Let me make one thing clear, right up front, for those of you who didn't know yet. I am a global warming denier. Or very nearly one. In particular, I think that the evidence that the earth is warming overall is merely suggestive, not conclusive. I think that the consensus scenario among climatologists who do believe in global warming for how warm it's going to get, roughly 9 Fahrenheit degrees over the forty to sixty years, actually sounds like a good idea, both for us and for the planet, for a long list of reasons that are mostly off-topic right this minute from what I want to talk about. And most importantly, I think the math for claims of anthropogenic global warming just plain doesn't work, that it's not an accident that none of the computer models can successfully predict the past, let alone the future. (If you put in old data and run the models, you don't get anything like current conditions.) It was the late George Carlin who hipped me to what's wrong with this argument, decades ago, when he observed that when environmentalists start talking apocalypse, it always sounded to him like they were (on some level) bragging: "Look how powerful human beings are, man: we wrecked the sky." We're a tiny fraction of this planet's biomass, which is itself a tiny fraction of the planet's mass; technology provides a multiplier effect, but not that much of one. The idea is overtly preposterous. And besides, since I like the idea of the planet finally climbing the last bit of the way out of the last Little Ice Age even if it takes some human help to do so, I really don't care a whole lot even if it turns out that I'm wrong.

But you know what? All that being said? If global warming is your number one issue, you and I do not need to be enemies, and I'll tell you why. There is almost nothing that you want to do to stave off global warming that I don't want to do, too, for my own even better reasons.

You want the world to burn a lot less coal? So do I. Not because I give a rat's hindquarters about CO₂ emissions, but because there are only two ways to mine coal: completely wreck the local ecosystem, or send people down under the ground to die over and over again. It routinely chaps my back end that a bunch of moronic tree hugging hippies and crybaby luddites talked us into sticking with coal over nuclear over the last thirty years, when nuclear power (in any country that uses even vaguely modern safeguards) has killed exactly zero people in the whole time since it's been invented, but coal mining kills dozens or hundreds of coal miners every year.

You want the world to burn a lot less oil? So do I. Not because I think that what comes out of commuters' tailpipes matters all that much to the environment (now that we've cleaned up auto exhaust so much since I was a kid, thank Prime). Not because I'm all that terrified of "Peak Oil," a goofball idea that requires that you know exactly nothing about the oil industry. I had my eyes opened on this one by a guy I went to college with who was a petrogeologist for an oil exploration firm: there is always about a 75-80 year supply of oil in the known world oil reserves. Why? Because when it gets over 80, everybody cuts funding for oil exploration, starting it back up again when it drops below 70. If that ever happens and then the geologists don't find oil, then I'll worry, but it hasn't happened yet. I will say this, though: we may be about to run out of cheap oil, out of major oil reserves of light, sweet (low density, low sulfur, easy to process) oil that's close to the surface and under enough pressure to make it nearly free to extract. But whether we are or not, and whether it matters to the atmosphere or not, I want the US, especially, the heck out of the oil consumption "biz."

For one thing, most of you weren't even born yet when I acquired my permanent chip on my shoulder over OPEC. I lived long enough to see the Bell System dismantled; I hope to live long enough to see those damned OPEC sheiks crawl helplessly back to their cheap-ass tents and holes in the ground, so the rest of us don't have to care about their hopelessly corrupt medieval religious fundamentalist feudal backwater countries. Just about all of the major oil producing regions of the world right now are in violent backwater underdeveloped, horribly misruled, gangster-ridden, warlord-dominated parts of the world like the middle east, southeast Asia, Russia, west Africa, and Latin America, because those of us in the few decent places on the planet to live used up all our local oil (or all the cheapest parts of it) half a century ago; I'm sick and tired of watching America's finest march off to die in every stupid conflict in the third world, because we have to care about them because they have oil. The sooner we can stop caring about their stupid oil, the happier this cynical old-too-early curmudgeon will be, whether it "saves the planet" or not.

