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What follows is an email exchange on a private mailing list between Matthew and David. Please keep in mind that the level of sarcasm often runs high on this mailing list. Matthew wrote: To which David replied: To which Matthew queried: To which David answered (apparently from a soapbox): I'm not sure which part didn't make sense to you, but none of it made any sense to me. And I wrote it. But that won't stop me from expanding on it. All this whimpering and whining about the greenhouse effect is, for the most part, pointless. Man didn't have any influence on the earth during any of the previous ice ages, droughts or expanded tropical zones. Now, for whatever reason, it seems to some people that the earth is getting a few degrees warmer and we're going to melt the ice pack and all the coastal lands are going to be flooded. So what. It won't be the first time. Nor the last. Whether we do or don't have any influence on changes in the climate doesn't really matter. The consensus of opinion now is that we're depleting the ozone layer and we're all going to get cancer and die. Or that we're filling the sky with to carbon dioxide. So! In the big scheme of things the earth will be fine. We're little more than a pimple on an elephant's ass. We may kill ourselves off. Perhaps all the other life forms too. Though neither is very likely. But it doesn't really matter. The earth will still be here. And it's fairly indifferent to whether we're here or not. I'm not advocating that we toss all of our efforts to improve on how we care for the earth, but we should apply a little common sense in the process. The EPA and government in general do not allow for common sense. All the hub-bub about some species going extinct is also pretty much over done. Something like 98% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. And not at the hand of mankind. Most of them were gone before we ever entered the picture. So why are we holding up economic progress for the sake of some bird or squirrel? And when progress is allowed to proceed an incredible amount of money and other resources must be allocated to build a preserve. I won't even begin to rant about the fact that people aren't allowed into many of these reserves. The Exxon Valdez is a good example. It seems rather silly that we, and 'we' includes pretty much everyone, except Larry, who drives a car, think that we can move vast amounts of oil day after day, year after year and never spill a drop. Oil spills are bound to happen. Again, I'm not suggesting that we toss the baby out with the bath water, but some reasonableness should be applied. Exxon spent how much to clean up the Valdez spill? 3 billion? 4 billion? Whatever the number is, it's ridiculous. They could have spent a billion dollars cleaning up the spill and I'll venture a guess that Prince William Sound would look about the same today as it looks after spending 4 billion and waiting a decade. Maybe a better way for them to have spent the other 3 billion would be to retrofit as many ships as 3 billion dollars would do. Including those of their competitors. At least the likelihood of future spills would have been substantially reduced. Or perhaps the money could have been spent on developing new methods to contain and cleanup future spills. Do you have any idea how many dollars were spent on saving sea otters? Try $40,000 each. Now that's dumb. Not to mention that they flew in lobster and crayfish for the sea otters to eat. Now there's irony. We should save one animal at a cost of $40,000 and feed it a bunch a lobsters. Let's kill one species for the sake of another and call it humanity. I can't help but wonder how many children went to bed hungry on those same nights that sea otters feasted on lobster. |