Hey, Republicans, even if global warming were a hoax (it’s not), don’t you think we could live without carbon fuels?

ScottCDunn
4 min readMay 2, 2019

It seems like another week, another conservative exercise in histrionics about the hoax of global warming. To hear conservatives talk about The Green New Deal, they say that it’s a plot to allow the government to take over the entire energy sector of the economy. They will even tell us that CO2 is not a poisonous gas, that it’s great for plants and that we were headed for another little ice age, anyway.

So, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus on Global Warming, let’s assume for the moment that the whole thing is a hoax. We will take their arguments as granted and consider other reasons why we need to doff our addiction to coal, oil, and natural gas.

The first reason to consider eliminating carbon-based fuels is pollution on a massive scale. The waste from the extraction, transportation, and burning of these fuels is enormous. We have seen oil spills on an enormous scale. There are gas well fires that have been burning for decades because no one knows how to put them out. that no one knows how to put out. There are still coal mine fires that no one knows how to put out, too. All of that is uncontrolled pollution.

In the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, we have seen numerous oil spills in pipelines and tanker trucks. Who could forget Deepwater Horizon? We have seen numerous train wrecks from the transportation of natural gas.

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