But for another reason, I know this about history: the reason America was the one bailing England out in 1943, and not the other way around, was that oil was just that much better than coal, and starting 50 years before that, we made the switch and England didn't, so we got rich and powerful while the fabled "empire on which the sun never sets" (because, as any Irishman will tell you, God Himself wouldn't trust an Englishman in the dark) shrank to a handful of counties in northern Ireland and a tiny little sheep farm off the coast of Argentina. Right now, something really important is happening all over the world. For the last hundred years, the rich white owners of every single corrupt sewer of a country in the third world have been doing everything in their power to keep the brown and yellow majorities in this world poor and enslaved, and over the last couple of decades, they've been gradually and grudgingly failing to keep people down. Despite the best efforts of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and every rich white elite in the tropics, the rest of the planet is developing a middle class. That middle class is going to want, going to need, a middle class lifestyle. And given a choice of technologies to power and fuel that lifestyle, they are not going to choose oil. They're going to buy nuclear power, or maybe solar, or maybe wind, or maybe geothermal, or maybe tidal, or maybe some combination of the above.

And here's the damnedest thing about that: our scientists and engineers are at or near the forefront of over half of those technologies. It could be us that they have to buy them from, it could be our companies that collect the patent royalties on those technologies (and pay taxes thereon), it could be our country that gets those jobs. But if we do, it'll be over the Bush (and probably McCain) administration's dead bodies. The President's current budget proposal cuts subsidies for solar research, already a pittance, by 7%, right at the point where the world is deciding where the factories are going to be built, and whose technologies are going to be the dominant ones, in 3rd generation flexible thin-film non-toxic inexpensive solar cells. That's inexcusable. That's selling our country's future out for cheap, considering what we're talking about cutting is 7% off of what was already only a $170 million dollar appropriation out of a $2 trillion budget. We could quintuple that research and development allocation and it would still disappear in the rounding error on the deficit. But you know what? My thinking is that all those new middle class citizens all over the world are going to buy solar, whether they buy it from us or from someone else. Probably not to "reduce their carbon footprint," no matter what they say, but for the same reason that those same parts of the world abandoned their old, corrupt, inadequate government landline phone monopolies and went straight to cellular: faster build-out, less politics, more choice, and able to be built in smaller, cheaper increments at a time. If it takes all the rest of you freaking out over global warming to get the US to get in front of that wave, fine; I'll go along, even though you're almost certainly wrong, because I want what you want, too.

For the same reasons and because no matter what tech they use, for the next several decades all those new middle class customers are going to be living in places where electricity from the national electrical grid is shortage prone, expensive, and unreliable, you can bet this about them, too: no matter what they use to generate power locally, they're going to buy the most energy efficient household appliances and corporate equipment they can get their hands on. You want people to upgrade their air conditioners and refrigerators and furnaces and computers and lightbulbs and what-all-else to new ones that use a lot less energy, so power plants will emit less carbon dioxide? They're going to want to do so because it's cheaper than building new power plants. Heck, we're insane if we don't do so rather than build new power plants. Over a decade ago, several major national electrical utilities did the math and showed their shareholders that, for less than the cost to build a new power plant of any kind, they could buy all of their customers new appliances that would eliminate the demand for a new power plant. They called it "generating nega-watts," and failure to implement those proposals is something we're all going to feel as oil and natural gas get more expensive, driving up the cost of electricity, while demand rises faster than new plants are built, browning out more of our electrical grid every year. And the most annoying part of that to me is that we're long past the point of Jimmy frakkin' Carter in a cardigan begging people to freeze in the dark to reduce energy consumption. We have the means now, from more efficient cooling of computers and smarter power-saving software to better-designed appliances to lower-friction higher-efficiency pumps and motors of all kinds to three entire new categories of suddenly-cheap lighting technology all of which generate as much light at 1/10th the power consumption with 1/10th to 1/100th the waste heat beaming down on you, to live as well as we are now, only cheaper. Get this through your heads, if you haven't already: even if gas goes to $7 a gallon and that results in runaway inflation, you don't have to live any worse than you do now; you only have to live smarter than you do now. You're worried about people's energy wasting wrecking the ecosystem? Fine, worry about that if that's what it takes to get you to do what's necessary to get people to stop wasting money we can't afford to keep spending and getting nothing back to show for it.

