The Bipartisan Plan for Global Warming: Burn More Carbon...

Reading the tea leaves as best as I can, here's the plan:

The US and Europe will switch from Coal to Fracked Methane. More Oil will also be drilled and consumed. The hope is that the CO2 savings garnered from switching from coal to methane will counter balance the extra oil consumption, thus avoiding triggering current treaty obligations.

Meanwhile, the Coal will be shipped to China where it will be burned with little or no smokestack cleanup. While this will aggravate an already awful public heath problem in China, the short-lived particulates and sulfur aerosols should mask some of the warming caused by the vast increases in global CO2 levels. Think of it as poorman's GeoEngineering.

Of course, all of this will devastate the already ailing oceans with more acidification and mercury poisoning. And the day of reckoning when the aerosols are gone, but the CO2 remains will be horrible.

Why, you ask? Growth. To quote Clinton: It's the economy, stupid. As non-renewable resources become more and more scarce, it takes more and more energy to stand still, much less grow. And, until we RADICALLY reform our economic and political structures, Growth is the only way we avoid massive unemployment and social breakdown.

Someday, probably sooner than we think, we're going to have to learn to live with less and share what remains more equitably. That "someday" will come in one of two ways: either we'll crash and burn and then rebuild or we'll switch the controls off autopilot and bring this mess in with as smooth a landing as we can manage. But the autopilot is called The Free Market, the manual piloting is Socialism. And THAT"S a problem.