Cool Sails in the Sunset

A certain Prof. Salter has a novel idea for combatting global warming. He has proposed that 50 remote-controlled yachts spanning the globe and spewing a fine mist of salt water into the air could do the trick. The salt would get carried up into the clouds, which would increase the reflectivity of the clouds, causing more sunlight to be bounced back to the sun, thus cooling the earth and offsetting global warming.

This could be done quite cheaply -- at a tiny fraction of the cost of environmentalists' invasive and disruptive plans, so cheaply in fact that if people gave to Prof. Salter's plan rather than to Al Gore's profitable speeches, it would just about cover the cost (I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.)

But, as the National Post article puts it, there's a problem with his proposal.

"They promise to save the planet for a pittance, and without making humans pay a dear price for their profligate ways. Fifty ships a year, built at a cost of some $400-million to $500-million, would remove the increased warming now attributed to all the fossil fuel burning. They would also provide the time required for an orderly transition to economies based on renewable fuels -- the passion of Prof. Salter's professional life."

It sounds like a great idea, so naturally environmentalists dislike it. They don't even want to consider it. They don't want to spend a dime testing his theory.

You have to ask yourself, "why?".

I don't know what answer you come up with, but here's mine:

Solving the global warming "crisis" easily would be a disaster for them. They love being in crisis mode. They want there to be a crisis. They have turned it not into a merely practical problem but into a great moral crusade of good-vs.-evil; us-vs.-them; they want to blame the west for its prosperous ways, and they want to intrude as much as they can into other people's lives. They love railing against conservative governments that drag their feet on this issue -- althought they happily left the Canadian Liberals alone when they talked the talk but utterly failed to walk the walk. This fact alone tells you that many environmentalists are frankly politically motivated and want to impose socialist goals and values on societies and dsicredit and undermine conservative regimes.

It may also be a matter of displaced conscience. Bill Gothard has a theory, and I tend to agree with him, that when a person suppresses his God-given conscience, his conscience pops up in some other area -- man is hopelessly moral, and needs to feel that he is living by a moral code. So, a person who supports the destruction of a human life in a mother's womb may take up the cause of saving whales, or not eating meat, and make that her righteous cause.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that Al Gore was once a pro-life man. He swallowed his pro-life views and became a rabid, and I mean rabid, supporter of abortion rights. Perhaps his zeal for environmental causes, and "saving the planet" is a consequence of a seared conscience in a matter of first importance to God -- human life, a substitutionary morality where instead of revering human life, he reveres the environment instead. And man, instead of being evil for aborting human children, is evil for using incandescent lightbulbs.

Food for thought.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.