showing pretty rapid progress.
Quote:We don't have more than these other countries because we stole their wealth.
And where did I say that? We don't "owe" these countries our prosperity. It's in our own best interests to help these countries achieve political and economic stability. It's not that dissimilar from the social services we provide to the poor in the USA — we don't "owe" the poor anything. We choose to provide them with some measure of relief because the alternative — a vast sea of unhealthy, hungry, angry, alienated people — leads quickly to social instability. That's not "leftist" ideology. It's common sense. Left and right don't enter the picture until we look at the
means by which we wish to accomplish our ends.
