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Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

The most interesting part of Gores speech for me was the strong point he made (oh he’s not the first or last) about dependence  on foreign oil and renewables for the U.S. The economic, social and political, for this is surely big politics I argue not, points of his speech are the most interesting part of that speech. The American culture shines for me very strongly through as well as he as a person and a speaker but this also a very American thing, hmm perhaps…we do have these “strong leaders”, patriarchs, in other parts of the world as well.

Sustainability as is, that is the survival of the human race as a dominant species and in a society in which we can uphold this state for generations to come, is only partly about the ecological dimension of this planet. This is the part that is mostly talked about, details about how and what affects what in an ecological sense, which is all good and well as for we humans do need some sort of fairly stable environment to survive. But the other 2-3 aspects, (depending on who you talk to in the sustainability science  field) social/cultural, economical and (institutional), are at least as important in the system of sustainability. It all links together.

Relating to climate change which is what I hope we are talking about here (whoever presents it and whatever “truths” are told or not).

“With the July 2007 release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate”

Now thats a cut from wikipedia Scientific opinion on climate change so I suppose I should dig something up from a nice journal like Nature or the like, but this was taken from Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union so I suppose it’ll have to do (for now).

Connected to the economic sphere; “The Stern Review on the economics of climate change” executive summaries can be found here, and the full review here. Now the yay and the nay has been loud on this one almost as loud as the yes and nos regarding climate change itself and understandably so we were built (Oh no I do NOT mean intelligent design…) to go for minimum energy…just something about this universe that wants it that way.

Now we live on a planet that has been around for about 4,5billion years. And a certainty is that our impact on this planet has during the last 200 years increased enormously (from about 1 billion to 6,5 billion! in population) somewhat related to fossil fuels and cheap energy? perhaps?

If not the population increase then at least the unbalancing effect we have on this balanced system called earth?

Thank you Thomas for inspiring me to clarify

Tags: politics, speech, al gore, climate change, earth, sustainability, aspects of sd

Vice President Al Gore as well as citizen and presidential candidate Barak Obama.