[Terrapreta] Critical thinking or lack thereof

[William Carr]

> "According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute,  
> industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources  
> for 150 years, meaning we are moving away from carbon toward  
> hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases  
> as you go from wood and hay (1:1) to coal to oil to gas (1:4)"

Did anybody catch this part?

An invalid comparison if there ever was one.

Crichton is cherry-picking his citations,  trying to prove we don't  
need to DO anything about carbon by going all the way back to HAY !

As if there was some magic guiding force moving our society away from  
carbon, mysteriously operating in the background !



It's an invalid comparison, if you're actually concerned about carbon  
dioxide as a Global Warming gas.

Wood and hay are carbon neutral fuels.   Coal, oil, and gas are not.

Burning biomass has never added a gram of Carbon to the atmosphere  
that didn't COME from the atmosphere in the first place.




************



This reminds me of what a cousin of mine tried to tell me once.

We were at a family picnic, and out of the blue he said:  " did you  
know that if you dump raw sewage into a river, 100 yards down the  
river that water will be safe to drink"?


I looked at him in astonishment.   Several things went through my mind.

1) This was obviously something he'd been told.   What today we call a  
"talking point", particular to his political party.

2) This guy is actually supposed to be intelligent.

3) My cousin is SO convinced of the rightness of his Party's policies  
he didn't even analyze this anecdote before repeating it.

4) Apparently he'd never heard the "solution to pollution is dilution".

Dilute raw sewage ENOUGH, and the amount of live Fecal Coliform  
Bacteria per liter will be low enough that your likelihood of  
infection from it is also low.

But the water ISN'T clean.    The bacteria will find a haven in a  
backwater somewhere, and given a food source may reproduce until it  
reaches toxic levels.   That's why municipalities have Sewage  
Treatment plants.

5) Also apparently, the conclusion the listener is supposed to draw is  
this:   that God has such a complex plan for the world, that he  
designed Nature to automatically clean up after us !

This anecdote isn't a fluke.

I've heard other talking points like this, with similar flawed  
logic:   I occasionally get them in group emails and it's a  
distressing sign of "group think".



*************



I looked at my cousin in disgust, and told him "YOU can drink it, not  
me !".     He was taken aback.   Apparently not the result he was  
expecting.


And so we come full circle.   Both Crichton and my cousin seem to  
believe there's no need to worry over the problems global civilization  
causes.

Both of them want to dissuade the rest of us from the effort of  
thinking, and possibly doing something about these problems that might  
cost them money in taxes.


I think the "lack of critical thinking" is just what Crichton is  
hoping for.



William Carr