News checks are never brief.
Did you know crickets are able to pass information about predators to their young in utero?
But this is the article that got to me. It's about global climate change, and the small cost of curbing it. One study says $80 per metric ton of CO2 would do the trick; the author suggests $300 in light of recent pessimistic news. An increase of $2.60 per gallon of gas.
But we won't have it. Who cares that we're definitely on track for disastrous temperature increase this century, and that there's a 10% chance of a catastrophic 12-degree increase? That's cool, as long as I get to drive cheap.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert is quoted in the article:
“Global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning.”
“Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action. If climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”
My favorite part of the article, though, is the end, where the author is responding to Dumbass Senator James Inhofe and others who would deny the existence of human-caused climate change or point to the fact that there's "only" a 10 percent chance that we're going to hit "We're All Going to Die" on the Global Warming Scale in the next century:
Most people would pay a substantial share of their wealth — much more, certainly, than the modest cost of a carbon tax — to avoid having someone pull the trigger on a gun pointed at their head with one bullet and nine empty chambers. Yet that’s the kind of risk that some people think we should take.
In a somewhat related matter, watch this and all other performances by George Watsky:
1 comment:
As a great sociologist once told me, "Don't let school get in the way of your education." I'd say you're simply keeping this in mind.
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