Overseas military operations are exempt because:
1. Climate change is a national security issue.
2. Climate change is scientifically questionable.
3. The U.S. gov’t often exempts itself.
The twist of (1) requires no further comment.
Stated alone, (2) is true, in that, despite the dominance of the green meme, climate change is still open to question, as any theory should rightly be — or it’s not science. To wit, gravity is a theory, not a fact. It is a fact that objects fall to the earth. It is the theory of gravity which explains this. But I really should speak of theories, since we have both Newton’s classical theory and the modern general theory of relativity, which is understood to better explain what Newton’s theory approximates. So that settles it, right? Well…
Several decades after the discovery of general relativity it was realized that general relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics.[18] It is possible to describe gravity in the framework of quantum field theory like the other fundamental forces, such that the attractive force of gravity arises due to exchange of virtual gravitons, in the same way as the electromagnetic force arises from exchange of virtual photons.[19][20] This reproduces general relativity in the classical limit. However, this approach fails at short distances of the order of the Planck length,[21] where a more complete theory of quantum gravity (or a new approach to quantum mechanics) is required. Many believe the complete theory to be string theory,[22] or more currently M-theory, and, on the other hand, it may be a background independent theory such as loop quantum gravity or causal dynamical triangulation.
I will settle for Newton. “Works for me”. Take that for lazy — not a kind of confirmation bias, but an efficiency from Mediocristan, where getting too abstract is avoided because the amount of information to be judged becomes mentally untenable. (So I will admit, as any good programmer can attest, that laziness can be — like the kids — all right).
As a tangent, since I’m reading an attempted rebuttal of scientific atheism called The Devil’s Delusion, I find this quote to be itself a great rebuttal of theism:
[I]t is logically impossible for an omniscient designer to know, unless, of course, we are to preclude individual freedom of will.
Since it’s obvious to me, at least, that we have individual freedom of will… you get the idea. Now, one could say that perhaps we are bound by design, but given freedom to roam, much like wildlife in a national park. The Garden is the first order out of Nature, etc. Surely if there’s a watch, there must be a watchmaker? Faulty analogy, since we already know that there’s a watchmaker called mankind… but I’ll move on and choose (3), the U.S. gov’t often exempts itself. Why should it be bound by any law?
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
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