re: #7 LudwigVanQuixote

AGW will hit the poorest first.

We have a global economy. Crop failures in Russia and China means that they take care of their own first and others simply won’t have.

Spread of contagion will damage crops too. That will hit the poorest nations first as well.

AGW is real and it is killing people now.

As usual, there is a set of “real Americans” who simply could care less. After all, those dying aren’t white, aren’t wealthy and aren’t Christian.

Of course the heatwave in Europe that killed 71,000 in ‘03 killed Europeans, but then again they weren’t wealthy either.

For the record, the GOP is evil and literally murderous.

The GOP is far from the only cause of AGW. Europe has talked a good game with respect to carbon emissions, but over the past decade, their emissions went right on up. China is a big producer and consumer of coal. And in the U.S., the last two years were ones in which Democrats held every lever of power at the national level. Nothing much was done about AGW.

For a very sophisticated look at how groups of people arrive at decisions, and the likely implications of this for such efforts as the Kyoto Accords and the Copenhagen summit, read Bruce Bueno di Mosquito’s book “The predictioneer’s game”. His conclusion is that we shall have to have a technological fix, because without it, the tragedy of the commons will play itself out. Republicans or no Republicans.

Our fate lies in the hands of the people designing and building successive generations of wind, solar, and nuclear energy facilities. When these can beat coal at its own game, the crisis will have been solved. [Oil and natural gas are secondary problems, because less CO2 is emitted per unit of energy obtained, and because supplies are limited.]

Public policy must therefore focus on advancing the state of the art in green energy. Republicans are mistaken about AGW and the need for green energy, but winning them over to the task of solving this problem and developing this energy will be easier if one steers clear of demonization. Haven’t we had enough of that recently?