Sigh...To Be So Young And Naive

I met with a former student of mine recently to go over his work from last year, which pretty much just turned into a bullshitting session. He is perhaps one of the most conservative students I've had, and I actually had to step in and prevent a near heated argument between him and another student in my class over the New York Times, for godssake.

He really disappoints me in a lot of ways. He's really bright, he's a decent writer, and generally a nice guy. But let politics creep in, and he's so irrational. I realize that reveals my bias away from the conservative side, but I don't care. I've heard enough of the arguments they make to realize that they are incredibly irrational.

Somehow the topic of conversation turned to global warming. He says, "I just can't believe that my SUV causes global warming."

"Can't or don't want to?" Slips out of my mouth. He just sort of looks at me noncomprehendingly. "You believe in pollution, right?" Still stares. If he was in question, I had plans to walk him down to the bottom of the building and show him the trash on the street.

Why can't we take precautions against things, rather like a vaccination against a known killer, rather than wait until we're dying of the disease to go see the doctor and have our treatment options greatly reduced? A buddy of mine on a forum used the great example of being in the middle of open combat. If someone is firing at you, are you going to wait until you can verify their height, weight, dogtags, regiment number, make of the tank they're driving, how much fuel it has left, all of the ammo he has left, etc. (and I'm paraphrasing his example) before you do something about it? Or are you going to fire back and at the very least take cover somewhere? After all, I guess you can't really know whether or not he really means to kill you, can you?

I don't see how the debate about warming is much different from the debate about pollution. It's bad. Noxious fumes from cars are bad. Garbage is bad. Why not try to reduce the impact? Where's the harm in that?

It seems to me that those who don't want to do anything about global warming do so for very selfish reasons, because it just seems to make sense that you'd want to not, you know, wreck the Earth, and stuff. I hope my student at least thought of that when he took the public transportation that returned him to the parking lot where he keeps his SUV in front of his dorm hall.

-- Virgil