As a child, I remember having discussions which sometimes led to arguments over the popular topic of the moment. Without change, both sides of the discussion would be firm in their views until the decisive answer was handed down by a parent or an encyclopedia. That was pre-Google, if any of us can recall those days. It was a time when encyclopedia britannicas, not wikipedia, resolved disputes.
When no adults were available, or a vastly over-priced collection of books wasn’t handy, you had to end the dispute along a defined line of responses. ‘We agree to disagree,’ ‘whatever (thanks to Saved By The Bell),’ ‘think what you want to think but I KNOW I’m right,’ ‘Nuh-uhhhhhh,’ or the ever popular, ‘it’s science,’ would make the short list for common final arguments. All juvenile, and all were based on pride and lacking in facts. The ‘it’s science’ response was my favorite because it was an attempt to establish a certain fact out of the clear, blue sky.
When one side couldn’t successfully argue their way to the finish line, they would attempt to bludgeon the other side into submission by suggesting that the facts were on their side and any resistance was futile.
I was reminded of this argument today when reading through Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) comments at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. She was speaking on the issue of “climate change,” a subtle, clever phrase shift away from “global warming” which suffers from a dwindling population of legitimate proponents in the scientific community. Speaker Pelosi began her comments to the gathered crowd by saying, “we are all in this together.” She hammered her point home by saying that goverments “should make decisions and choices based on science.”
She went on to deliver a dizzying array of comments, too scatter-shot and thoughtless for me to cover in this post. Some of the gems [read: eggs] she laid included: “The impact of climate change is a tremendous risk to the security and well-being of our countries;” “They also have to do it with openness, transparency and accountability to the people;” “everyone has to have their situation improved by it;” and “I do see this opportunity for climate change to be … a game-changer.”
As for my obviously differing view on the issue of “climate change,” they have zero argument from me that we should take ownership of our actions and be conservatives when it comes to the environment. Where Pelosi and Co. lose me and a large portion of the population is when they politicize and polarize the issue on the basis of incomplete information, all in the name of “science.” It is an intimation that we are to bow at the alter of “science” and adjust EVERY aspect of our lives on the basis thereof.
This begs a painfully obvious question: how do we account for errors, agendas, and a lack of information with regard to this science? Make no mistake, this argument isn’t, ‘we don’t have all the information, so we shouldn’t act,’ rather I am saying that we should preserve our “well-being” by avoiding costly jaunts into a green economy without any significant return on investment, and look upon the Al Gores and Nancy Pelosis of the world with a politically skeptical eye.
Instead of heavy-handed suggestions that we let climatologists determine what is best for our countries, economies, and personal lives, all under the basic argument that ‘it’s science,’ shouldn’t we be having a rational, non-political discussion about the environment? I suppose that is too much to ask for with the stellar leadership of House Speaker Pelosi. What do you think?
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