The People Who Make Sustainability Impossible

So above is this great little video of Bill O'Reilly explaining that you can't explain things, and therefore God exists. Normally, I try to not to let these people get any blog time, but you know, based on the title of this post, that someone is going to get mentioned.
The really eerie thing about this isn't O'Reilly; his exhortations are easily enough dismissed. No, what scared me was when I showed this video to a friend and he immediately denounced the video, and O'Reilly, as "an entertainer just doing what he can to entertain." Further, when I suggested that all professions, engineering, plumbing, acting, entertaining, politicking, accounting, whatever-ing, are bound by ethics and morality, and that Mr. O'Reilly was lying to people - blatantly - he suggested, defensively, that "the global warming people" are liars too, and for the same reason as Mr. O'Reilly.
The problem here is that a sizable portion of the world population (especially in industrialized nations) don't just believe that anthropogenic climate change is an unproven myth. They believe it is a proven lie. They believe that "global warming" is a political tool that left-leaning politicians use to amalgamate power. They do not see clear evidence of climate change because the scale of it is not one that can be observed by an individual. Nor do they see the benefits of sustainable concepts: if Eastern Kansans have to pay higher taxes to finance wind generator installations in Western Kansas, all they see is the taxes, the wind generators are invisible, the cleaner energy produced by them is invisible, and the net reduction in greenhouse gas is invisible. The jobs created (or maintained) to install these generators are typically invisible too.
And yet, an unusually cold winter in Eastern Kansas is very visible. And so the pressing need to convert from a global economy built on the back of carbon into one built around hydrogen seems like no big rush; look how cold it was this year.
Given a population of people clearly skeptical about global warming, it doesn't take much to concrete in them the belief that global warming was cooked up as a method to steal their livelihood. (RUN ON SENTENCE WARNING!) Charges are leveled at environmentalists like Al Gore that he and others (in no particular order) have an obvious conflict of interest because they advocate green technology but also invest in it (which is anathema to people who of course never have invested in concept they also champion), they make erroneous scientific claims (that one group in England did...something wrong...right, so all global warming evidence must be suspect), they claim we need to be sustainable but hypocritically use large amounts of energy themselves and continue to eat meat (because if you contradict yourself at all in your entire life, then your entire life is a lie), and he and others refuse to debate the topic of global warming (sorry, but for most of the scientific community, i.e. anyone qualified to effectively debate the topic, anthropogenic global warming is not debateable, it is a fact).

And yet, we do not live in a meritocracy or a technocracy. We live in a world where Sarah Palin can be a candidate for Vice President. Where political positions aren't earned through promotions, it is earned through popularity contests. And so as long as loud voices can continue to drive the debate away from solutions to global warming and keep it focused on the question of whether global warming exists at all, the world cannot move forward. Sustainability goes nowhere.


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