Global warming is a symptom of pollution

We've already won this one folks and we did it back in the 1970's.

It's time for democrats and progressives to take the argument back from the realm of conjecture and scientific studies. We've already won this one folks and we did it back in the 1970's. The high-falutin' argument goes like this: pollution is bad. We can all agree and actually have all agreed that pollution is bad and contrary to weeping Indian commercials the primary polluters by far are the corporations. Period. The is indisputable.

I don't know how the corporate media framed the argument against pollution as a scientific exercise about the symptom of pollution - it's a mystery, but here we are. I cringe when I hear the phrase global warming because I know that every time we say it the simpletons grin in their unconscious fear of bewilderment and the corporate lackeys smirk in impish delight. I liked An Inconvenient Truth but I can't remember Gore saying the P-word even once (he may have said it but I don't remember it). The right wing is great at misdirection. They have us spending billions to try and prove an un provable position on global warming when the subtext is really about the indisputable fact of pollution. The irony is that global warming is probably correct. Snowstorms probably are the result of it because normally the temperature would have been colder and made snow impossible. Is this going to convince the average person? It's sad but it's laughable to even consider it.

Researching global warming is intellectually fun but in the larger scheme of things, what's the point? Doesn't it sound like an intellectual parlor trick over time? Our intellectual narcissism does us in every time, just like it got Nader, a well meaning person who couldn't resist the temptation to show the world how much smarter he was. Nader is smart but he's not savvy and he siphoned votes away from the smarter of the other candidates, Gore. There was no convincing a man on a mission to prove that he's not an idiot to the world. Bush, Nader's real opponent, was busy trying hard to prove the exact opposite, that he's not an intellectual. Bush may not be an intellectual but it's now painfully obvious that he's savvier that most people in Washington. How many Kerry's does it take to screw in a light bulb? Infinite because there are infinite ways of doing it and Kerry would carefully research and weigh every one of them - all the while we're in the dark.

Democrats need to wake up because that's our mission. We are the people, the smart and the less smart. The right wing, corporate mission is to fool us long enough to rob the purse that is our tax base. If you're against pollution, as any sane person would be, a right winger will called it global warming and then use billions of tax dollars to discover whether or not it exists and a lot of Democrats go along for the ride because it's intellectually fun and also because of the money. We've already won this argument so let's do away with symptomatic terms like global warming when the cause is what needs to be remedied and that cause is pollution.

•  IMHO, we need a better word than "pollution"

  Three syllables, and Latin based--it does not get to the gut "yech" factor part of the brain directly enough.

  (The problem with English--it is one of those languages, like Albanian, in which most of the vocabulary is borrowed from other languages.)

  Filth, poison, waste, muck, slime, blight or "air-shit"--someone come up with a better term.

  Compare:

  • We are polluting our atmosphere.

  vs

  • We are fouling our air.
  • We are poisoning our air.
  • We are defiling our air.
  • We are be-filthing our lungs and our planet.

  by daulton on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:07:51 AM PDT

•  You think we can sell a cable network

  on calling it "When good climate goes bad?"

  by CoyoteMan on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:29:18 AM PDT

•  Externalities.

  by environmentalist on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:40:29 AM PDT

  •  Absolutely! See my sig.

    At some point the human species needs to realize that Life is a hierarchy of externalized costs.  A big animal eats a smaller one.  The cost of the big animal's survival is "externalized" to the smaller animal (then to the smaller still, eventually to plants/plankton and, finally, the energy of solar radiation).  The human species must also recognize that this fact does not justify continued and wanton externalization and deferral of costs, but rather recommends that humans choose a new ethic of seeking always to discover how their actions create such costs and how to minimize or eliminate them.

    by sxwarren on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 09:06:00 AM PDT

•  Pollution isn't the right word/phrase

  The real problem is by-products, or waste

  by Dcoronata on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:44:34 AM PDT

  •  I like waste too

    It resonates through all the causes of pollution and gets to the underlying attitude that generates pollution.  It's something everybody ought to be ashamed of of.  We've become a society of waste:  we're wasting lives and money in Iraq, we're wasting lives in america by failing to educate out children, we're wasting the bounty of our planet by using sledge hammers to put in thumbtacks (such as by using trucks to pick up a few bags of groceries or brightening the suburbs and subdivisions to the extent that we can't even see the night sky).

    by Urizen on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:58:20 AM PDT

    •  Wish I had more time

      work's a real BITCH this morning!

      If diary is still alive in 90 min I'll give a more full discussion of what I mean scientifically by "waste".

      by Dcoronata on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 07:32:32 AM PDT

    •  I like your sentiment but...

      it's too poetic.  Don't get me wrong, I agree.  I pretty much agree with global warming but the choir isn't who I'm proposing we preach to.  Corporations are polluting everything.  Did anyone here watch the Electric Company?  

