What are the nation’s priorities, money for transglobal holding corporations or prospering workers and a livable planet?

Thanks, Obama; I voted for you to piss off a particular party for your entire 8 years. Do NOT stop.

This is going to become a crucial issue, and not before time. Why should any sane and responsible society allow the coal industry to destroy the future of climate, agriculture and biosphere? Rather than arguing with a pathology like that, wouldn’t it be cost-effective for government, on behalf of the citizens, to buy a key block of shares and boardroom influence — for reasons of national health and energy security. Thus we could start to get these delinquent corporations into line with the future of the human environment and the human species. Frankly, big carbon corporations are now behaving like dangerous pandemic viruses on global society. Waxman-Markey and the GOP response to it show just how thoroughly they have subverted the democratic process in America.

Hear, hear. The GOP response to Waxman/Markey is fascism, plain and simple. We need to face the fact that a lot of Americans have become authoritarian followers, who have totally sold their minds to paid propagandists on the right, with the ultimate source of that money being a financial elite made rich by profits from fossil fuels.

The virus analogy is very apt, too, IMO. These fossil fuel industries are parasites on the biosphere, and are busily engaged in devouring it, even while it dies.

Since the capitalists of Wall Street have turned down new reactors for decades, I think his advisors have failed him in this regard. It is unfortunate that he advocates such a bankrupting scheme from the past.

The clearest evidence that we can do more comes from the U.S. acid rain program, whose costs are estimated to be 40 times lower than quantified benefits. The EPA’s CAIR program would do more — it would motivate further reductions in acid rain costing 25 times less than the benefits. The acid rain program has been an outstanding success from the perspective of cost reduction. However, it has not succeeded in either solving the acid rain problem or motivating justifiable and achievable investments in emission-reduction technology.

More evidence comes from the recently-announced EPA rules for vehicle emission performance. The rules will be comparable to California’s Pavley standards, which are expected to result in net savings of $361 per MT CO2. California plans to implement newer, more stringent rules, which would would do more. The new rules would yield estimated incremental net savings of $262/MT. Based on these (negative) cost projections, the vehicle regulations are undeniably “cost-effective” in the sense of being “economical to an owner or operator of a vehicle”. But they clearly fall short of the “maximum feasible and cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles” that were required by the Pavley law.

In the case of both acid rain and vehicle emissions, we can do — and could have done — even more. So why didn’t we? (Hint: As Ms. Browner pointed out, the 1990 Clean Air Act passed with the expectation that the cost per ton of sulfur dioxide reductions would be over a thousand dollars.)

This is going to become a crucial issue, and not before time. Why should any sane and responsible society allow the coal industry to destroy the future of climate, agriculture and biosphere? Rather than arguing with a pathology like that, wouldn’t it be cost-effective for government, on behalf of the citizens, to buy a key block of shares and boardroom influence — for reasons of national health and energy security. Thus we could start to get these delinquent corporations into line with the future of the human environment and the human species. Frankly, big carbon corporations are now behaving like dangerous pandemic viruses on global society. Waxman-Markey and the GOP response to it show just how thoroughly they have subverted the democratic process in America.

for more on this go to climatesecurity.blogspot.com

We must be dreaming.

“Logical and reasonable” looks good on these people, they ought to dress up more often.

But I still don’t think that carbon neutral energy production will avoid runaway global warming.

We need carbon negative energy production.

We need everything Obama, Chu, and Browner were talking about, plus we need to seize the coal fired power plants, convert them to biochar fuel, enhanced efficiency to pay for carbon capture, and carbon storage by deep injection or mineral carbonation.

Carbon negative energy is “where the puck will be” in a decade or so, IMO. Why not skate directly to that point, right now, to use Chu’s metaphor?

By doing this, we can actually start putting the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon we have poisoned our biosphere with back underground, put the genie back in the bottle, and live and do fine.

The coal fired power plant owners should forfeit their ownership rights of these plants. They have abused those rights, by not running these plants in the public interest. It’s looking like gigawatt coal fired power plants are more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and should not be in private hands, at all.