Positive Liberty

How exactly am I supposed to take this post seriously, given the name of the blog? “Cars are Evil”? Oh please. And he calls me the childish one?

There is nothing irrational about taking the following approach, which the blog’s author condemns, but which is a fair summary of my own thoughts on the issue:

At first, doubts were cast about whether the earth was warming. Now that there is general agreement on that fact, doubts are raised about whether this warming is man-made. The consensus on this point continues to grow, so doubts are now raised about whether a warmer planet is cause for concern, or whether anything we try will succeed, or, get this, whether we’ll screw things up even worse (the presumption being that we’ve screwed things up already).

This is called skepticism, and it’s healthy.

A new theory, particularly one with radical implications for human action, should be made to prove itself at every juncture. I’m almost entirely convinced of the reality of anthropogenic global warming — now I need to be convinced that whatever we do will both assess the scope of the problem correctly and present something like the optimum mix of efficacy, safety, and economy.

So convince me, please. Don’t call me names. You go calling me names, and I may start to wonder again whether you really had a legitimate point about the whole global warming thing anyway.

Contrast my approach to the outright lying from this particular environmentalist, to whom any means is presumably legitimate, provided only that it serves the predetermined end — that cars should be done away with:

Less honest inaction advocates, like Kuznicki, insult our intelligence by falling back on the possibility that the science may be wrong without defending against the inverse – the likelihood that the science is correct.

But I did no such thing. I admitted that the science behind anthropogenic global warming was almost certainly correct. I then offered several reasons why doing nothing, at least for the time being, was a plausible response anyway.

Helps when you read your opponents, people.