And if you want people to use more energy efficient gear to save the planet, and I want them to do it to save the economy and provide American jobs selling energy efficient gear, we have a common enemy. The same presidential budget cuts subsidies for energy conservation research by 27%, from the (again) already laughably low number of $870 million. Wow, we were spending a whole 1¢ a day per American subsidizing that research? And we're cutting it? Wouldn't it generate a lot more jobs and a lot more future revenue for the US treasury and a lot more wealth on the American stock market if we spent a whole dime per person, if that's what it takes to get our companies out ahead of what's obviously about to be a booming market? Whether it saves the planet or not?

Although speaking of wasting energy and money, what's the poster-child for global warming crusaders, the Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and Satan himself rolled into one of the environmental movement? The SUV. You want people to drive a lot fewer Sport Utility Vehicles because you mistakenly think that their tailpipe emissions are going to raise sea level? I think you're a fool, hopelessly incapable of estimating even order of magnitude of the impact of those emissions -- but I hate SUVs even more than you do. Not because they pollute, not because of their "carbon footprint," but because they're mind numbingly stupid vehicles! Because they're so big, they cost a fortune, not just to run, but to build and buy, some of the most expensive cars in America. With America going into a period of stagflation, just like we did after the last deficit-financed bogged-down unwinnable land war in Asia, well, if we're not going to end up with another Great Depression (let alone the Wiemar Germany type meltdown that a few economists are warning of), then it's going to take the American people getting a lot smarter about their money. When we're talking about SUVs, that means getting them to look at the actual crash safety data and the actual accident statistics and realize that this "SUVs are safer for my kids" (if not yours) thing is not just immoral, it's factually in error. Which leaves the excuse that they sometimes need a car that big? Please. No more often than your average person hauls that much freight or that many passengers, it wouldn't just be better for the planet if they owned a subcompact and rented an truck or a van the times they needed one, it'd be thousands of dollars per year, maybe tens of thousands of dollars per year, cheaper. And for the tiny percentage of Americans who do routinely carry five, six, or more passengers on a daily basis? We used to have this thing called a "station wagon." Oddly enough, some car companies still make them. They seat just as many people as an SUV, just as comfortably. But at a third less weight, and half the height, they're cheaper to make and a holy heck of a lot cheaper to run. Watching people complaining about the economy while wasting money hand over fist by buying SUVs just annoys the heck out of me.

So yeah, those of you who actually think it's important that the planet have polar bears in the wild, who tremble at the thought that we might have to move our farming activity to land that hasn't been strip-mined to chemically-supported desert by industrial farming if the rain moves, who look at the long-shot chance of some of the world's worst slums getting flooded and see that as a problem rather than an opportunity, and who think that nattering on and on about "cap and trade" or "carbon footprint" is somehow going to stop all that? Don't mind me over here rolling my eyes and thinking that you're full of crap. Unlike the short-sighted morons who are running this country at the moment, while our reasons may be different, you and me, we want the same things. I'm not your enemy, and you're not mine, no matter how stupid I think you are (or you think I am).

P.S. For those of you who didn't see it on BoingBoing, there's a fantastic way to see, visually, just where the government's money is going. WallStats.com sells a gorgeous poster of the President's proposed budget for fiscal 2009, called "Death and Taxes." I bought two, one for myself and one as a gift. That's where the numbers on federal funding of energy conservation and solar, above, came from. There's a pan-and-zoom version of it on their website, too.

(Editorial note: In the interest of brevity, skip all the arguments intended to prove anthropogenic global warming. I've read them; anybody who wants to read them and find out why so many aging stupid tree-hugging hippies and mercenary scientists getting paid by think-tanks to pontificate out ahead of the data or outside their areas of expertise and naive young kids think that I'm full of crap can find it all online elsewhere. Grist's "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" is the best summary I've seen; I just don't feel like arguing about that right now. Save the comments here to discussions of the things that do or don't make sense for economic and practical reasons whether or not they "save the planet.")