![Firmin DeBrabander. Smog hangs over a construction site in Weifang city, Shandong province, Oct 16. 2015. Air quality went down in many parts of China since Oct 15 and most cities are shrounded by haze. [Photo/IC]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/deberbander_china.jpg?quality=83)
Professor of Philosophy Firmin DeBrabander, Maryland Institute College of Art, has joined the growing list of greens who think “autocratic” governments like China are better climate custodians than Democracies.
Why is climate change such a hard sell in the US?
June 8, 2017 12.36pm AEST
President Donald Trump on June 1 took the dramatic step of removingthe U.S. from the Paris climate agreement – the product of many years of diligent and difficult negotiation among 175 nations around the world. Recent polls reveal that six in 10 Americans oppose Trump’s move. However, a significant portion of climate skeptics remain – especially among Trump’s base and the Republican politicians who cheered this move.
The unfortunate truth is that environmentalists and their allies have failed to ignite widespread passion around climate change. And now they are faced with an administration stridently opposed to environmental regulation, slashing the EPA’s budget drastically and reversing President Obama’s climate change initiatives.
…
Learning from the past
I suspect that because of all these hurdles, climate change is not liable to be solved by democracies. Autocracies might do better – like China, for example. Given the severity of its current air pollution – a veritable “airpocalypse” – China’s government does not need to be prodded or persuaded to act; the necessity is obvious, and urgent. And China has the ability to take dramatic measures on climate change and act quickly – just what scientists are calling for – dragging the people with them. This is, after all, the nation that lifted half a billion people into the middle class in a single generation.
…
Read More: http://theconversation.com/why-is-climate-change-such-a-hard-sell-in-the-us-78794
China in particular has a long and shameful track record of pollution and disregard for the environment; cities choked with smoke, toxic waste dumped into the nearest convenient lake. Communist China has a long history of utter disregard for the needs of ordinary people.
DeBrabander’s claim that Dictatorships like China “might do better” at handling climate issues than countries whose governments are accountable to the people is absurd.
Oh this is just bullshit.
Of course it is. The left only do stupid.
Sorry for being captain obvious.
“The unfortunate truth is that environmentalists and their allies have failed to ignite widespread passion around climate change.”
Could that be because science is based on logic and reason, not passion?
“Recent polls reveal that six in 10 Americans oppose Trump’s move” [to leave Paris Climate Agreement].
Really, his faith is in pollsters?
My searches only revealed one poll conducted by ABC picked up by several left leaning news outlets … ‘A Consensus has been reached’!
The same “Pollsters” that predicted Hillary would win in a landslide…and they were talking about the Electoral College at that time… Before the Popular Vote garbage when she lost by a Electoral College landslide.
Polls are highly suseptible to partisan political manipulation. If you are skeptical about the truthfullness of the MSM, then you should be skeptical of the accuracy of polls they create.
You can get any answer you want by wording a polling question the proper way.
Question order can make a big difference as well.
[quote]The unfortunate truth is that environmentalists and their allies have failed to ignite widespread passion around climate change. [/quote]
The unfortunate truth is that I’ve just had to light the wood burner because I’m sat here shivering in our typical British summer weather. Still waiting for the Mediterranean summers to arrive that the BBC promised us 20 years ago.
“Recent polls reveal that six in 10 Americans opposeTrump’s move.”
“The unfortunate truth is that environmentalists and their allies have failed to ignite widespread passion around climate change.”
Those statements seem to be contradictory. To the extent that the second is true, it’s tantamount to an admission of abject failure of the alarmist narrative despite the combined heft of the Obama administration, mainstream media and pal-reviewed climate literature.
You can well imagine that in Australia we have our share of totalitarian aspirants like der Brabander. One that comes to mind is a swampie named Clive Hamilton. He’s a failed Greens candidate who is now dreaming of power over the ignorant masses by other means.
How many of those who participated in polls knew what is climate Change? or for that matter at least IPCC’s definition of climate change?
Instead of conducting polls on global warming, why they are conducting polls on climate change?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Worse than that, presumably the referenced poll was on the Paris Agreement.
The MSM STILL refuses to report on how costly and ineffective the “agreement” is, and how harmful it would be to the US vis a vis our Chinese and Indian competitors.
The general public has accepted the meme that DJT is “anti-science”.
Here’s a good example of why you should be skeptical of polls:
I saw a graphic today on tv reporting that some new poll shows a majority of Americans are against the new Republican health care bill.
