[quote=FlyerInHi]Why is trying to conserve carbon fuels and reduce pollution an extremist position?

Wanting to drill baby drill and use everything we can take out of the ground without conserving for the future is reckless.

Wanting to save money while people toil in poverty and go without seems reasonable, right? That because money is limited. But, in reality, money is a human invention. We can create it and manage it however we want.

But conserving the earth fuel resources (for whatever reason) is extremist? In reality , humans can’t create anymore oil once we use it all. Seems reasonable to conserve our God given bounty.[/quote]

It’s not extremist to want to preserve fossil fuels but some of the purposed solutions could be considered fairly extremist and devastating to an economy that relies on inexpensive energy. This idea that we can just replace our power grid with wind and solar so simply ignores the complexities of how a power grid works and dynamics of supply and demand (i.e. peak power demand does not coincide with peak solar and wind generation). Carbon credits which rewards the currently existing companies at the expense of new companies starting up is certainly going to stifle innovation.

In addition it’s becoming clear that we don’t have this whole global warming thing figured out as well as we thought. Most of the climate models built years ago are not working out as predicted. Obviously the climate has a lot of complexity and numerous factors that we don’t control and probably don’t understand. Unfortunately we don’t really understand man’s influence on the climate. Is it a lot, a little, negligible. Are we going to go back to living like we did in the 1800’s because we figure out we need to cut emissions by 80% to restore the climate. Do we know that restoring the climate to what it was in the 1800’s is better for the planet or worse?