Climate change: what’s the argument about?

I view the argument over whether climate change is natural or or the result of human activity as irrelevant, in fact whether climate change is real or not as a separate issue, the nub is why we’d want to live in a society that wastes energy and resources?

The exiled Shah of Iran was reputed to have said Oil is too valuable to burn… There are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s sake!.

He was right, fossil fuel based products are the basis of our modern lifestyle; pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, and huge range of products we rely on daily use oil and coal as a feedstock, and yet we squander this resource to burn for heat, power and transportation.

Without recycling we’d end up burning or burying these commodities, and using even more to replace what we’d just thrown away. I suppose one day we can resort to mining the old landfill sites for the valuable plastics they contain.

It strikes me that the climate change argument appears to be primarily over the concern for wasted money, but money is negotiable, we’ve all witnessed how effortlessly it can be created and destroyed. The natural resources we discard every day aren’t so easily manipulated, once they’ve gone, they’ve gone, money is a virtual resource, we can always make more.