Gary Johnson is willing to admit that we have a climate change problem, but he thinks it is too expensive to do anything about it, so he wants to do nothing. Except for one thing: his solution is to emigrate.
Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson offered an outta this world solution on Sunday to the planet’s environmental crises.
We do have to inhabit other planets. The future of the human race is space exploration,Johnson said on ABC’s “This Week.”
This is what I regard as the thinking of locusts: burn through what you’ve got and just move on to fresh ground. Except there’s the little problem of the “what you’ve got” being the entirety of Planet Earth.
I do have some serious questions for Governor Johnson, however.
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Which planet do you think will be more habitable than Earth after Libertarian laissez faire policies get done with it, Venus or Mars?
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If neither of those two, which planet do you propose as the new homeworld for humanity?
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I assume that you acknowledge that some terraforming of this new home will be required. Since that would require the investment of a substantial portion of Earth’s resources to accomplish, over centuries to thousands of years, before we see any return on the investment, do you think the free market is capable of driving the greatest public works project in all of human history?
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Let us pretend you have a real habitable extraterrestrial planet in mind. How do we get there? By “we”, I mean the 7 billion people now on Earth. Or do you imagine this is more of an opportunity for the few incredibly rich people, while everyone else boils, fries, broils, or fricassees on Abandoned Earth?
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How do you reconcile the fact that you oppose closing coal plants because it would cost the economy too much, while proposing a solution that is immensely more expensive, currently impracticable, and requires allowing this lovely blue planet to choke on our waste? This does not sound at all cost effective.
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You seem to regard natural resources as fungible. Are you capable of empathizing with people who might love pieces of this Earth so much that they don’t see any possibility of substitutions? I don’t think we should surrender the Galapagos Islands, the Olympic Rain Forest, the Great Barrier Reef, or any of the millions of treasures we ought to be protecting. Do you also see your children as interchangeable, so you’d have no problem giving one up if we provided a replacement of equal or greater value?
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When do you leave?