JayB

Of course it is... "Since 1992, Maggiore founded two HIV/AIDS skeptic groups, including the Alive and Well AIDS Alternatives group in Los Angeles. Later, she traveled to Africa and is said to have personally influenced former South African President Thabo Mbeki's decision to block funding for HIV-positive pregnant women in South Africa." Link Love the random non-sequiter + "Ummmm....vaccination?" chaser/combo on the end of that one though. Very humorous to contrast the blase'-I'm-so-over-caring-about-that with the multi-post torrent of spite and venom that poured forth when Blake had the temerity to question the utility of a certain poster's favorite down jacket not so long ago. Good stuff!

More accurately, I'm sure we'll be hearing more from you regarding these folks in the future, whether we want to or not. You realize, of course, that right now, somewhere...someone may be watering their plants with fluorinated tap-water.

Because you represent a better future, for all of us. I care because the crackpot ideas promulgated by this movement were an integral part of Thabo Mbeki's decision to reject simple anti-HIV interventions that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, for one thing. The related pseudoscientific hysteria that's driving the anti-vaccine movement serves as a barrier to the complete eradication of preventable diseases that have plagued humanity since time immemorial, and jeopardize the mass-vaccination efforts that lend protection to the people in society who are most vulnerable to the said diseases - the very young, the very old, the immunocompromised, etc. The sublime idiocy that undergirds the creationist movement represents a threat to sound scientific education - which is partly responsible for the genesis of these movements - but it's not a direct threat to anyone's health. Most people who are concerned about one are concerned about the other, but there are always exceptions. You, the embodiment of the better future that we should all strive for, should save your energy for things...like crusading against fluoridation.

Very insightful commentary. I'm also quite interested in what'll happen when and if Obama presses Europe on Afghanistan. "Will 2009 and the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency mark the beginning of a new era in transatlantic relations, or will the old divisions linger, nurtured by the depth and gravity of the economic crisis? Will the crisis lead to nationalistic and selfish attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, stymieing the long-awaited rapprochement, if not a full reconciliation? It is, of course, too early to tell. Even if the more left-leaning of the European left, like the most liberal of US Democrats, voice concerns that Obama has selected a far too centrist cabinet, a classical form of anti-Americanism is bound to recede in Europe. It is very unlikely that Europeans will take to the streets to denounce the "essence" of the United States – what America is as much as what America does – as they did during the Bush era and even during the Clinton years. America's image in Europe has changed profoundly since November 4, and the style of Obama's diplomacy once he becomes president will probably confirm that change. Yet in the realm of transatlantic relations, as is true globally, it is unwise to expect too much from a single man, whatever his exceptional qualities. Fundamental problems remain, and new ones are likely to emerge. First, whatever the brutal style of the new Russia under Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, the Soviet Union no longer exists and no longer constitutes the common threat that was the "glue" of the Alliance until 1989. Unless something very wrong happens, a new cold war is not about to start. Second, there is a continuing structural imbalance between the way Europe looks at America, i.e., with passion and concern, and the way America looks at Europe – with mild interest giving way to growing indifference. During the cold war, Europe was America's first line of defence. In the current global age, Asia, the Middle East, and maybe even Africa will constitute greater priorities for the US. Third, even if the US under Obama praises and even practices multilateralism, Americans are far from ready to accept the reality of a multipolar world. They may write about it conceptually, but its meaning – a world in which their country is only primus inter pares – has not really penetrated the national psyche. America's internationalism remains grounded in the idea of American exceptionalism – a unique role and sense of mission. It is an approach to the world which Europeans have great difficulty coming to terms with. Even with Obama as president, they may be quick to denounce the combination of arrogance and hypocrisy that they see as linked to America's view of her special and unique mission. Fourth, if US diplomacy changes in style and content, will Europe be ready to face the challenge when America calls for help? One early test is likely to be Afghanistan, when a smiling but firm Obama turns to Europe and says: "You have backed me in immense numbers. I thank you for it. But now I do not need your symbolic votes; I need your concrete support. I need the further engagement of your troops in Afghanistan." I suspect that European leaders will not respond eagerly. Most are convinced that there is no military solution in Afghanistan and they know that public opinion, especially in time of great economic hardship, has no appetite for such operations. Europeans have a traditional tendency to denounce American military adventurism, while relying on the US as their protector. Fifth, to these "old" problems one must add a new one: the likely impact on transatlantic relations of the worst financial crisis in decades. Protectionism in the classical sense of the term is unlikely. We have learned the lessons of 1929. But public subsidies to national champions may prove to be as destabilising for the climate of international cooperation as tariff barriers were in the past. The temptation to appease suffering populations with populist, selfish measures may grow as the crisis deepens. Paradoxically, too, the greening of America – an America that discovers late but with passion its responsibility for the planet's survival – may lead to a competitive transatlantic race for first prize in ecological good behaviour. And one could multiply the subjects of possible tensions, from nuclear disarmament – too much for the French, too little for many others – to the best ways to deal with Iran, Russia and China. The essential issue lies elsewhere. For Europe, the election of Barack Obama is a crucial test. Will Europe rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity created by America's daring and exhilarating choice to prove to itself, and to the rest of the world, that the old continent can exist as a power, and a united actor?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/dec/27/barack-obama-europe

