Serious Protecting the environment and/or protecting the economy

[Abra Kapocus]

There's that Cree Indian proverb that comes to mind, paraphrased in such a way to say that when all the world is spoiled and drained we will realize that we can't eat money. There's also a quote by one of my favorite comedian activists, Lee Camp, who says that measuring the health of a society by how well the stock market is doing is like measuring the health of a man by the happiness of the leeches that are attached to him. And, of course, there's the realization that the rich oligarchs who control policy in this country benefit a lot more from unemployment and recession than any other economic condition. Lastly, there's the notion that the status quo (dirty energy) is more profitable than making substantive change.

If I had to choose, environment all the way. Try counting your money underwater.

 

[Hidious]

I've seen people argue that we'll never run out of oil because advancements in technology will keep finding more oil. They cited the fact that many past oil depletion predictions have been false so far. I wish I were kidding.

Well then, I guess we should all pray to the oil gods. Hey, it isn't that crazy. A whole group of people on twitch pray to a helix fossil. Why not the remains of fossils?

 

[billymills]

If anyone wants to come up with a better question/opening post, I'll edit it in. The prompt is clearly lacking at the moment.

 

[Kingpoleon]

Let me ask you this: Does the economy or environment take care of itself better? Whichever one you answer to that, the opposite is what you should have picked in the poll.

 

[Abra Kapocus]

Let me ask you this: Does the economy or environment take care of itself better? Whichever one you answer to that, the opposite is what you should have picked in the poll.

The rub there is often times our efforts to take care of the economy hurt the environment (which may also be vice versa depending on a number of things). Not to say they're mutually exclusive, but given who holds all of the chips at least in the US, such a fate is often the direction that it goes. It's amazing how hellbent we seem to be on making the two fundamentally unable to coexist.

 

[Dandatpenguin]

America is sending soldiers into other countries to fight and die for oil. We're spending more money and more lives to get oil, than it would to use alternatives such as solar power. But there are stupid laws in some counties prohibiting some of these alternatives. Like where I live we're not allowed to have solar panels on our house because "It looks too ugly". Also as of right now scientist say this is the best places that we know of in the universe. So I would say the environment is more important than our economy.

 

[mattj]

There's got to be some kind of balance. I don't agree with forbidding logging because it might "possibly" kill off the last of some tiny population of quail that can't cut it in today's world. But I don't agree with clearcutting. I don't feel bad when gassing up my car (I only drive 2 miles round trip a day anyway). But I oppose the Keystone pipeline because pipeline's bust all the time and I'm sick and tired of it. Other than trillionaire companies complaining "Ohhh b-b-b-but it's going to be too expensive waaaaaaaah" while simultaneously posting a quadrillion dollar profit, I don't see why we can't do both.

 

[verbatim]

Why do we always frame environmental issues in terms of the planet's health? If we really fuck things up the planet will just have to wait a few thousand years to recover, whereas we'll all be dead. Also "Save Ourselves" sounds much better on a bumper sticker.

 

[Abra Kapocus]

Why do we always frame environmental issues in terms of the planet's health? If we really fuck things up the planet will just have to wait a few thousand years to recover, whereas we'll all be dead. Also "Save Ourselves" sounds much better on a bumper sticker.

I think that's more or less been the mindset of pretty much most environmental movements from the getgo, to preserve the planet's ability to sustain human life.