Not just an academic question:
Generally, North Carolina is more part of the solution than the problem of global warming. The state has been a leader in encouraging renewable energy, especially solar energy, and some of its cities and towns have promoted the use of renewable energy in homes and required it in public buildings.
But that positive record is being clouded by the rise of climate-change skeptics in the General Assembly and the administration of Gov. Pat McCrory. Not only has state government lost a sense of urgency or even obligation about addressing global warming, it also has begun rolling back earlier efforts and thwarting current ones.
A few years ago I speculated about the psychological drivers of climate-change denialism, because I thought it was important to answer the question of "why" someone would ignore the mounting pile of scientific as well as observed evidence on this critically important subject. But we also need to understand there are (at least) two different kinds of deniers: The ones who truly don't believe it's happening, and the ones who do accept it, but still fight any attempts to curtail the human behavior that's bringing it about. And when somebody gravitates from the former to the latter, the cognitive dissonance that creates can make them somewhere between extremely aggressive and downright vicious:
http://ift.tt/1OIO8wV
No comments:
Post a Comment