At least that's what this woman: Christine Maggiore, believed, and she dedicated her life to promoting that message. She passed on the virus to her daughter (the little girl in the photo), who died of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at the age of three. Now it's killed her too, but not before she could dedicate her remaining time to convincing other women to forgo the standard precautions used to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, striving to cultivate paranoid anti-science mythologies about HIV in Africa and elsewhere, etc. More on Christine and Her Crusade. This is bad craziness. Her irrational delusions about HIV differ from the lunacy the motivates the anti-vaccine crusaders by degree, but not in kind, and share quite a bit of philosophical and ideological common ground. I suspect that we'll be hearing more from these folks, rather than less, in the future. *Maybe the Foo Fighters, who evidently endorsed Maggiore's organization "Alive and Well," and her beliefs, will set them to music. "T-Cell counts maybe droppin', but big Pharma's pill's I'll never be Poppin...." http://www.foofighters.com/community_cause.html

This one-sided "economic growth is good no matter what, rising tide, no pain no gain, sweatshops is good, destruction is creation, 300 kinds of toothpaste is freedom, let's all get rich now by any means necessary so we can afford to build zoos for whatever's left when we're done, buying plastic shit saves a Chinese baby so buy more of it" nonsense has run its course. I think we're all familiar with what capitalism has been capable of doing (no need for your dissertaion on the miracles of meat refrigeration). Now it's time to address what it is not and never will be capable of doing. Namely, wiping its own ass in terms of the ecological, psychic, and social dislocations it creates. I for one hope that you'll reveal the replacement for the market-economy/constitutional-democracy model that you painstakingly constructed in your dorm right....this....second. There's not a moment to waste. Ready the hand-made 'Republican Spain Action Figures', the Risk board, and the dice from the Dungeons & Dragons set. Your hour is nigh.

Don't get all sciency here, dude. I personally find the idea of pilotfish and sharks, clownfish and sea anenomes, Egyptian Plovers and Nile crocodiles, choosing to participate in cooperative relationships both novel and beguiling. Extend this idea a bit, and it's easy to conceive of them swaying to the strains of "Lion King" scores as after they completed their negotiations and entered into their chosen roles and relationships. "With your tooth under my wiiiiiiiinnng, I don't have to worry about a thinnnnnng..." Beautiful.

You mean these? http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/05/news/economy/obama_stimulus/?postversion=2009010515

