oil

So what next for climate activists swept up in ‘Yes, we can!' mania?  Perhaps we first must acknowledge how hard this is going to be.  As a friend wrote to me in reaction to last week's blog post, "I share your enthusiasm about the long-term, but the near term is going to be very challenging.  Obama needs to convince the public that some pain is required immediately in order to clean out the problems in the financial system, mortgage markets, and budget deficit." My friend is right of course, and so-far-so-good

Congress passed the bailout plan with a price tag of nearly a trillion dollars, but the ink was hardly dry on this new Monopoly money when quite a few experts began to predict it wouldn't be enough. Some estimates hope the "investments" that taxpayers will make in bad debts could ultimately turn a profit, but how likely is that?

Much is written about our oil addiction, but we are addicted to another fossil-drug — coal. And while oil steals the breath from our kids and incentivizes our bad behavior around the world, coal is the major contributor to global warming and one other surprising side-effect — thirst.

Our brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years to react to rapid changes in our environment. One apparently built-in feature is the tendency to keep the environmental backdrop against which our lives play out relatively constant. That makes it easier to detect rapid changes to which an organisms must react. One of our fish ancestors in a Devonian lake 400 million years ago was not paying attention to .01 degree Celsius temperature changes in the water occurring as clouds passed the sun - it was looking out for dangerous predators in that water that could end its life in a second.