The best course is to replace them (and by "them" I mean Republicans and conservative Democrats) with progressives who will take the global climate crisis seriously.

Some of the recalcitrants may be "persuaded" by threats to their re-election (in a primary or in a general). As LBJ said, grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.

until it cost busineses, don;t expect anything to change

...who is fairly wealthy, living in a McMansion by a lake, who is actually a wonderful guy, friendly, intelligent and extremely liberal.

Since neither he nor his wife need to work - and neither do their adult children - he spends all of his time working to elect Democrats in NJ and PA congressional districts.

Great guy. I like him very much.

He was the first person I saw walking around town wearing an Obama button in 2008 and his car - a Lincoln MKZ hybrid; he also owns a Prius - is plastered with Bernie Sanders stickers. (For the record I personally have no use for Bernie Sanders; I was for Ms. Clinton all the way.)

The McMansion, of course, features lots of solar cells on the roof.

This summer I met him at a barbecue among friends. When we sat down, after our usual bitching about how horrible Trump and his congressional enablers are, he remarked that he regarded the Obama Presidency as a failure.

Of course, I personally regard Obama as the best President of my lifetime, which I stated - since I like the guy and don't want to get engage my normal sense of anger - blandly, but I asked him why he thought this.

He said, "Because he didn't accomplish anything on climate change..."

Um...um...um...

Well, he didn't. Of course, he did appoint Steven Chu as the Secretary of Energy. And let's be clear on something: Of all the Secretary's of Energy we've had since the office was created, Steven Chu best understood climate change, and more importantly, understood best how to address it. (In saying "best" I am not implying I agree with everything Chu believed, but frankly, he was better than all other Secretaries of Energy.)

Of course, the only other science Nobel Laureate ever to serve at a cabinet level - although informally so as a kind of "minister without portfolio" - was Glenn Seaborg.



Glenn Seaborg served as the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission - negotiated the test ban treaty of 1963 in personal meetings with Nikita Khrushchev, utilizing his internationally known prestige - and, um, knew better than anyone on this planet how climate change could be addressed.

The guy who criticized Obama, um, didn't.

Like Glenn Seaborg, I am a lifelong Democrat. I have never voted for a Republican in my life, and have never missed a vote. Although Seaborg worked with and knew Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush and even Reagan, his writings make it clear that he didn't think highly of any of them.

If I had asked - and I probably should have asked - my friend what it is he thought Obama should have done, I would have certainly heard more drivel about so called "renewable energy."

It didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work.

Recently, I had occasion to reflect on the discredited but famous Pacala and Socolow paper on climate wedges when a moral and intellectual idiot wrote, with obvious glee, about the disappearance of their "nuclear wedge." The stated reason in the reference provided by the moral and intellectual idiot expressing glee, was that the reason that nuclear reactors are no longer cash cows is the rise of the use of dangerous natural gas for everything.

Nuclear energy has a climate impact of roughly - a general consensus in the scientific literature - of somewhere of around 50 grams of CO2/kwh, at least, if you include the estimates of complete morons like say Benjamin Sovacool. It certainly could be much lower and, in fact, with reprocessing driven by nuclear energy itself as a source of primary energy - as close to zero as is possible. Dangerous natural gas has an impact of somewhere between 500-600 grams of CO2/kwh.

So called "renewable energy" since it's intermittent requires that gas plants be less efficient because of the requirements of wasting energy on restart.

There are no innocent political parties in the United States. We laugh at "them," and revile "them," without considering ourselves. We are all guilty. It's not that "we" know what to do. We don't. Our polices are the equivalent of the announcement in the middle ages that the ideal manner of addressing the black death was prayer.

There is a huge anti-nuke wing in our party. We surely don't get it either. Our party actually thinks the German energy policy was a good idea; it is a policy of ripping up old growth forests to get at coal.

If we controlled the White House and the House and the Senate, we would still fail, just as Steven Chu failed - although he did give it his best shot - to restart the nuclear construction industry in this country. The reason he failed was because people were able to declare that "gas is cheap" by ignoring the external costs that every generation after ours will need to pay.