The fact that Walmart is surviving better than other businesses (I don't know about your Whole Foods assertion, nor do I know how 'green' Whole Foods really is), but yours is but a single example, against which there are many, many counter examples. There will always be a low culture segment in America with no vision of the future that acts without social conscience. Fortunately, they don't speak for the country as a whole. Yes, I think this country is a better one than you do, despite all of the idiotic things we've done in recent years, that is true. Perhaps it's because my parents lived through and fought in WWII, or that I've lived to see us orbit Saturn and drive on Mars, or...I don't know. I may well be wrong, and part of me thinks I am. We'll see. Well spoken Pat. However, I've noticed that as gas prices have dropped to under $1.70 a gallon, all kinds of assholes are climbing back into their Suburbans and huge SUVs that they'd parked when gasoline was approaching $4.00. They don't give a f* that WE all have to breath the fumes, or that they are burning gas 3 times faster than necessary so as to reduce the next generations reserves, and that we have our military go running over to all kinds of shitassed sandboxes with the net result of lots of dead people just to ensure that we have gas for strategic reasons. It's true that there will always be assholes who don't give a shit, but what's heartening is all the folks who've changed their driving (and other habits) for good, even though gas prices have gone down. JayB likes to speak for the lower class and the third world factory worker; two constituencies he does not belong to and has little personal experience with, while labeling his opponents as 'elitists'. I never fail to get a kick out of it. It's not about Xing being able to afford a stereo (most of the factory dorms where the lions share of new Chinese factory workers live are not air conditioned, nor is it an option, BTW) or Joe Sixpack being able to afford that big screen plasma TV; it's about taking responsibility for the consequenses of one's actions, and about being a good, long term steward of the rare, habitable little piece of astroturf we find ourselves on. Sustainability has to happen sometime, either gradually and voluntarily and or by force through catastrophe. JayB argues for the latter under the 'consume now, fuck the future' guise. I prefer the former under the 'let's all consider the impact of our actions' philosophy. He represents clinging to the past, hence the vote for McCain et al, I represent trying to make a better future. He sees human beings as units of production and consumption; I see them as somewhat more complicated creatures. Pretty simple, really. "...I represent trying to make a better future." Really, come-on now, aren't you selling yourself a bit short? Spare us the false modesty, already. Are the people who shop at Walmart really "..a low culture segment...with no vision of the future that acts without social conscience.", or "assholes who don't give a shit?" I don't think so, nor do I think that you have any legitimate basis for making such a claim, but I do hope that you'll take us one step closer to the better future that you represent by elaborating on that point, at length. I also don't think that the vain conceit emanating from those who are so well off that they don't have to shop for bargains is the least bit justifiable, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because total consumption tracks income/wealth much more closely than where someone happens to buy their shampoo. If anyone has a moral and ethical obligation to restrict their consumption, it's the folks who can afford to fly to third world countries for a vacation, run the AC all summer and the heat all winter without worrying about whether they'll be able to afford gas or groceries, etc - not the factory worker living in a trailer in the US or an apartment block outside Shanghai. Secondly, whether they realize it or not, or whether they intend to or not, they're participating in a mechanism that's lifted more people out of poverty in the past 10 years than all foreign aid has since rich countries started sending cash to the same folks that their protectionist trade and heavily-subsidized agriculture policies were helping to keep impoverished. People who don't know one another, don't like one another, and don't agree with one another have a sufficient basis for cooperation that benefits both in a framework of voluntary mutual exchange. People with no higher motive, and no particular interest in nor affinity for poor people in China, by the simple act of trying to stretch their family dollar, have - it's worth repeating - done more to alleviate poverty and suffering in the world than the all of aggregated foreign aid that's ever been donated. Strong work for a low culture segment with no vision for the future and no conscience. I can understand why someone who has convinced himself that cooperative relationships amongst animals is impossible in the absence of a conscious choice to cooperate might have difficulty understanding how this this is possible, much less how it all works though.* *I implore you - the vision of a better future - not to waste your time rebutting any of the above if it will distract you from even a second's work on the revolutionary ("Choice as A Driver of Symbiosis in the Animal Kingdom"?) monograph that must be behind that hypothesis. It's simply too important.

The fact that Walmart is surviving better than other businesses (I don't know about your Whole Foods assertion, nor do I know how 'green' Whole Foods really is), but yours is but a single example, against which there are many, many counter examples. There will always be a low culture segment in America with no vision of the future that acts without social conscience. Fortunately, they don't speak for the country as a whole. Yes, I think this country is a better one than you do, despite all of the idiotic things we've done in recent years, that is true. Perhaps it's because my parents lived through and fought in WWII, or that I've lived to see us orbit Saturn and drive on Mars, or...I don't know. I may well be wrong, and part of me thinks I am. We'll see. Yes - the poor folks do have a tendency to disappoint their betters, don't they? Well - there's also the fact that Ramanujan and Xing would really like to have a bit of AC when it's 105F and 99% humidity, think that a bit of electric lighting would be swell, and have heard that there's lots of fascinating material on the internet, and may not elect to renounce all of the above so that their more enlightened brethren in the West can continue to flip on the central heating and the plasma screen without worrying too much about the climate after zipping down to the PCC for a Bok Choy run...

Could you please use concrete examples to illustrate what you mean by the last sentence?

