LogicalOpinion.com

Global Warming Alarmists: I Don't Believe You

So you think that global warming is real? A key issue? You agree with Academy Award and Nobel Peace Prize winner and chief global warming luminary Al Gore that the climate “crisis” is a “true planetary emergency” and a “moral and spiritual challenge to all humanity?”

I don’t.

More importantly, I don’t believe you truly believe it either.

After all, if you were really concerned about global warming…

…you’d stop eating beef, milk and all associated dairy products immediately. Livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases worldwide—more than all planes, trains and automobiles on the entire planet combined. Cows belch and flatulate methane (up to a whopping 130 gallons per cow daily), a gas with 21 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide. So if you talk about the dangers of global warming but had a steak for dinner and milk with your cereal this morning, you're far from convincing.

…you’d push for more nuclear power plants. Only 14% of U.S. energy comes from nuclear power—the rest comes from sources that are major greenhouse gas producers: petroleum (40%), coal (23%) and natural gas (23%). France, on the other hand, generates 78% of its energy needs from nuclear power, and it has the cleanest air (and lowest electricity bills) of any industrialized economy in the world. More nuclear energy would immediately and massively lower greenhouse gas emissions (even a doubling to 28% would be the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing carbon emissions from all U.S. passenger cars). Have you petitioned Congress to allow the building of more nuclear power plants?

…you’d stop using air conditioning in your home and car. Mankind survived several hundred thousand years without A/C, and still does in the vast majority of the world. Maybe you can too. Or is feeling nice and cool today more important to you than the whole world supposedly feeling too hot tomorrow?

…you’d live in a smaller house, closer to work. Everyone else in the world does. Or are you somehow special and exempt? Al Gore, at least, seems to think so: his Tennessee mansion consumes 20 times more energy per year than the average U.S. household, which in turn consumes far more than those in other countries. And in that vein, how about the hypocrisy of the Hollywood set, who give Gore’s movie an Oscar while being chauffered in by limo to the Academy Awards from their energy-guzzling palatial mansions.

…you’d forego pets. Let’s face it: they’re cute, but they’re also furry little CO2 emitters on legs, and they eat a massive amount of food, which is energy-intensive to produce and primarily meat-based (see cow issue). Or is the love you get from Fido more important to you than entire islands disappearing from projected rising sea levels?

… you’d buy only locally produced foods. Nothing is more ironic than seeing a global warmist buying bananas in a Chicago supermarket. Where, exactly, did that banana come from? Central America? From a banana plantation onto a diesel train to the coast. Then a refrigerated container on a ship to the U.S. Then a refrigerated warehouse. Then a refrigerated truck to the supermarket. How much energy (and greenhouse gases) were expended so that you could enjoy that banana split? Let’s not even talk about ice cream (deep refrigeration of a dairy product), or the French cheese section at Whole Foods (refrigerated dairy products flown in from across the Atlantic). Is the satisfying of your taste buds more important than all the kids in Africa that will supposedly die from increases in global temperatures?

…you wouldn’t go on vacation away from where you live. Unless you plan on traveling by bicycle, that trip you’ve been planning is entirely dependent on oil, be it by car, train or—God forbid—the tons of kerosene consumed by jet aircraft. Or is all the coastal devastation global warming will allegedly entail merely the price to pay for your Cancun beach getaway?

…you’d dramatically cut back on commercial entertainment. What, exactly, is the carbon footprint of a blockbuster movie filmed in multiple locations around the world? How much energy does it take to light up all those sets, power all those computer effects, and air-condition all those movie theaters? How about all those TV shows? How many trees were felled and shipped to print all the books? How much electricity are you using annually to power all your electronic gadgets—from cell phones to internet to video games to ipods to flat-screen TVs. Remember, most people in the world do not have any of these, so if you do, you’re a primary global warming contributor.

…you’d stop having kids. After all, the crux of the global warming scare is that humans are causing it. Less humans, less warming. Why directly contribute to Gore’s “true planetary emergency” by increasing the population?

But you’re not doing any of these things.

So no, I don’t believe the global warming alarmism. People who truly believe something don’t just talk—they act.

Until I start seeing global warming believers actually doing things that match the severity of their rhetoric, consider me a rational skeptic. Especially when the so-called “solutions” to the global warming “problem” sound remarkably like the same political agenda that these same folks were previously pushing under different guises.

You want to convince me that global warming is real? Fine. Show me by your actions that you actually believe it first. Until then, save the hot air.

The Case for Guns

Should private citizens be allowed to own guns? Liberals say no; conservatives say yes.

While both want what is best for the country, liberals and conservatives approach the issue from different perspectives: liberals focus entirely on the societal costs of guns, while conservatives weigh those against the major societal benefits of private gun ownership.

