From the same book I referenced earlier:
We realize that to continue our use of fossil fuels is morally wrong. Like the economies (and consumers) dependent on slave labor, we can no longer rely on the cheap but perilous use of petroleum, natural gas and coal. New energies must be discovered, and the use of viable, carbon-free technologies must replace fossil-fuel ones.
Costs and moral wrongs are not the same thing. This rhetoric reminds me of the typical “out-of-bounds” accusations that are levied against people who use Hitler analogies in the midst of a heated discussion.
>> “We realize that to continue our use of fossil fuels is morally wrong.”
To describe that statement as profoundly ignorant does not even begin to do it.
You’ll love this:
http://socialtimes.com/greenpeace-vw-spoof_b68700
He says, “perilously,” begging the question. Tell it to an Irishman scrounging in the peat bog during the winter.
I have camped in the Tetons with someone who would become a lawyer for the Sierra Club, a good fellow, but a guy who never worried about the practicalities of keeping his dwelling warm at an affordable cost. If you can arrange it, you can travel anywhere without using a heater or air conditioner, just like Jim Bridger.
What is so perilous about using decomposed vegetative material? Before it was fossil fuel, it was plants. And before it was that, I suppose it must have been carbons spread all over the ground and in the air. (Maybe that is wy Wisconsin used to be tropical rain forest?) Nature, using the power of the sun, concetrated the carbons together; all were are really doing is using solar energy from several years ago and converting fossil fuels back into carbons to be spread all over the ground and air again.
Exactly, Michael. They want to leave it all in the ground, because they do not need it in Sausilito, or in their ground caves. The object is to support the communist revolution in China, when Mao swam in the Yankgste river, or was it the yellow river, or the yellow part of the Mohawk, near the lock? Mao should be revered for getting a mouthful from wherever he swam.
The imposition of any large and unaccounted-for externality is wrong by any reasonable set of moral standards.
After all, isn’t that really what morals are? An emotional cost barrier we’ve been brought up with, designed to help us internalize the costs of our actions in society.