I agree that Arab governments have sold the Palestinians down the river, as has their own leadership. Restricting the conversation to their "Arab Brothers" for a moment, why do you think that they have concluded that it's in their interest to give rhetorical support to their ambitions, while doing absolutely nothing that would directly or indirectly improve their situation in practice?

There's quite a bit of latitude between a mechanism like an incremental carbon tax with a low-point of entry, and a global "New Five Year Plan/Great Leap Forward," no? Which end of the spectrum does your preferred set of policy responses fall into? How much power do you want to grant the government to oversee the manner in which people live in order to meet/satisfy your CO2 output reduction goals? Would a simple incentive like the carbon-tax that I mentioned be sufficient, or would you be in favor of granting whatever agency is tasked with overseeing compliance with carbon reduction goals significantly more latitude to do what they deem necessary?

Infinitely harder? Gee, that sounds a lot like impossible, no? Have you morphed your pre-Gore argument from 'let's wait until we've got more information' to a post-Gore 'let's wait until we can figure out what to do'? It's no surprise that 'wait', ie, do nothing, is the common theme in all your arguments. JayB & company seems to prefer to remain confused on how humanity should move forward regarding the Global Warming issue, but to me, the process, already massively underway, seems relatively simple; change perception and values and the money, innovation, and lifestyle changes will follow. Where this will take us may not be predictable, and we may fall short along the way, but I really don't see what's so confusing here. Money follows values in this country. Where is the venture capital money going these days? Green technologies. That was completely untrue 3 years ago; venture capitalists hadn't even heard of the technologies they're now ponying up millions for today. Large corporations follow the values of consumers, not the other way around. Car companies are tripping over themselves to produce greener vehicles. Did they come up with the idea? The three Rs, carbon footprint, downsizing; all are examples of effective concepts that are greening the decisions that individuals make every day. Al Gore's movie may have been as flawed as any human creation, but it certainly did the trick in spades; to expose the 'debate' for what is really was; a denial of an accelerating reality. It's interesting to note that the consequences of global warming are coming home to roost much sooner than even the most rabid proponents predicted. So much for 'waiting until we have more information'...another bullshit PR campaign to delay the inevitable for a few more quarters and elections. Finally, with regards to the idea that investment in green technologies with somehow 'bankrupt us', that is absolute, pure bullshit. Such proposed investments, whether public or private, are subject to the same cost/benefit analysis they've always been, so there is no reason to believe that some new mega-project to create a perpetually self-eating watermelon out of unobtainium will come along and destroy our economy (laughable, given that good old unregulated capitalism just imploded without any help from the sci fi writers). This, like pretty much all of the propoganda that has been shoveled our way form the GW denial crowd, is pure fantasy. How about "orders of magnitude" more difficult. Once you leave the realm of science and enter into the realm of conflicting value judgments, prerogatives, circumstances, political structures, ideologies etc the debate about how to allocate scarce resources that have many alternate uses begins. Glad you're and optimist, and I hope that bottom-up methods such as persuasion via reasoned dialogue that you are advocating in this post remain "the movements" preferred method of bringing about the changes that the people within it desire. It'll be interesting to see how many people stick to their guns while the global recession runs its course. Sales at whole foods are down, sales at Walmart are up - and this pretty well sums up the way that most people operate when the rubber hits the road and people have to make decisions that actually involve going without.

to Sobo. I hereby grant you the dubious and most likely wholly unwanted honor of serving as my official proxy in this thread.

Leaving aside the matter of how their economy got where it is for the moment, why - in your opinion - is it that Egypt, a vocal friend of the Palestinians, has erected a wall to keep the Palestinians out, and sends the army to seal the break every time that the Palestinians punch a hole through it?

No one was denying that HR can use Facebook profiles to check out people who don't keep them private as part of the process they use to scrutinize a candidate. What was amusing was the "Hey, smart guy - how are people supposed to find you on a social networking site if your profile is set to *private* - HUH!?" bit, especially when offered up with no small dose of hauteur and condescension, all backed up with an appeal to authority (of sorts). "Pfft. I was speaking to a sous-chef about recombinant DNA and he said that..." Or - put another way: "If you'd bothered to read instead of spraying incessantly, you would have noticed that I did not disagree with your original statement about where recruiters look -- that's approximately correct. What I did knock was your lack of understanding that Facebook can be plenty useful as a public, social medium even if people have their profiles marked private, and the fact that recruiters/HR don't go around befriending people just to view their profiles, which means one doesn't have to deny them access 'cause they never ask for it in the first place. They simply see a private profile and move on to looking at other things." Anyhow, I'm very disappointed in the tone and length of the preliminary response, but I'm confident that if I stick with it, I'll get my bi-weekly, profanity infused helping of blovistility one way or another.