The Liberal Viewpoint

The liberal position against private gun ownership is straightforward: guns are an instrument of force and violence, and in the hands of private citizens will only increase violence in the country. After all, one cannot commit a crime with a gun if there is no gun to commit a crime with.

From this viewpoint, the liberal solution is very clear: disallow private citizens from owning guns and society will benefit. There will be less violent crime and accidental shootings and the whole country will be a better place as a result.

And from this viewpoint, anyone arguing that private ownership of guns is a good thing must be uninformed, immoral or simply callous to the loss of life.

Not so fast, say conservatives—the issue is more complex than that. Not only is it naïve to think that making guns illegal will eliminate gun crime (criminals in every country always have access to guns), but this line of reasoning doesn’t take into account any of the major benefits of guns.

Cost and Benefit

To understand the conservative position, think of cars. They kill, every year, a far greater number of people than guns do. This is an undisputed fact. So should we then not allow private citizens to own cars? Wouldn’t we save thousands of lives every year and make the world a better place as a result?

Most would agree that this is an absurd proposition. But implicit in coming to that conclusion is the mental cost/benefit calculation that we make in evaluating the question: yes, ownership of cars leads to the deaths of some 45,000 Americans every year. But (and this is a very important but) the benefits of car ownership are perceived to far outweigh the costs, from convenience to greater productivity to pleasure to the health of the economy.

In coming to this conclusion, we are not uninformed, immoral or callous about the loss of life resulting from car ownership. We simply accept that there are tradeoffs and in this case the value of car ownership for society as a whole exceeds the cost.

The conservative position on private gun ownership follows the same logic. Liberals, they say, focus only on the costs of guns. The costs are real. But the discussion is not complete unless one weighs these costs against the benefits of private gun ownership.

From a conservative viewpoint, there are two main benefits to private ownership of guns, both of them equally important: protection of individual liberty and crime prevention. We’ll look at each of these in turn.

Protection of Individual Liberty

It is no accident that the right to individual gun ownership is clearly spelled out in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, directly following freedom of speech and religion.

After winning the bloody revolutionary war for independence, the drafters of the Constitution aimed to design an ideal form of government for the new country, one that would most effectively secure the rights and liberty of its people.

Astute students of history, they full well understood that whatever words were in the Constitution were worthless if the people didn’t have the power to protect their rights and resist against tyranny. And in this they followed the old Swiss dictum: “if weapons are a token of power, then in a democracy they belong in the hands of the people.”

Aristotle had said much the same centuries before: “those who possess and can wield arms are in a position to decide whether the constitution can continue or not.”

This has been true throughout history. One of the first and most crucial steps to dictatorial rule has always been to disarm the populace. Name any of the most repressive regimes in the history of either the modern or ancient world, and it is an absolute certainty that the people subjected to its rule were not allowed to carry arms. As Hitler himself stated, “history teaches us that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.”

Conversely, the opposite is true: an armed populace is one of the most effective checks against excessive government tyranny. Switzerland, for example, has the highest ownership of guns per capita of any country in the world. It is also one of the most successful democracies in history, the combination of which prompted Machiavelli to note in 1532 that they are “most armed and most free.” What was true some 500 years ago continues to be true to this day.

This was clearly reflected in the thinking of the men who drafted the United States Constitution. Thomas Jefferson declared that “all power is inherent in the people…it is their right and duty to be armed at all times.” Patrick Henry’s goal was that “every man be armed.” And James Madison praised the “advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”

The primary motivation for arming the general populace was to ensure that Americans always had the means to defend themselves against tyrannical oppression.

To provide just one example of the effectiveness of this concept, 1,500 Jews with just a few dozen guns in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of World War II were able to hold out for 28 days against over 12,000 German troops armed with tanks and heavy artillery, prompting Goebbels to comment that “it shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms.”

What if citizens of all countries during the last 100 years been armed? Could a great number of the 20^th century’s most horrific injustices, massacres and genocidal acts been avoided or greatly minimized?

An armed populace serves as a bulwark against oppression and tyranny. It is perhaps no accident that a number of the world’s longest-standing democracies—such as the United States, Switzerland and Finland—also have had the most armed populace. “Most armed and most free” is not a coincidence.

Crime Prevention

The second benefit of individual gun ownership is as a means of preventing crime. Any weapon that can be used to attack can also be used for defense.

First, there is deterrence. Let’s say a criminal has a choice to commit a crime (murder, robbery, assault, etc.) in one of two cities: one where it is legal for citizens to carry guns and one where it is not and the population is unarmed. Which would he choose?

The answer is obvious. And in fact, surveys of felons report that they are typically more fearful during a crime of a potential victim being armed than running into the police. This is easily evident in criminal behavior patterns: for example, the instance of “hot” burglaries, where the criminal robs a house while the resident is present is more than 3 times lower in the United States, where many citizens are armed, than in Canada or Great Britain, where strict gun laws have left the majority of the populace defenseless. Criminals clearly understand the deterring value of guns.

