re: #3 Crimsonfisted

What now? Where do we go from here?

Speaking just for me.

Where we should go is wind, solar, nuclear, cogeneration, green buildings, smart grids, electric cars, and on and on. And mitigation. For instance, don’t put expensive, long-term investments right on the coast.

Sweep aside regulatory obstacles. Grant eminent domain to power lines connecting wind and solar installations to markets. Grant licenses to build nuclear power plants of a fixed, proven design, without any “environmental impact” nonsense. The environmental impact of AGW, by the account of those who say they take it seriously, is the gorilla in the room. Nothing else much matters by comparison.

And if we absolutely must, I suppose a tax on carbon emissions. It’s less disruptive than “cap and trade”, and it’s less prone to gaming. Cap and trade, by contrast, will be almost entirely gaming, racketeering, and hype, with no real effect on carbon emissions. What does it matter, for instance, if a trillion seedlings are planted in some poor third-world country? The normal fate of seedlings is failure. Without a suitable plot of land and property rights to protect that plot, the seedling, in the unlikely event that it reaches stick size, is to be plucked and converted to charcoal for cooking.

Speaking of wood cooking, there’s a fifteen dollar wood stove (details)…that gets far more cooking accomplished with a given amount of wood than makeshift hearths do. Get them to everybody who cooks with wood.

What we will do is putter along with R&D at non-emergency pace, then freak and spend a bundle when the dice of weather turn to reinforcing climate change rather than, as now, mitigating it. When the solar cycle comes around to a spate of high sunspot activity, and El Nino rolls around, and some storm devastates NOL again, then we’ll pay more attention.