If you're too dumb to figure out how to make your profile private, then you're too dumb for the job. A private profile on a public medium designed primarily so that people can find you. Now that's smart. Yes, imagine that. And then only people that you accept can view your full profile. Everyone else can merely see the fact that you have one. Pretty clever, them Facebook folks... Look dude. Ignore the basic and staggeringly intuitive aspects of profile settings, how someone can easily find you, but can't see your profile unless you give them permission if that's how you want it to work, and all of the other basic information that you picked up within 10 seconds of scrolling through the intro page before signing up. The man spoke to a Professional Recruiter. 'Kay?! Recruiter. Professional. Yeah. That's right - a pro. What field? Recruiting. Yeah. Next time you claim that sending someone an e-mail *doesn't* automatically give them unfettered access to the contents of your in-box, how about you wait until you ask someone that's had a conversation with a Professional Recruiter first. Got it!?

All will be well... " Dear dumb ass folowers of FSMism, There have been a lot of weird things that i have seen in my life before, but this tops them all. Do you really believe that there is/was such a thing as a flying spaghetti monster? Seriously, how fucking old are you? I know there’s such a thing as freedom of speech and expression, but this kinda shit should be banned. Theres is only one God and one Holy Word. Why dont you people get that? How much sense does it make to say that decreasing numbers of pirates lead to an increase in average global temperature? Is that science or some fifth grader trying to sound smart? You are the kinds of people I dread to meet in public. If I were to ever have the displeasure of meeting your retarded ass, I would probably beat you senseless untill your stupid childish mind thought like a normal person and believed in something that sounds correct instead of just saying “Eh, lets make a new religion..and what the hell, our ‘god’ should be a clump of spaghetti. Oh, and it should have eyes and be able to fly. Lets bow down to it and see how many people follow suit!” Damn you all to hell!! Better yet, somebody should lock you in a fucking psychiatric ward for further examination because they obviously didnt do that enough when you dumb fucks were born. I hope this web page is taken off the web as quickly as it was put up. –Sincerly, ANNONYMOUS" http://www.venganza.org/

You are here.

Hmm. Lots of passion there. It sounds as though if you read the materials that I linked, you'd be able to translate this set of convictions into concrete statements about the optimal discount rate and, by extension, the optimal carbon-tax schedule.

Meth is a hell of a drug... Saying yes to anyone, WaMu built empire on shaky loans By PETER S. GOODMAN AND GRETCHEN MORGENSON THE NEW YORK TIMES "We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe's-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we've done our job, five years from now you're not going to call us a bank." -- Kerry K. Killinger, chief executive of Washington Mutual, 2003 SAN DIEGO -- As a supervisor at a Washington Mutual mortgage processing center, John D. Parsons was accustomed to seeing baby sitters claiming salaries worthy of college presidents, and schoolteachers with incomes rivaling stockbrokers'. He rarely questioned them. A real estate frenzy was under way and WaMu, as his bank was known, was all about saying yes. Yet even by WaMu's relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer. Parsons could not verify the singer's income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved. "I'd lie if I said every piece of documentation was properly signed and dated," said Parsons, speaking through wire-reinforced glass at a California prison near here, where he is serving 16 months for theft after his fourth arrest -- all involving drugs. While Parsons, whose incarceration is not related to his work for WaMu, oversaw a team screening mortgage applications, he was snorting methamphetamine daily, he said..." http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/393914_wamu28.html Then:CrackMeth. Now: Xanax and beta-blockers...

Seems like the useful take-aways from techno-threads involving traditional pro usually amount to something like: 1. If you're on a multi-pitch route, get in bomber pieces as soon as you can to protect against a factor two fall onto the anchor. 2. All things being equal, putting in pro at closer intervals after you've started a route/pitch will help reduce the risk that the high-impact forces generated by small amount of rope between you and your belayer will result in a ground/factor-2 fall, but you can space things out a bit more as you move away from the ground/belay if the pro's good and you're looking at a clean fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sort of related... ~Doubling up on pro before sections that are cruxy and climbing through them to the next good stance/placement instead of thrutching around pumping out while trying to get an intermediate piece of gear in the cruxy stretch seems to be useful for me, when the conditions allow it, but that's more of a "mentally optimal pro" thing than a "mathematically optimal pro" thing.