Apart from deterrence, guns also play a major role in the outcome of a crime. For instance, crime statistics show that women are 2.5 times less likely to suffer serious injury from an attack if they resist with a gun than if they offer no resistance. Guns provide women with an equalizing tool to efficiently subdue their would-be attacker.

The link between guns and crime prevention is also evident in places where gun bans have been recently imposed. Australia, which banned most firearms in 1996, saw the following changes in crime in the two years following, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics: armed robberies rose by 73 percent, kidnappings by 38 percent, assaults by 17 percent and manslaughter by 29 percent. Clearly, disarming law-abiding people is not an effective means of crime prevention.

On the flip side, statistical regression analysis showed the impact of certain U.S. states allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Had other states followed suit and also allowed concealed weapon permits, in the same year murders in those states would have declined by 1,800, rapes by 3,700, aggravated assault by 11,000, robberies by 61,000 and burglaries by 112,600.

Guns play a significant but role in crime prevention: major national polls suggest that there are somewhere between 760,000 to 3.6 million defensive uses of guns in the United States per year. How many of those have saved people from property loss, bodily harm or even death?

While there is no question that some legally purchased guns will be used to commit crimes, it is also without question that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are both a deterrent to crime and an effective means to positively change the outcome of a crime in progress. These are critical, undeniable benefits.

Conclusion

Any serious discussion of the gun debate must include not just the cost of private gun ownership but its benefits as well.

For conservatives, as it was for the founders of this country, protecting freedom, individual liberty and the right to self-defense are inalienable individual rights. As Samuel Adams said, “The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”

Conservatives, like the founders of this country, believe that by leaving the entire citizenry defenseless one would only invite tyranny and abuse from criminal elements—be they in official government garb or otherwise. Gun ownership gives peaceful citizens the means to defend their liberty, property, life and freedom.

In the words of Thomas Paine, “the peacable part of mankind will be continually over-run by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense…The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian, while on the other hand arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world…Horrid mischief would ensue were [good men] deprived of the use of them…The weak will become a prey to the strong. The history of every age and nation establishes these truths.”

A Rational Look at Abortion

For all its emotion and controversy, the abortion debate is actually quite simple, and rests on a single question: at what point does human life begin?

After all, both the pro-choice and pro-life camps agree that killing a one-week old baby is murder. No issue there. And neither camp has an issue prior to conception. The only difference between the two, and the source of so much disagreement, is in that 9-month period in between. The absolute pro-life position is that human life begins at the moment of conception; the absolute pro-choice position is that life doesn’t begin until the whole baby is out of the womb. And of course there are many positions in-between.

The debate has nothing to do with women’s rights, or the right to privacy. These are red herrings that simply serve to confuse the real issue. Don’t believe it? Then try applying these rights arguments to a 1-week or 1-month or 1-year old baby: What if the woman doesn’t want the child? Isn’t ready? Was raped? Doesn’t have a father? Doesn’t have the money/time/resources/support for a baby? Can the woman abort her 1-week old baby? Of course not. She’d go straight to prison for murder. Because there’s no legal “right” that allows one human being to legitimately end the life of another (other than in self-defense.)

So the debate is entirely about when human life begins.

This is a very important question, because the answer determines whether one is simply making a lifestyle choice or committing infanticide—not something to be taken lightly.

Some people say life begins at conception. Others say 3 months. Others say at the time of a baby’s viability. And yet others not until the baby is physically separated from the mother. So who is right?

And the answer is: nobody knows. Not definitively. Sure, there are many with a certainty of opinion on this matter. On both sides. But certainty of opinion is far different from certainty of fact, and only unchecked hubris would not allow for the possibility of being wrong.  Thus far there is no scientific proof that life begins at one point versus another.

Given the absence of proof on this subject, and given the immense importance of the decision—whether or not to terminate what may possibly be a child—the obvious rational and moral decision is to err on the side of caution. To assume that life begins at conception, until proven otherwise. To not do so is to risk being wrong, and being wrong on this issue would mean participating in the murder of children.

Protecting children is one of the most important responsibilities that we have, both as individuals and as a society. And life and death decisions regarding children are not something we should take lightly or gamble with, especially not for the purpose of convenience or lifestyle choices.

And for those with religious or spiritual beliefs, being wrong on this issue has personal ramifications far more serious than simply feeling guilt over the death of a child--all spiritual beliefs save their harshest punishments for harm done to children.

If, at some point in the future, there comes definitive proof that human life doesn't begin until some time after conception, then at worst the result of our cautious approach will have been some additional deliveries, which our society can handle. But if it turns out that at some time in the future life is proven to start at the time of conception, then we will spare humanity infanticide on a massive scale. In ignorance, then, playing it safe is by far the more enlightened choice.