My Comments: I read this writers articles from time to time as his primary focus is the world of investments and how to make money. That’s also my professional world.

When this one crossed my screen, I took notice since the issue of climate change is very real, in my opinion, and will become an increasingly larger issue in the coming decades. It’s probably inevitable that it will cause major changes in where and how our grandchildren and beyond live their lives.

by Jeffrey Dow Jones

Climate change.

That’s all I need to type — a single pair of words — and you’ve already formed a dozen conclusions, adopted a defensive posture, and entrenched yourself into well-defined position. Gloves up. Two little words and every single one of you is ready for battle.

Today we’re going to put the gloves down. We’re going to find some common ground and then we’re going to figure out if we can make some money and maybe change the world while we’re at it. But before we do that, we need a quick understanding of how we wound up here in the the first place.

See, somewhere along the line climate change stopped being a scientific issue and became instead an ideological one. When you think about it, it’s all very strange. Why is a topic that is so obviously only able to be addressed via research, data, and the scientific method one that has deeply such entrenched socio-political roots?

Personally, I blame Al Gore. He made that freakin’ movie. You know the one. In 90 minutes, he became the indisputable global spokesperson for climate change. And from that distinct moment on, it stopped being a matter of scientific inquiry and became instead a debate. Today the topic is as contentious and divisive as ever.

It could have played out differently. Imagine if Grover Norquist was the centerpiece of An Inconvenient Truth. Or John McCain, who, I’ve been told by people in the know, was intended to represent half the film in its early drafts. That would fit, especially given that McCain was the guy who introduced landmark legislation in 2003 to curb trends in global warming. That was back when Republicans loved technology like hybrid automobiles because it reduced our dependence on foreign oil. Screw those Saudis!

But no, it was Al Gore. Co-captain of the Blue Team. And even though he helped make a movie that did a fantastic job explaining the topic and why it matters and mobilized a huge chunk of the population to unprecedented extent, Washington D.C. was cleaved in two, because, dammit, the Red Team really hates Al Gore. As the figurehead for global warming, no Red Teamer in their right mind could stand alongside him. In fact, they’d have to take on an adversarial stance. Screw this global warming hoax!

That political divide had real world effects. Policy efforts to curb climate change were thrown out the window. What was once possible under the bipartisan banner of McCain & Lieberman became impossible in a post-Inconvenient world. The Obama administration tried to address the issue by promoting and subsidizing “green” technologies instead, but those efforts were co-opted by even more rapid technological change in the traditional energy sector. Today, we don’t really worry about running out of crude oil quite so soon and now we’re sitting on more natural gas than we know what to do with.

High up Mt. Olympus, some supernatural deity with an extreme sense of irony is laughing at us.

And we’d probably all be laughing too if the possible consequences weren’t so large.

Jeffrey Jones, as he does always, writes loooong articles. If you want to read the rest of this, go up to the top and where it says “leave a reply”, send me a comment and I’ll forward it all to you. It comes to me via email so I’ll need your email address.