All it takes is a little common sense

by

Gerald Plessner

Paul, who has retired to Maui, e-mails me every week to attack my commentaries. He's a typical neo-conservative who blames liberals for everything. Last week he sent me a Wall Street Journal article about global warming and asked what I thought about the issue. I knew his question was really about Al Gore, whom he despises, but I left Gore out of my response because Gore didn't create the problem.

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The industrial world is only about 300 years old. To believe that the earth's climate and nature haven't been changed by the pollution from industry and transportation over all that time is counter-intuitive. It just defies common sense to think that the huge increase of pollution caused by burning fossil fuels --- primarily coal for electricity and oil for transportation --- haven't changed the atmosphere, and certainly for the worse.

You don't have to take into account the destruction caused by harvesting natural resources like the topping of mountains in West Virginia to mine coal, or the elimination of the tropical rain forests to obtain wood and oil. You have to come to the conclusion that substantial and permanent harm has been done by pollution.

If you accept that negative changes have happened, which I do, then the next questions are "how much" and "how soon".

Given that fuel use will increase ever more rapidly because of the modernization of China, India and other countries, we have to be concerned and we must begin to do something to slow and then reverse the damage.

I believe that common sense commands us to conserve more, if only to leave a legacy to our grandchildren and their grandchildren. Your descendants, whom you know, will know their descendants who will suffer and perhaps die early because of our refusal to worry about global warming now. It is not some distant thing!

I believe a greater power --- call it God, call it evolution, call it the Big Bang, I don't care --- caused Earth to be a unique and amazing place in the universe. To neglect this wonderful gift is a crime against humanity and God.

Incredibly, there are people today who look forward to the Earth's destruction. Such foolishness is hard to fathom but it is a fact of life on earth. I believe that this idiocy is a force that encourages the disbelief in the science about global warming. It is part of a pervasive anti-intellectualism that cripples our pursuit of knowledge and scientific truth.

Those who believe the irrational End Times scenarios prophesied by men two thousand years ago, should be challenged for their ideas, which I believe are sinful beyond comprehension.

Now about how many scientists believe that global warming is happening, I believe the following:

A great majority of independent scientists are concerned about global warming to the point of calling it an eminent crisis. More than 1,000 scientists from around the world have written about it, according to someone's last count. And they know more about the subject than the Rush Limbaughs and Paul Harveys of the world!

Almost all the opposition comes from think tanks funded by energy and other corporations with a stake in keeping things as they are. They employ scientists who agree with them and the scientists do just that. They are also sponsored by the conservative billionaires who support such things for their own selfish reasons.

It defies common sense to believe that any of those individuals come to the issue from an objective point of view. And if you think for a moment that the Wall Street Journal comes from a neutral position on the subject, I have a bridge to nowhere in Alaska I want to sell you. The Journal is notoriously biased in favor of big business and Wall Street. If you think they care about your great-grandchildren's future lives....well, you get my point.

What I don't understand about modern America is how such individuals and corporations can be so un-American, so uncaring, and so disrespectful of their own religious traditions and understandings.

How can they care so little for the future of the human race, be so rapacious that "money now" is the only thing they care about, that they will actively fight what is a rational common sense point of view that our universe is a finite resource, and that a retirement bonus to one executive of $248 million is more important than life on earth for human beings.

It makes me wonder about their lack of common sense.

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Dear Reader: If you believe that my comments deserve to be read by more people, please forward this column to the editor or opinion page editor of your local newspaper. Ask them to contact their syndication services about adding my commentaries to their authors list. They can also contact me at gerald@geraldplessner.com. Don't you agree that we need more common sense if our grandchildren are to survive?