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Adapt

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The world may or may not be on its way to a global warming crisis. Some want to act as if it is. Some want to play it on the safe side. Few want to ignore it altogether.

One thing's for sure, though - it ain't time to hit the panic button.

A fatal flaw in the thinking of Al Gore and his ilk is that, in order to stave off global warming, we would have to take drastic steps that involve actually HARMING various undeveloped countries. Such is the problem with rationing energy.

For example, the biggest threat to an all-out assault on global warming is the industrialization of Africa. What if all those Africans had the industry to give them a quality of life equivalent to that in Europe and the United States? If you want to stop global warming, you have to stop that. And if you stop that, you also stop the ability for people in third-world countries to receive better medical care, cleaner drinking water and foods, live in better homes, etc.

In other words, to stop MAYBE stop global warming, you'd DEFINITELY harm and kill millions of people by denying them the benefits of life that we have in already-developed countries.

Now, a practical approach:

We can't fall prey to the media's dire warnings on global warming. It's only hurting us that we're being scared so badly. Does anyone remember Global Cooling in the '70s? Or SARS? or the Bird Flu?

All the fuss, all the warnings, all the doom and gloom predictions - never happened.

So let's get our heads on straight and try listening to BOTH sides of the global warming debate - half of scientists say we don't cause it or it's not a big deal. But the half that disagree are the ones grabbing the headlines.

If we can't reach consensus, we have to meet in the middle when it comes to the solution. First off, we have to realize that we're humans. This earth is ours. We MUST alter the environment to live in it. That being the case, we can't in good conscience, hold people in third-world countries from developing.

The balance? We can bring them the technology to do it in as clean a way as possible, while we employ the same practices back at home.

It's good to see that few Helium writers think the government should regulate energy. People must be realizing what a danger-zone we're in when the Supreme Court rules that carbon can be classified as a pollutant.

Think about it - we breathe in oxygen, and breathe out carbon dioxide. We're a quirky court ruling away from the government being able to regulate how often you and I exhale.

So leave regulations out, and responsibility in. That's how to adapt.

Learn more about this author, J.R. Anthony.
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