Imperial Japan was invading Asia and Nazi Germany was invading Europe in the 1930’s.

It would have been nice and good if the United States would have helped to defend Asia and Europe, but we had our own problems with a bad economy. We weren’t willing to invest hundreds of thousands to die and hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent on a war.

Until we we attacked by Imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor. Until Nazi Germany declared war on the United States 2 days later and torpedoed our shipping off the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts killing over a thousand. Then it was our survival at stake. Then we were going to defend our own families and country. We didn’t invade France in June, 1944 to liberate France from Nazi Germany. We invaded France to get to Nazi Germany and kill Hitler.

Polls might show that having energy independence is more popular than slowing down Global Warming, but it is thin support. Energy independence might be a nice thing to do, but it is not our survival. Slowing Human Machine and Land use caused Global Warming is for the next 50 generations.

So here’s the question for you: Do we make that investment around a finite fuel that will either run out or kill us first, or do we do it around a sustainable renewable fuel?

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Why have you never answered the question Joe and several others have posed to you: How do we limit GHG concentrations to 450 ppm without dumping coal?

And as Joe points out, many of the strategies for getting to energy independence — shale oil; Fischer-Tropse processes etc. — actually create exponential increases in GHG emissions per unit of energy used, hastening GW, not mitigating it.

Until you answer these questions, your rants are worse than worthless — of course, the reason you don’t, is because your central argument is wrong — we won’t get to stabilization by pursuing energy independence. Domestic energy is not always the same as clean energy —

Please figure out another — less destructive — way to get press coverage. Why don’t you, Easterbrook, and Bjorn get together and brainstorm on it. We’ll help.

When the rolling brownouts start happening, people will demand energy now. The insta answer will be coal.

That doesn’t mean you have to ignore global warming altogether. It just means instead of leading “with global warming (with energy independence as a key secondary message)”, lead with energy independence (with global warming as a key secondary message). Focusing mainly on energy independence first doesn’t mean giving up on global warming, nor does it mean global warming will never get front and center.

Some reasons:

- Energy independence, done right, can tackle many of the same problems you’d be tackling going up against global warming. For example, a “WWII-level” push for mass-produced PHEVs, alcohol fuels (with disincentives for coal-based variants), and higher vehicle fuel efficiency, matched with incentives for renewable electricity deployment and efficient power use in homes and industry so we have electricity for those millions of PHEVs, would help energy independence and global warming at the same time.

- This economic and political moment in history is ripe for an energy independence push. It’s not quite there for the more painful parts of an AGW push in the U.S.

- Divide and conquor: going after oil, auto, and coal industries all at the same time is a lot! Going after oil, and co-opting auto, isn’t such an insurmountable problem. Then, later …

- Demonstrating success with energy independence will show that this kind of effort can succeed.

- AGW efforts have the political difficulty that not only are they painful (for example phasing out existing coal plants, cap and trade taxes), but it’s difficult to gain the benefit of them, since they depend on all countries pitching in. Energy independence efforts, on the other hand, tend to spread. For example, mass producing PHEVs of FFVs in 1 country helps spread that industry worldwide. The leverage is favorable.

- The Apollo Alliance looks for $50-$300B per year in cap and trade revenues. $300B per year?? We are strapped already. With the 4 Federal Budget Horsemen already running amok (War/DOD, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, Federal Debt), with high energy prices already, with a wounded financial system and expensive bailout, with a weak dollar, inflation prospects, job loss, bad trade balance … I don’t think we (the U.S.) is ready for anything like the scale of economic hit they’re talking about at the moment. Even if something like that is put into law, there would probably be a huge political backlash later.

If we can push energy independence (i.e. phase out oil) in the context I tried to describe, while making mild progress on AGW-specific fronts (i.e. focusing most new energy on renewables rather than coal, etc) we should be well set up to finish the AGW job later.