I’m one of ‘those people’ that have never been totally convinced about global warming. It seems to me that the scientific community is somewhat mixed in their opinions on the topic, but who knows what scientists and experts are in the pocket of the oil industry, the auto industry, or for that matter the environmental-related businesses. Lately I’ve been leaning more and more toward the global warming side, but I’m still not totally convinced.
I read Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded to educate myself more on this issue, and I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t really MATTER whether or not it’s true - we still need to do something about our addiction to oil, coal, and natural gas.
With the world’s rapidly expanding middle class, and exceptional growth in China, India, and other developing nations we’re using more natural resources than ever before, and there’s no infinite quantity. Some day we’re going to run out of these resources and we need to start working on clean alternative energy to take its place.
Friedman’s book discusses the various problems with our dependence on ‘dirty’ energy, and it’s not just climate change. The West buys our fuels from dictatorships in the Middle East and other areas that are hostile to us (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) and we’re passing along enormous wealth to these countries. The development of these fuels are destroying tropical forests and other ecosystems, despoiling rivers, and leading to an incredible amount of species extinction.
If we want our kids to grow up in a better world than we did, we must move forward with discovering and developing clean energy solutions that will improve our environment and our societies and help the developing world continue to flourish. The book outlines steps that our world needs to take to make this goal a reality.