      My point is that we already have won this argument, if we simply take language of victory back and stop using the term that was created to obfuscate the truth.

      by tuc on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 08:53:19 AM PDT

      •  Minor problem

        and that is surveys of land, water and the air indicate that there is less pollution today than in the 1970's.

        We've made great inroads in pollution, and we should both build on that success, and increase the scope to more than industrial brownfields and rivers.

        by Dcoronata on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 09:03:42 AM PDT

        •  Sorry

          I didn't know global warming wasn't caused by pollution (i.e., Adding carbon dioxide or methane  to Earth's atmosphere). I guess it doesn't exist and neither does pollution.  I stand corrected.  Factories produce no pollution.

          by tuc on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 09:22:55 AM PDT

          •  That's why I have a problem with your theme

            Pollution per se DOESN'T cause global warming.

            For example, soot and sulfur dioxide cause global dimming, a condition that is the precise opposite of global warming!  

            The vast majority of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere comes from natural processes, in the case of CO2 it is nearly 99%.  The problem is, when the sinks can not perform at 101%, that tiny extra 1% adds up like compound interest, slowly and gradually swamping the original steady-state value.

            If you want to get down to brass tacks, overpopulation and inefficient energy usage causes global warming.

            by Dcoronata on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 09:34:30 AM PDT

  •  That's the point - we already know it means

    The last thing we need is a new word.  Waste is too amorphous and scientific sounding.

    by tuc on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 08:49:21 AM PDT

    •  It seems, you don't.

      All processes which attempt to create mechanical energy or thermal energy from chemical processes generates waste.  The conversion is never 100% efficient, it is the matter of that inefficiency and the by-products generated in the processes where waste is generated.

      In the case of fossil fuels, waste is generated in many forms, from nitrous oxides and various oxidized carbons to ozone, methane, and soot.  Coal is one of the worst, it being by far the least "pure" of the fossil fuels.  It is full of heavy metals including uranium, lead, and mercury, each of them emitted into the atmosphere by burning.

      There are other forms of waste- moving a 200 pound human payload with a 6000 pound SUV is a waste when a 2500 pound vehicle can do the same, or 100 people can fit in a 14000 pound bus.

      Waste is also generated by our food industry, to the tune of 10,000 pounds of cow, pig and chicken solid waste per person in the US, per year.  These animals also generate more methane than our vehicles, a greenhouse gas that while it is active has 60 times the IR blocking capabilities of CO2.

      by Dcoronata on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 08:58:37 AM PDT

•  Poisoning

  Poisoning is the right term here.  Faceless corporations are poisoning all of us.  Who here doesn't breathe the air?

  Do people really think the free market will take the best interest of the whole into consideration?

  by pissedpatriot on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:54:54 AM PDT

•  yup, so what

  all natural systems do the same as well, why should we consider ourselves any different? Consider bacteria in a petri dish. Bacteria consume an energy source, reproduce, and give off waste until the energy/food source runs out or they choke on their own shit.

  Yeast is an excellent example of "choking on your own shit." The bi-product of respiration, being alcohol,  eventually kills the yeast which produced it.

  Humans, to me, are like a bacterial infection upon the Earth's surface, behaving just as any other natural system.

  by xjac on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 06:58:39 AM PDT

  •  If the Right is against it...

    then why would they use the term "Global Warming" on their book jackets.  They're hiding in plain site here.  GW is their term.

    It's like the in 1980's.  Pollution ceased to exist and corporations pretending to solve this problem by "recycling" which doesn't reduce pollution at all (and may create it).  But you can't be against recycling can you?  Only if you're against pollution which recycling didn't limit and may have actually created more of.

    I cringe at the thought of those recycling baskets and separating the plastic from the paper.  All with a self-satisfied look of inner goodness and all BS. We play their game and they continued to pollute and it's still going on.

    by tuc on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 09:00:27 AM PDT

•  Pollution is a health hazard

  regardless of Global Warming.  The argument needs to be removed from that context as the linkage can't be totally proven.  

  We are at the level of nuclear technology.  Why are we burning ANYTHING to create energy?  It is INSANE without the global warming argument.  Toss that in and it is beyond insane.

  by kursk on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 08:07:09 AM PDT

•  it's not just pollution

  the earth goes through hot cold cycles that last sometimes millions of years. our pollution is making things worse. we not only have to adapt to our changing earth. we also have to adapt to or clean up the mess we make.

  by hypersphere01 on Thu Feb 15, 2007 at 08:09:24 AM PDT