Political Debates are Fun…

… but that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m actually saying that neither side is really looking at this issue the right way.

The liberals been trying to get all of us to “save the planet” for decades, so when they realized they had finally convinced nearly everyone that global warming was real, they started tripping over themselves to make environmental practices the solution. Meanwhile, conservatives have been fighting regulations for so long that once they realized there wasn’t any rational argument against the reality of climate change, they started trying to convince people it wasn’t humans that caused it.

Here’s how that whole thing is going to play out.

The right wing is beginning to realize that so-called “environmental” policies aren’t such a bad thing. There’s big money to be made in new energy development, and most “sustainable” practices are actually good for the bottom line. At the same time, the left wing is kind of like the unpopular kids finally realizing they outnumber the popular kids. By a lot. So, environmentalism is becoming very “fashionable”, not to mention a whole lot easier, and usually cheaper, too.

And that’s what I’ve been saying all along. Most people want to do the right thing, but we’re also very lazy and very greedy. If you make “doing the right thing” difficult and expensive, then we’re going to do the easy thing. If you force us to “do the right thing” through regulation, then we’ll get really mad. But if you make “doing the right thing” easy and profitable, then we’ll do it all day long.

And love it.

And again, that’s great. I’m all for living sustainably. But none of that is really to the point. I don’t care if the primary cause of climate change is carbon emissions, sun spots, deforestation, the tilt of the Earth’s axis, or your deity of choice declaring his or her wrath on humanity. Whatever the cause, let’s figure out what we can do to stop it. Because it’s not the planet that’s in peril, it’s us.

Somehow, I don’t think buying a hybrid is the solution, but some scientists already have the right idea.