environmental news - couple of quotes

[jinasphinx]

The New Yorker's interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, whoever she is, has the best summary I've seen of global warming. And a great quote about the controversy:

To focus on the degree of disagreement, rather than on the degree of consensus, is, I think, fundamentally misguided. If ten people told you your house was on fire, you would call the fire department. You wouldn’t really care whether some of them thought that the place would be incinerated in an hour and some of them thought it would take a whole day.

A plan to quietly sell a large amount of public lands was defeated by environmentalists and hunters working together: "'There's absolutely no question about what's brought us closer together,' agrees Oregon hunter and prominent outdoor columnist Pat Wray. 'It's the Bush administration.'"

(I think the Secure Rural Schools proposal to sell National Forest land is still on the table though, because it's part of the proposed 2007 federal budget. Found a link about the extended comment period.)

Comments

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

It's pretty disingenuous to panic about selling say, most forest service land. The current regulations mean that private owners would probably be better stewards of most of it than lessees are. As it stands, barring an environmentalist standing in front of the trucks, there's almost no reason for a lessee not to clear-cut and return a blasted lunar landscape to the forest service. If they actually owned the land, they'd have a genuine incentive to restore it. Further, it's only recently that the Forest Service got to take credit for tourist revenue on public land--before, the only way they could get money from the land was to sell timber off of it. Perverse incentive, anyone?

To be sure, there's a lot of public land that shouldn't be sold, but keeping some of it in possession of the federal government just makes it subject to the loudest special interest group of the moment--it's pretty brave to assume it'll always be the environmental lobby, as that's not what history shows.

And, of course, we already know how to cure global warming--the break in the hockey stick is when we started controlling particulates but not greenhouse gases. All we need to do is smog up the place a bit and the warming will stop. Otherwise, surely there would be *some* rising temperatures for the first 300 years of industrial revolution. Now, that might not be a great solution, but it does point up that there's more to this than meets the eye. An argument about degree is all well and good, but you don't know what to do about your house being on fire unless you know whether it's caused by say, a gas leak, a spreading wildfire, or a lava flow. The responses are entirely different. Let's hear it for poorly constructed sound-bite analogies!

Of course the really smart thing to do when your house is on fire is get *out*. So this means we all agree that NASA is underfunded, right?