The fundamental issue here is that even if I grant that the 3,000 number is at the high end of a cone of uncertainty that may stretch from (off the top of my head) 1,000 to 3,000 deaths, and even if I grant that both the study itself and the media coverage of it were both motivated at least in part by a desire to harm Trump politically (big assumptions that I’m not actually granting by the way) it STILL gets nowhere near what he actually said

wow, lots to unpack in that post, Herbie

You're just handwaving. If capitalism is destroying the planet and both political parties in the US are enabling it, then why are emissions falling in the US even as population increases? Not all of those things can be true simultaneously.

There is one party in the US which literally claims that climate change is a hoax and wants to burn as much coal as possible and go all-in on highway construction, and there is one party which has acted at both the local and federal level to reduce pollution in as many different ways as possible. Like, the actual goal of the Trump EPA, with the full support of the GOP, is simply to undo every single thing done by Obama. This wouldn't be necessary if both parties were acting in harmony on environmental issues.

Yet it only took me 60 seconds in Google to find a picture of Obama at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference.

Soviet Russia and communist China aren’t exactly encouraging qin the field of the environment.

War of Juxtaposition, Vol. II

Yeah but where was he during the 2008 conference?

Chessmate

Like what? For these "benefits" to be worth acknowledging they would have to be benefits that actually require us to pay the given cost. Otherwise there is no reason to pay said costs which is the crux of the anti-capitalist stance. If the cost has nothing to do with said benefit then this line of thinking does not make sense.

Which "facets of Cuban life" do you feel cause the comparison to "fall completely apart"?

I do not recall me or anyone in this thread claiming that socialism/communism is a "magic bullet for solving [global warming]" so this seems nothing more than a strawman. What IS true is you will never solve global warming as long as capitalism is the dominant economic system. Does that mean it magically will not be a problem in a socialist society? Of course not.

I would like to further challenge the contention being made here (and also by Kokiri) about China:

1) China has had the fastest growing economy for the past few decades than any other country in history. The revolution in the mid 20th century has led to China advancing from the 3rd to the 1st world thanks to this economic development. This economic development has no doubt occurred at great cost to the environment. While most of the west industrialized and transitioned from agrarian societies over a century ago, China was much further behind. So to compare China over the past few decades to Western countries over the past few decades is misleading because it is not a like for like comparison. Either you are suggesting that countries that are, technologically, decades behind the West in terms of production and infrastructure should remain that way in the interests of environmental protection, or you must allow such countries to enjoy the benefits of industrialization that the West has been the sole benefactor of for a long time. In a theoretical sense, developed countries such as the United States could provide countries like India etc with the resources to industrialize in an environmentally safe manner. But we know that is never going to happen.

2) Now that China has began to reach parity with the West in terms of industrialization, it is already beginning to make great strides in the field of sustainability. Moreover, you mentioned how one had to "look no further" than China, but of course this is a perfect example of what you have accused Dustin of when he finds facts to suit his theory rather than considering all the facts. China is not the only country that is on the path of socialism. By "looking no further than China" one would neglect to appreciate that Cuba (a country not a paragraph earlier you made sure to deride, you seemingly forgot that it existed when attempting to make this point) has demonstrated some of the most sustainable developments of any country in the world:

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/ne...1027-0018.html

This is an ideological stance that has little basis in reality. I posted this just a few days ago:

https://gritpost.com/un-paper-capitalism/

And this is the UN composed entirely bourgeois economists saying it. The idea that global warming is not tied to the economic system is dangerously wrong.

Does it now? If it is so clear I would love for you to elaborate on this point.

This is just ideology.

Also lol at the idea of changing the dominant economic system in a "gradual and measured" way. I refuse to believe you actually think this. Only someone who studied absolutely no history could be so idealist.

Aside from the fact that this is just argument by assertion (much like your contention about "measured transition"), this statement makes it seem like you aren't fully aware of what communism actually is.

This implied logic here seems to be that if the emissions are falling than the planet is not being destroyed. However, I don’t accept that and neither should you. Even a casual foray into the science regarding climate change would make it clear that this is inaccurate.

Is this the stuff that one party accepts as fact and the other explicitly denies?

Another logical inaccuracy you seem to be making soah is the idea that

A) What the GOP is doing is clearly causing global warming
B) the democrats are not doing the same thing as the GOP

Therefore: the democrats are not enabling global warming.

Even if I accepted A and B, the conclusion hardly follows. To return to our original analogy, our patenient has a treatable but terminal illness. Maybe the GOP wants to hack the patient to death with an axed. The democrats, meanwhile do not want to do that, but also do not want to treat the patients illness.

Either way the patient will die. And the best we can say about the democrats is they aren’t on the pro-axe-hacking path

Accepting that global warming is real hardly constitutes “accepting the science”. The democrats are in no way taking the steps the science says we need to take to avoid destruction. So I am not sure how you could call this “accepting the science”.

It is amazing how much credit everyone itt thinks the democrats deserve for merely agreeing that global warming is real.

But I guess that is how it works when your entire political horizon involves doing better than the GOP.

im a buffoon as usual

i misremembered it. so i looked it up. now it's starting to come back to me a little. i think he popped in just to make a speech and leave. but the whole point of the thing was for all the world leaders to be there together to work out a deal. and he wouldn't go there the same time as them. all the world leaders were going there to work out a deal, but obama.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/...ate/index.html

that's just from quick google and cnn obama loving coverage

i thought i was bad with hyperbole

me and birdman aren't blind to the differences between dems and repubs. like dem ca governor brown is currently trying to block trumps efforts to drill the **** out of the california coast. ok. that is a difference.

under democratic leadership, especially uncriticized dem leadearship, our planet will be ruined in 200 years? under republican leadership it will be ruined in 100 years? great.

I’d change it to more like 50 years and 30 years but yeah

i think that's the science that dems get so much credit for believing in. isn't the dem's line basically "yeah.... the planet will be destroyed BUT... i mean.... we just can't change too much. that's just too crazy'

..

Al Gore

1) So what should we do?
2) "Uncriticized Democratic leadership"? Who is saying that they want that?

did anyone else catch Rush Limbaugh's begrudging admission that the scientific community is ~unanimous that climate change is the cause of Hurricane Florence?

Wait what? Lol. I've stayed quiet while you guys compete to argue about who believes in climate change harder, but people don't actually think this right?

People still understand we've been historically low levels of hurricaines. Pretty sure scientists do.

You can argue that the democrats don't/didn't do enough, but the above is plainly inaccurate.