Once any real problem has been drug into a political rathole and been made into a lucrative political issue, it is virtually impossible to get the problem back out of the rathole so that it can be studied, researched and analyzed as the problem that it actually is.

Applied simplism and ideological sound bites are the lifeblood and the heartbeat of politics. The fact that neither has content that has any real value just doesn’t matter.

Will it get votes on election day?

Yes!

Then, by golly, that’s a good thing! Let’s keep saying it! It must be right if the voters believe it.

Sorry, folks. I may not be the most skeptic person in the nation where global warming is concerned but I am unabashedly cynical about politics, politicians, political parties and political operatives. (Consultants, pollsters, etc.)

I am especially cynical about elected officials who use the position to which they were elected by the rest of us as a stage from which to run for reelection instead of doing the job that they asked us to elect them to do.

Part of his problem with Al Gore is that he is so narrow-minded that he is unwilling to view the other side of any issue. He has stated a position several decades ago and only looks for confirmation that he is right. He is always right and anyone that disagrees with him is not only wrong but ignorant and dangerous.

Unfortunately for us all, the media and politicians and like-minded people have believed in him and his cause.

What is dangerous is that if you tell a big lie long enough then people will believe it. Now, Mr. Gore does not believe it is a lie. I believe he truly believes that global warming is all man’s fault and he probably believes catastrophes and calamities now and in the future are the result of man.

What Mr. Gore fails miserably in is critical thinking (looking at the facts, listening to dissent and other peoples interpretations of the facts) and economics (how badly would we damage the world economy – who would be the losers – mainly the poor).

But back to his speech…

Why is the US losing jobs to foreign countries? A good bit is due to US government regulations (labor and environmental), taxes, and laws. Would it get better with Mr. Gore’s plan – absolutely not.

Gasoline prices rising? Sending money to the Middle East? That one is a no-brainer. The US government policy is specifically tailored to rely on someone else for the oil. The US doesn’t want to use their own resources. Send a couple of 100 billion dollars to unstable governments every year and watch as the value of your dollar drops. Then the price of imports (gas) to up.

Replace all coal for electricity in 10 years? ridiculous.

Replace every car in the US in 10 years with a non-existent car that would cost much more than today’s cars? Impossible.

Completely redesign and rebuild the US economy in 10 years? I couldn’t write any better fiction than that.

Climate change is bad now? You can cherry pick your catastrophes all you want, Mr. Gore. I could do the same for the rest of history.

Oh, and what happens when the US invests trillions of dollars to solve a problem that may not be a problem (Still no one has proved that global warming is manmade. Many people have dispelled the THEORY that CO2 is the cause. – but they are the dissenters who should be punished for their crimes against nature.)

I could go on, but my computer is warming the room up too much and the ice in my glass of water is melting. Coincidence? I have a theory about computer generated global warming….

If you can read past The Goracle’s hyperbole and his overly simplistic obsession with atmospheric CO2 driven global climate change (Atmospheric CO2 is not a driver, it is a modifier.) this is a helluva good speech.

The problems and challenges that we face as a nation and as a people are there in stark detail.

The concern that I have is that if a problem is defined in a way that is an overly simplistic distorted caricature of the actual problem then the proposed solution will almost always be overly simplistic and the expectations for mitigating or solving the problem will be overly optimistic.

An issue is a topic of discussion and debate. Categorically, an issue can be one of three things. It can be a problem which is something for which there is a real and workable solution; it can be a situation which can be improved and its effects mitigated but which cannot be totally eliminated; or it can be a condition which is something over which we have no control or influence in which case our only course of action is to develop a better understanding of the condition so we can then learn better ways of living with the condition.

Even defining our energy situation as a problem may be overly optimistic. At this time, it is not possible for us to totally rule out that that our energy future is a situation or, perhaps, even a condition that we will have to learn to live with.

Going back to horse and buggy days is not an available option, either. Just as we don’t have enough farm land to produce the corn and other crops for biofuels, neither do we have enough farm land to provide for all the horses that we would need if we intend to be able to eat ourselves. Horses eat more than people, you know. Thus it takes more productive farm land to provide for a horse than it takes to provide for a human.

Have you noticed how it is always the availability of natural resources that establishes the parameters of the possible? Do you reckon there may be an explainable reason for that?

I think there very well may be an explainable reason for that. After all, our technologies of all kinds actually do just one thing for us: They enable us to make indirect beneficial use of kinds of energy and sources of energy that we are not biologically able to use directly and beneficially.

Have a wonderful day.