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What does climate change denial look like? A pig in a tux.
Though their mission ironically embraces "sustainable development," the Commercial Real Estate Development Association (NAIOP) is trying to scuttle efforts to improve building energy efficiency. Maybe this is good news. Coby Beck identifies 5 stages of climate change denial:
- It's not happening
- It's happening, but we don't know why
- It's happening, but it's natural
- It's happening, it's not natural, but it's not bad
- It's happening, it's not natural, it's bad, but we can't stop it
Just as we're coming to terms with the fact that buildings are responsible for over half of our energy use in the US (and the associated emissions), the NAIOP has clearly embraced Stage 5: it's bad but we can't stop it.
Architect Ed Mazria lambastes NAOIP's recently released study in an article titled, "A Hog in a Tuxedo is Still a Hog, the NAIOP Disinformation Study." Mazria points out how the NAIOP study cooked the books, by leaving out no cost, low cost, and cost-saving energy efficiency strategies.
"Clearly, this study is meant to confuse the public and stall meaningful legislation, insuring that America remains dependent on foreign oil, natural gas and dirty conventional coal."
Check out Mr. Mazria's recent testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources to learn more about how building energy efficiency can create green collar jobs, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, address global climate change, and save money. (a win-win-win-win)
oracle2world is probably hired by the energy companies and other organizations that profit from any failure to address climate change.
They actually employ people to sound informed and make arguments like the ones used by oracle2world.
The tactic is to sound informed and reasonable and keep less informed people from understanding the seriousness of the climate change problem.
I hope oracle2world is paid well. I couldn't be paid enough to be that dishonest.
Here are some more climate change denials that are being used:
We will be raptured to heaven and all the sinners will be left with a scorched Earth. No problem.
Several meteorologists with the Weather Channel have admitted that global warming is made up.
Half the scientists in the world admit that it is not really happening. The other half are liberals and cannot be believed.
I just ask those people back, when the US is a vast desert, and food transforms from our chief export to our main import, and you finally admit that global warming is real, do you really think I would sell what food I have for just money? What good is money going to be?
Okay, how about these questions.
1. Are effects from rising CO2 swamped by the water vapor/cloud feedback mechanism? 2. Compared to other disasters (total thermonuclear war, bird flu, extinction meteor strike, Yellowstone supervolcano, gamma-ray burst, mega tsunamis, etc.) how worried should anyone be about global warming?
The bottom line is that people adapt to long slow change - it is the abrupt threats that challenge us. The Yellowstone supervolcano is overdue to erupt. It would spread a cloud of ash that would cool things dramatically for many years and affect food production, probably significantly.
A small global warming of a few degrees spread over hundreds of years ... just isn't much of a threat no matter how you cut it.
And please spare me the future predictions that read like something out of the Book of Revelations. They are just WAGs (wild-a**ed guesses), nothing more. There are winners and losers in climate change and no one knows exactly where, when, and to what extent who wins and who loses in the future.
But I would like to commend you for your recognition of Greenwash. The US has spent an enormous amount of effort to clean up its natural environment over the years through a grind-it-out-process. And unsupported end-of-world stuff about climate change is making a laughing stock out of the environmental movement.
