| Wal-mart is a joint stock corporation. The chain of decision making goes: line employees < middle management < executives < board < shareholders. So on the big decisions, executives, the board, and for really big decisions, the shareholders must vote. The United States is essentially a giant property management company, run as a consumer co-op. The chain of decision making is: civil service (including NSF funded climate researchers) < Congress < voters. So as voters we actually do need to research and understand the big issues, just as a shareholder needs to research the companies they invest in. Of course, perhaps the U.S. should not be run as a consumer co-op (aka democracy). I am sympathetic with that view, but that is really a whole other discussion. But for now it is, so people do have to take an interest in the issues. It would be nice if we could just delegate these issues to a class of experts. But how we do know if these experts are on the right track? At some point we must do at least some verification ourselves. There is no other option. I am not an expert in climate science. But I do know quite a bit about politics and government. In college I began to major in political science. But I found that the researchers in political science were incredibly off base. Their research was wrong, irrelevant, and used models that couldn't properly work. Thus I do not have a strong, baseline trust in academia. My experience in political science shows me that systematic error can flourish among "scientists". These leaked emails illustrate the climate "scientists" are not scientists seeking truth wherever it may lead, but are advocates with an institutional agenda. So we have climate scientists who are smart, but who should be treated with the same amount as trust as the prosecutor lawyer in a criminal case. We have the hoi polloi who are ignorant. That leaves us, smart, thoughtful people, who have to make the best judgments we can. |
Your job isn't really to study climate change and come to a conclusion. It's to elect someone who you think will do a good job of that.
It would be impossible to be informed enough about every issue you'd need to vote on while not working full-time on that sort of thing. Legislators have entire staffs for that purpose.
I realize I'm not thinking like the average American in that respect. They think something along the lines of "I think gay marriage is wrong, so therefore I'll vote for someone else who thinks gay marriage is wrong. He agrees with me so his decision making process must be good." To choose candidates by that system you'd have to be an expert on a large number of topics that 99.9999% of voters are not.
Instead my goal is to figure out which politician is most intelligent, hardest working, and has the correct motivation, and assume that they and their staffs will come to better conclusions than me since that's their job and not mine. I don't assume that someone who agrees with my relatively uninformed notions on things like climate change or the economy is correct just for that reason.
So I guess my point is, there is no relevant judgment we can make on the global warming topic. Consumer behavior is a drop in the bucket (if the CO2 problem really exists) and its going to take radical public policy changes that we do not get a direct vote on to fix.