Now, think about this: The Republicans don’t have a health care plan. What they have is a process that wil eventually end up with a health care bill. But at the present time *noone* knows what the bill is going to finally look like or whether it will be bad or not, so there is no way anyone can make a proper judgement of it.
Yet this polling group thinks it is a good idea to ask poll takers their opinion of what they think about a health care bill that doesn’t even exist yet.
There is no way such a poll could be used to judge anything. It is a worthless charade whose only goal is to throw cold water on the Republican health care push.
Why did a majority of poll takers vote the way they did if they don’t really have the ability to judge the Republican plan yet?
It’s because the MSM is on a constant drumbeat telling people the Republican health care bill is bad, bad, bad. It’s propaganda and half-truths repeated over and over again, and it has its effects even when people are completely unfamiliar with the subject they are being asked about.
Indeed. Confucius he say
“Be careful what you wish for”!
A fire starts when you will, but will not go out when you please.
The greens and warmunists are in love with an authoritarian approach. They are still stuck in the mindset that (potential) problems can, and must, be solved by passing ever more stringent new laws. While laws against murder certainly may influence the incidence of the crime, they haven’t managed to abolish it yet in states with the death penalty.
It is nonsense. Selective blindness. Cognitive dissonance. Or just simply ignorance and profound dishonnesty.
Ask the people of the former East Germany. Leipzig in 1989 was the most polluted city in Europe. Cleaning up the east has cost the united Germany hundreds of billions Deutschmarks and it is still not finished.
Ask the Poles, the Ukrainians and, not to forget, the Russians.
Just more proof, it was needed, of the true aims of the Marxists that make up the CAGW movement and for whom the movement is merely a vehicle of convenience
Back in the 70-ties a Polish colleague and friend gave me a simple demonstration of the wastefulness of the central-command economies of dictatorial systems. He asked me to lift his TV, a normal sized box, very similar to my own, in the corner. Where I had no problem lifting my own, I almost broke my back on his. He said it was at least 15 kilos too heavy. Why? The manufacturer put some superfluous extra steel beams in it, purportedly for ‘sturdiness’, but in fact by doing so the TV production helped the steel makers to fill their qouta of the 5 year plan.
As I already thought by looking at his name, indeed he is from my country. As in most countries, including the USA, our country’s universities are breadbeds of extreme left, extreme “green” ideas, highly intolerant for any other ideas about global “warming”… A few years ago a lecture by Dr. Singer an dothers at the VUB (Free University of Brussels) was cancelled due to pressure of Van Ypersele, then vice chair of the IPCC. The main press and TV channels are even worse: never allow a dissident thought…
Orestes has cited China as a model for us, and a few other leftist warmists seconded her motion (Naomi Klein perhaps). (This was about when her book came out, a year or two ago.) But China has a poor environmental track record. It has issued a few ukases mandating certain moves in a green direction, which I suspect is what drew praise from Oreskes et al. But China is still heavily into building coal power plants. It is not doing any heavy lifting regarding CO2 reduction.
There has however been a much better example of a green authoritarian government: Pol Pot’s.
What dictatorships have that democracies don’t have is a tightly controlled PR department. So China can describe how rapidly and thoroughly it is embracing non-CO2 emitting power systems, even as it continues to build coal fired power plants. For whatever reason, there is no pushback on Chinese statements of environmental policy in spite of their actions.
“What dictatorships have that democracies don’t have is a tightly controlled PR department.”
Well, the US has a pretty tightly controlled Democrat PR department in the MSM. They don’t have a complete monopoly on the “truth” like they used to, but they are still dominate, as they have demonstrated over the last few months blowing nothing up into something over Trump.
It appears Trump has done nothing illegal, but that won’t stop the MSM from creating more wild conspiracy theories. One good sign is it looks like people are starting to get weary of all these false claims by the MSM and the Left. Even some Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are saying things are going too far. The MSM and the Dems credibilty is on the line.
And we see that we have another incident of the MSM blatantly lying about Trump. Trump wrote a letter to Comey where he referred to Comey telling Trump three times that Trump was not under investigation for anything.
CNN and ABC both claimed this was not true, and they and the rest of the Leftwing MSM ran with this story for weeks, but now it turns out that it *was* true, as Comey outlined in his opening statement for his testimony today in the Senate.
Yesterday, the Democrat Senators were grilling Trumps CIA, DNI, NSA and Justice Department heads and trying to get them to say Trump had tried to influence them into killing any investigations.
