Les Jones

Yes, how embarrassing it would be to achieve an independent, sustainable energy economy for the wrong reasons. The people of the future will surely hate living in houses with tiny energy bills in efficient, thoughtfully designed communities. They will despise reliable public transportation and declining asthma rates and giggle at us for not having the sense to burn the Arctic in a huge, gas-fueled conflagration.

You know the dead Americans of the 1800s up in Heaven are gazing down, glad they wantonly drove passenger pigeons to extinction instead of listening to the crazy bleeding hearts who thought the poor birds were pretty and deserved to persist. Think how dumb they would feel if we now had a sustainable $5 billion/yr squab harvest not because someone thought using a resource made more sense than exterminating it, but because someone thought the pigeons were pretty! Oh my God that would be humiliating for the dead people in Heaven.

Caring about the future has to be one of the dumbest things a person can do, especially an old guy like McCain.

Will we achieve an independent, sustainable energy economy or will we rid ourselves of carbon dioxide, which if it isn't causing global warming is nothing but an inert gas?

People are doing stupid things in the name of reducing greenhouse gases. Things that, in global warming theory is wrong, are damaging the environment. I don't think it's too much to make sure that greenhouse gases really were the cause of recent warming (which now seems to have reversed).

Holy crap, stupid things! Humans have never done stupid things before. It must be all the carbon dioxide.

Perusing your post, I can't find any instances of stupidity, like calling a gas "inert" that makes rain mildly corrosive, eats through rocks when pumped underground and competes with sea creatures for calcium.

"eats through rocks when pumped underground"

Now why would someone pump CO2 underground? I admit I've had some strange hobbies in my time, but it never occurred to me to take one of the products of combustion and force it beneath the Earth's surface. It it intrinsically rewarding or is it a way to meet eligible singles?

Oh, right. People are pumping CO2 underground because they're afraid it's causing global warming. That's another example of one of those things that's stupid if global warming theory is wrong.

"Caring about the future has to be one of the dumbest things a person can do, especially an old guy like McCain."

The implications that run rampant with a comment such as this shows me that persimmon hasn't fully integrated the ramifications of his/her political ideals to their logical conclusions.

Clue: it's called tyranny. Subjugation of the population is a nasty bit of human history that we can easily learn from, if these same people who supposedly care about the future of man would open their eyes and see it.

There is no such thing as "global warming theory." Global warming is a prediction resulting from applying general climate equations to future emissions production. The uncertainty in these equations is dwarfed by the uncertainty in the emissions projections.

Claiming there is no risk of climate change in 2050, when we are projected to be spewing 15 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year, because you have a hard time distinguishing natural variability from human impacts in 2008, at half the greenhouse gas production, is stupid. It's like refusing to nail up plywood until storm winds exceed 50mph.

While the coal industry has experimented with pumping CO2 underground for sequestration, most such efforts have been done by the oil industry to force additional oil out of depleted deposits. Nonetheless, you are correct; compared to reducing consumption by using our energy reserves wisely, underground carbon sequestration is a stupid strategy.

So you're no longer saying we're undergoing global warming caused by greenhouse gases now. We're moving the goal posts to 2050?

The cooling last year is just part of it. There may not have been any warming since 1998. If C02 and other GHG are causing warming in some decades and not others, they sure are being fickle little molecules.

I'm not the one moving the goal posts. I've understood all along what time scales are involved, which things are predictions, which are observations, what sort of balance exists between natural forces and manmade influences.

You are the one who can't keep it straight. Last year you were saying warming was definitely happening, but it's not our fault. Now you get a little counter evidence, and WHAM! no warming! You've never been able to get past the politics to understand the science, which puts you in the same boat as at least 90% of Americans, including many environmentalists.

No change here. We clearly have had warming, but now it's questionable whether there's been any significant additional warming since 1998. Maybe yes, maybe no. This past year was cooler.

OK, so you are still fixated on whether warming is happening now, no change. I'm still fixated on the empirically obvious fact that we are producing more carbon gases than our planet can absorb. We agree that carbon offsets are a bit silly and that hysteria is rampant.

Do we agree that a sustainable energy economy is necessary? Are we our descendants keepers?

I think you are being hysterical when you say things like "rid ourselves of carbon dioxide." The goal is to balance emissions with the planet's capacity to absorb them.

In any case, CO2 is not inert, and in adequate concentrations it is a pollutant. Methane too. Arguing about warming is a distraction from a plain problem with a simple solution: a capped, proportional tax on carbon producers.

"The goal is to balance emissions with the planet's capacity to absorb them."

Which, realistically, ain't gonna happen. Even with solar, nuke, whatever. It just won't happen. Even homeless people who live in shelters produce a net carbon output.

Sustainable energy's a good thing, because of all of the externalities (oil spills, mountaintop destruction, acid rain, smog, heavy metal releases, etc.). But let's not design an energy policy around gases who might be getting accused of a crime they didn't commit.

And OK, saying CO2 is inert is a bit too strong, but if it ain't causing global warming it's pretty darned benign.

I thought of another dumb thing we're doing as part of our attempts to fight global warming: producing biofuels from food crops. Heck, it's probably dumb if the greenhouse gas theory of global warming (like that better) is true. It's definitely dumb if it's false.

Why do you think all this is being done to fight global warming? Corn ethanol was sold to Congress as an energy-independence move, with major lobbying by ADM and Monsanto.

Our energy policy has been a disgrace for at least a half-century, and I don't much care WHY people opt to move it to saner ground as long as it moves in the right direction.

Turning food into fuel is the wrong direction, and we got there not by listening to scientists, but by listening to corporations big enough to buy Senators. All the hot air over warming predictions gave them cover.

I think farm lobbyists were behind it, but I also think environmental activists were only too happy to jump on the bandwagon.

Al Gore, for instance has since seen the light about the problems of biofuel, but he was an early biofuels advocate.