Science for Dummies

I'm a selfish person. I don't volunteer time or much money to charities. I don't like to recycle. I drive everywhere I go. I consume more than my share of material and energy, and I waste even more.

Basically, I'm like a lot of Americans.

Author Ayn Rand wrote about the virtues of selfishness — not self-interest at the expense of others, but merely a rational priority for one's own well-being. But while I'm not sure if Rand's philosophy is the best way to run a society, I'm completely perplexed by the current cynical, self-destructive debate over something in everyone's interest: The environment.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last month that it was 90 percent certain human activity has contributed to the rise in global temperatures, the scorn spewing from so-called conservative talk radio was both expected and befuddling.

Hundreds of scientists from 113 countries predicted the likelihood of hotter days, longer heat waves, the depletion of the polar ice caps, the rise in sea level and more intense tropical storms. Next month the IPCC will present a report predicting that in a few decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, tens of millions will be flooded out of their homes and tropical diseases and starvation will spread.

Partisan apparatchicks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity mock these pronouncements as Chicken Little hysteria, choosing instead to parrot the denials of oil-company-sponsored scientists and the guy who wrote that book about dinosaurs coming back to terrorize people.

I'm not about to debate the science here. I suppose there's a chance that the most authoritative and independent body of scientists in the world have it all wrong. The Earth's temperature has always fluctuated. And even the IPCC admits there isn't likely much we can do to fix the problem any time soon. But does that mean we shouldn't try?

Those who attack environmentalists as tree-hugging hippies continue to tell complacent Americans what they want to hear. They show them the world as they already imagine it to be, singing poisonous lullabies while ignoring some perfectly convenient truths.

Pollution is bad. Doesn't it stand to reason that the industrial revolution and an exponential increase in world population might have some negative impact on the planet? You don't need to drive past too many refinery towers on the Turnpike to imagine how we've forever altered our world.

It might not make short-term business sense to curtail industry to stave off the pollution that contributes to global warming. It might be impossible to force India and China to limit their growing, voracious energy needs. But no economy can exist without healthy ecology. Everything we eat, the air we breathe, the trucks we fill and the televisions we watch — everything requires clean, thriving oceans, streams and forests.

Corporations live from quarter-to-quarter, worrying little about where they dump their chemical waste or how much they deplete shared resources. But only sustainable ecosystems can sustain an economy. Shouldn't this be a major tenet of true conservatism? Sure, some environmental groups take their agenda too far and give the whole endeavor a bad name. But does it make sense to stymie environmentalism for partisan or short-sighted business reasons?
A recent Fox News poll showed that 82 percent of people believe global warming exists, though a Gallup poll shows most people think the impact will be far in the future. Maybe a little hysteria can help motivate individuals and nations to act in their own interests.

There are plenty of potential disasters we face that defy almost any solution. If the buried super-volcano in Yosemite National Park erupts, it will end all life on the planet. So would a very common gamma ray burst that could send 1 million trillion times the energy of the sun directly toward us. And we will most certainly find ourselves in the path of a large asteroid or comet at some point. The Earth is already covered with the evidence of past, possibly extinction-level collisions.

But even if we can’t stop or slow global warming, we can take action to improve our odds -- and life across the globe.

I'll leave solutions to smarter people, though a cap on emissions and a carbon tax to stem oil consumption and spark clean fuel innovations could be a good start. If we can't stop global warming, we can certainly make our planet safer, cleaner and more efficient while ending our addiction to oil found in Middle Eastern countries that foment religious wars.

Selfish? That's the idea.