I never saw "An Inconenient Truth" but I guess it really does paint a sort of apocalyptic view of the danger our world is in due to rising greenhouse gases. Now if you do have a sort of apocalyptic view of what the global environment is in for, fervor for the cause is understandable (although it may be misplaced).

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/30/climate_act/index.html


After reading this, I asked myself the following question: Should I be building a rocket ship to shoot my baby into space?

If you do believe in this sort of apocalyptic vision, I can understand how you would believe that action must be taken immediately, and that it should be done by any means necessary.
There have been apocalypse cults/religions for ages. The Norse were pretty much an Apocalypse cult/religion, and had Ragnarok. Christianity has the Book of Revelations. Relatively recently there was a secular fear of apocalypse based on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. It must be maddening to those that denigrate Ronald Reagan that he was the savior from that form of Apocalypse more so than anyone else.
If you are an atheist, but you do have a psychological desire for doomsday, so that you can "save the world," then a global warming apocalypse must be right up your alley. You get to make oil companies the perennial villain, and paint the first world as evil for polluting (both valid points to some degree, but are the doors of Exxon the Gates of Hell?)
Fear is a great motivator. But what are we motivated to do because of it? Even if we take the danger of anthropogenic global warming as true, why is it we believe that the steps being proposed are indeed the proper ones?
Large scale solutions may appear to be the answer to large scale problems, but the law of unintended consequences can, and often does, lead to problems that were worse than the one that was supposed to be addressed.
Here the author talks about "deploying clean energy technology at an aggressive pace with a negligible net economic cost, 0.1 percent of GDP per year or less."
The problem I have with the analysis is that it is glib, and the problem I have with the analyst is that in my assessment he is alarmist to the point of hysterical.

"If I were writing climate legislation, I would leave transportation out of the cap and trade system. Why legislate what is inevitable anyway? The price of petroleum, gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel are going to soar in the coming years because we haven't had intelligent energy policy for decades. Let our previous stupidity and myopia drive the price higher for the foreseeable future.
To inaugurate real change, policymakers need to put together an aggressive "energy independence" package as part of the climate bill. The package should be focused on tougher fuel economy standards, a low-carbon-fuels standard and an aggressive push to adopt plug-in hybrids. "

This just doesn't make sense to me. From the overall article, I'm guessing that he is pushing for a cap and trade system for all industries, but after going through his analysis that fuel costs will inexorably rise, tougher fuel economy standards are required, some sort of low-carbon-fuels standard to be put in place, and plug in hybrids need to replace the national fleet.

Is there something about apocalypse thinking that leads to faulty logical constructs?

Years ago, there was a comic book titled "Normalman." The main character was a man without superpowers who lived in a world where everyone else had comic book superpowers. Normalman's origin was that he was rocketed to another planet by his father who had concluded that their own world was going to explode, and he couldn't convince the rest of his civilization of his prediction. But, as it turned out, Normalman's father was wrong. And when the world did not explode as he had predicted, his wife, the mother of their baby, shot Normalman's father, crying out something along the lines of "My Baby! Oh my god, you shot my baby into space! You're crazy!" As I recall, Normalman's father didn't have to live very long with the guilt of having shot his baby into space, as his wife cut his life short upon seeing what he had done.

I'm curious if, in the light of the latest blows to warmist theories, if he is doing what would be the equivalent of building his spaceship for his baby. Of course, the world isn't going to explode like Krypton did, so shooting a rocket into space isn't really necessary. But if you do think that the global environment is going to change drastically in your lifetime because conservatives manage to delay passage of initiatives to modify greenhouse gas emissions, you may want to consider buying land in Greenland.

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/11/27/in-greenland-warming-fuels-dream-of-hidden-wealth.html?PageNr=1&-C=