Open Left:: Let's Talk About Geo-engineering

Let's Talk About Geo-engineering | 12 comments

A Couple of Points--With Frisbees At L-6 (4.00 / 1)

This is all basically niggling, as I agree with the main thrust of the diary. Still, niggling has its place.

(1) The paper on stability of legislation looks very good, just scanning the first few pages. Would that Obama had read it.

(2) Even so, such a statistical approach can only tell you so much, as I'm a great believer in the impact of historical forces, which can, among other things, bring political coalitions together and tear them apart.

Right now, the GOP coalitions is being ripped apart, but the Dems are doing a piss-poor job of taking advantage and doing things to take advantage of the strong hand they've just been dealt. Being faced with this sort of situation provides a different setting than we had in 1993-94, for example, the last time a Dem trifecta presented us with a statistically similar potential.

(3) The policy failure is the most important point. Where the initial impression from Chu's appointment was that Obama was seriously going to be science-driven and reality-based in his policy-making, it now turns out that it only means an anomalous degree of candor over his failure. As booby prizes go, this is pretty good, I guess.

(4) I"m all in favor of tree-planing. But as a carbon sequestration strategy, this obviously works best with fast-growing trees. I'm no expert here, but I'd suppose there comes an age when it makes most sense to cut down old trees and plant new ones. The question then becomes, what to do with the old trees. Obviously, not burning. So what sort of future-oriented uses might we come up with?

(5) More fundamentally, if biological carbon sequestration is the game, then it might make most sense to go for genetic engineering of simple organisms to do the sequestration at maximum efficiency.

(6) Frisbee-sized mirrors at L-6 that can be reoriented once the job is done still seems plausible to me. Or heck, we could just breed us some genetically modified space dogs and tell them to go fetch.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

by: Paul Rosenberg @ Fri Jun 26, 2009 at 12:35:10 PM CDT