But what I remember from the initial reporting on this is that Trump asked them to come out publicly and declare that there was no evidence that Trump was guilty of anything, and this is the same thing he asked Comey to do, to come out publicly and tell the public what he told Trump in private, that Trump was not the subject of any investigation.
So the Dems have twisted this request of Trump’s for his people to come out and publicly tell the truth that Trump was not involved in any investigation. The Dems are trying to bash Trump for asking his people to tell the truth. That’s how weird this situation is.
The lying leftwing MSM in all western nations are a danger to our freedoms. They distort reality to the point that they have millions of people confused about what is actually happening in the world. A recipe for disaster.
Slight correction:
What dictatorships and *climate extremists* have that democracies don’t have is a tightly controlled PR department.
There, a bit clearer now.
Apparently he has never heard the Frog and the Crocodile story.
First, CO2 is not pollution….thats a political term to be able to regulate it…good luck with that..
Second. air pollution is a combination of particles localized in an area of high population which can be corrected.
Has nothing to do with global CO2 concentration s…
In 1992 my wife and I, together with another couple, drove from Bavaria to Prague. On the road that we traveled there was an area where coal had been mined under the Communist regime. The trees were dead, no birds, no grass on the overburden, and the water in the small streams was dark emerald green. It was horrible! After reading all that the west was supposedly doing to destroy the environment, it was clear that we failed to measure up to the devastation that a totally uncaring political organisation could accomplish.
Coal mining does that in many places… for example, Kentucky
http://appvoices.org/end-mountaintop-removal/ecology/
Poor, poor Griff. He actually seems to believe the propaganda he’s paid to promote.
The two examples have nothing in common, other than they both involve coal.
MarkW is right. If you listen to Western NGOs, no doubt you’ll believe ‘capitalism’ is root of all evil – and the title of this blog entry.
I don’t know why Griff needs to dismiss the troubles communists created. Need to p in one’s own cereals?
Where’s the proof for this? We don’t need no steenking proof.
“What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.” – Jean Chretien, former Prime Minister of Canada
That quote pretty much sums up the whole CAGW farce.
Being in Baltimore, it’s interesting to talk to MICA grads about the school. They feel they’ve been sold a bill of goods about the value of a degree from a private art college. They end up working next to people with tech degrees from public institutions but earn 70% as much. MICA actually made the top 5 in schools delivering the worst value for the money spent to go there.
The Green Police are inherently fascist.
“Gore gets slammed by Bjorn Lomborg over false global warming prediction” on Fox
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/5461924819001/?#sp=show-clips
Governments can change the climate. Sure they can. Not democracies, sadly, because they just don’t quite have the required meteorological power. But your dictatorships: no such restrictions! A powerful dictator backed by a totalitarian regime can simply decree colder weather, and ka-ching!, global average temperatures drop immediately and decisively. This only works when people who think people can’t control climate are kept out of the way. Then it works, and works brilliantly. But as soon as there are people around who don’t believe in the power of the dictator to move the mercury in the thermometer with the power of his mind, well, the whole thing collapses. /sarc off.
An excellent question. Too bad that DeBrabender is so mired in Marxist/Socialist ideology that he completely misses the obvious answer, and goes for what is a blindingly stupid. It is in fact because here in the US democracy, freedom of speech, and especially important, an internet where the truth is still allowed (since the “free press” has mostly been taken over by Leftists). And where truth is allowed and cherished, it eventually prevails.
What he means is:
It is easier to fool one person
than to fool many.
Sorry, can’t argue with that logic.
Most political AGW skeptics realized this decades ago. The climate regulatory structure is an activist move away from individual rights to leftist statism. It’s no accident it became fully weaponized a year after the Soviet fell. There has always been an anti-American globalist base support channeling global climate policy and of course the American leftist establishment in media and academics adopted both international communism intellectually in the same fashion. The climate movement evolved from other green leftist predecessors from before Earthday.
We should have had criminal trials after the Soviet fell instead of climate conferences to bemoan Americanism which was always a subtext.
Anti-authoritarianism is the dominant dissent of UN sponsorship of global climate policy. That large blocks of skeptics persist in willful blindness to that agenda among the most distressing features of the climate war itself.
Stupid or venal? You decide.
In Rising Star, all of the brilliant people in that book, like Obama, majored in soft subjects like Poly Sci and anthropology, etc. Not a STEM major in the bunch.
These people are poseurs. That they accumulate power and wealth is a lesson for young people.