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Originally Posted by bfrank1972
Yep world is full of them, but how does this apply to anything we're talking about? I don't believe John Kerry is posting in this thread unless.... Irace???
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I am not John Kerry.
It is a type of ad hominem attack. He tried to do the same thing to Al Gore, by suggesting his message must be false because Al Gore has financially gained from his message. He is trying to discredit the witness by attacking the person's character without really addressing the substance of what the person has said. If someone is falsely appealing to authority then some people try to discredit the authority, but no one is appealing to John Kerry or Al Gore, as an authority on climate change. I think that is why his posts seem to come off as non-sequiturs, out from left field.
On this one though, unlike his Al Gore attack, he makes a fair point, which is that we need our leaders to lead by example, and we should all look in the mirror at our own actions. Not an easy thing. Often though, people making this point, are calling for less action; "if he doesn't have to do it then I shouldn't have to do it".
A politician tried to make this analogy at Gretta Thunberg that "...it makes no sense to be doing it (investing in green technology) if we are simply watching increases from China". Her answer essentially was that if we use that logic then her country of Sweden should do nothing for green energy compared to the US or any country other than China. It doesn't matter if the US produces half the emissions as China because the US is still producing the 2nd most emissions of any country in the world at 15% of the total emissions when we are only 4.25% of the world's population. BTW, China produces 30% of the world's pollution, and China makes up 18.47% of the world's population, so China's contributing a less than double the emissions as a percentage of their population, but the US is contributing almost four times the emissions as a percentage of their population.
We are doing bad with polluting the oceans, but other places are bad at polluting the seas. We technically ship a lot of garbage to other countries including China, so I don't know how accurate this is for the US if we just ship our waste to other countries that mismanage it later.
