5 thoughts on “So, what’s up with the Green Economy, now that the whole health care thing is settled?”

1. I wish I could be optimistic about Obamaâ??s energy and environmental policy, but after comparing what he originally said about health care with what he was actually willing to fight for, Iâ??m afraid Iâ??m just not.

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2. “Obama is missing the opportunity of a lifetime to give us serious climate change legislation, and he’s blowing it by going down the middle of the road, trying to please everyone.”

   This statement makes no political sense. I don’t see any serious political evidence that in the midst of the “great recession”, that the odds of a climate change bill being passed by the Senate would be improved by President Obama taking a less “middle road” position on environmental issues, whatever that means in this context.

   I admit I have no idea what will get the Senate to pass climate change legislation. But I see no evidence that this suggestion for Obama will lead to such success.

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3. “before it’s too late”? Too late for what? What if it’s already too late for whatever the author fears it may be too late for?

   If it’s a warmer climate and the implications of that which the author think will be “obvious” at some stage, I’ll have to disagree with him. Thanks to the huge seasonal variation and other variations on top such as droughts and wet spells, no one will really notice any other gradual changes on an annual basis. The only way to determine if a warming globe may have had some effect on your local climate is to analyze contemporary records and historical records. If, say, a farmer just had a few more crop failures than usual he (or she) will not just pack up and create another farm somewhere else where the conditions are better (a miraculous assumption of the “we’ll just adapt” crowd). No, instead the farmers will simply go out of business due to crop failures – and since that sort of thing happens all the time, who would even think of blaming global warming?

   Now from a global perspective, there are many industry consortia who are going ahead with commercial scale demonstrators for various technologies and there are some states which are bringing in their own regulations despite the infantile “negotiating” which politicians do at costly meetings like Copenhagen. “clean coal” does look promising on paper, but I am not aware of any commercial scale demonstrators anywhere on the planet. Biofuel – the only chance of that being in any way sensible is if waste material (chaff, corn husks, corn cobs, etc) can be processed into fuel. We cannot give up prime agricultural property for the exclusive production of fuel crops. One of the biggest contributing problems of course is from the exponential increase of humans in our already overpopulated world.

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4. Bush got bipartisanship all the time–on the Iraq war, on tax cuts that ballooned our deficit. And he didn’t do it by asking nicely and “going down the middle of the road.” He did it by threatening Democrats. Obama needs to start throwing punches. He needs to say that if you don’t support climate change legislation and an urgent path towards renewable energy, you want the United States to fall behind China and let the Chinese lead in the 21st century. That’s how you get votes in politics. You make it politically untenable to vote against you. You don’t get bipartisanship by asking nicely, as the past year has shown.

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5. Have you seen all the latest news about the exciting strides being made with clean , green ,renewable geothermal heat and cooling pumps , using the constant temperature just a few feet under the earth? It’s so worth looking into!!!

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