Discussion in NYRB prompted by the original article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21811 "The economics of climate change is straightforward. Virtually every activity directly or indirectly involves combustion of fossil fuels, producing emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide accumulates over many decades and leads to surface warming along with many other potentially harmful geophysical changes. Emissions of carbon dioxide represent "externalities," i.e., social consequences not accounted for by the workings of the market. They are market failures because people do not pay for the current and future costs of their actions. If economics provides a single bottom line for policy, it is that we need to correct this market failure by ensuring that all people, everywhere, and for the indefinite future are confronted with a market price for the use of carbon that reflects the social costs of their activities. Economic participants—thousands of governments, millions of firms, billions of people, all making trillions of decisions each year—need to face realistic prices for the use of carbon if their decisions about consumption, investment, and innovation are to be appropriate. The most efficient strategy for slowing or preventing climate change is to impose a universal and internationally harmonized carbon tax levied on the carbon content of fossil fuels. The carbon content is the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that are emitted, for example, when people use a kilowatt-hour (kwh) of electricity or burn a gallon of gas. To understand a carbon tax, consider an average American household, which consumes about 12,000 kwh of electricity per year at a price of about $0.10 per kwh. If this electricity were generated from coal, that would lead to about three tons of carbon emissions. If the carbon tax were $30 per ton, it would increase the annual cost of coal-electricity purchases from $1,200 to $1,290. By contrast, the costs of nuclear or wind power would be unaffected by a carbon tax because these forms of energy use no carbon fuels. Raising the price on the use of carbon through a carbon tax has the primary purpose of providing strong incentives to reduce carbon emissions. It does this through four mechanisms. First, it will provide signals to consumers about what goods and services produce high carbon emissions and should therefore be used more sparingly. Second, it will provide signals to producers about which inputs use more carbon (such as electricity from coal) and which use less or none (such as electricity from wind), thereby inducing them to move to low-carbon technologies. Third, it will give market incentives for inventors and innovators to develop and introduce low-carbon products and processes that can replace the current generation of technologies. Finally, a market price for carbon will reduce the amount of information that is required to do all three of these tasks. Ethical consumers today, hoping to minimize their "carbon footprint" (the amount of carbon they use), would have serious difficulties making an accurate calculation of the relative carbon emissions that result from, say, driving versus flying. With a carbon tax, the market price of all activities using carbon would rise by the tax times the carbon content of fossil fuels. Many consumers would still not know how much of the market price is due to the carbon content, but they could make their decisions confident that they are paying for the social cost of the carbon they use.... However, the major economic question remains: What is the appropriate price of carbon? It is at present infeasible (or at the least ruinously expensive) to prevent any and all future warming; yet unchecked warming poses serious threats to human and especially natural systems. We need therefore to strike a balance between the competing objectives of preventing climatic damage, maintaining economic growth, avoiding catastrophic risks, and not imposing undue hardships on poor people or future generations..." Etc

There is little reason to think the science isn't already mostly right despite the continuing rhetoric of the denialists. Starting today, global greenhouse gas emissions have to decrease by at least 80% by the end of the century to avoid warming greater than 2degC, which implies we'll have to do better since we contribute already a disproportionate amount. Peak oil and the present severe recession combined with climate change represent an opportunity to rebuild the economy on a truly sustainable basis. Maybe - but IMO the rougher things are in the present, the less willing people are to make sacrifices that might lead to a better future if doing so will their lives even tougher. No matter how how small the uncertainty is concerning the science, bankrupting the present to pay for the future isn't ever going to be a a viable way forward, so the path to lower carbon emissions is going to have to be paved with investments that create outputs worth more than their inputs within a time frame that will provide enough incentive to get them built. In practice, barring something truly revolutionary, that'll probably mean that we have to content ourselves with a series of incremental improvements in efficiency, gradually build solar/wind/etc capacity, and rely on conventional power sources until we transition to a technological state where we can generate the vast majority of our power without producing C02. Seems like after allow for incremental increases in solar, wind, increasing efficiency, conservation, etc - the gap is going to get filled with either coal, natural gas, or nuclear. I know which one will get my vote. *NYRB article that you might be interested in reading. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494