I work for a major national environmental outfit in Washington (we have a very good brand as they say) but I doubt that there is any policy measure or scheme that we are advocating that is likely to help with this lamentable situation. Emissions capping, international protocols, legislative initiatives, etc are all doomed to failure because we are too far along in the process. We should be concentrating our efforts on not how to stop global warming but how to deal with it. One possible solution would be to equip the earth with umbrellas (no joke!) or to otherwise change the reflectivity of the earth’s surface. There is an active scientific literature devoted to these technological fixes. What we need is effective ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSING!
I will tell you something else. At a personal level I have never seen people who consume more energy than international environmentalists. I am not kidding. Their “carbon foot-prints” are atrocious. Believe me, I know whereof I speak; If the average American consumes far more energy than say the average developing world person, in the same way the average DC or London-based environmentalist consumes far more energy than the average american because they are always flying to some high-level conference in South Africa or wherever.
Although I believe that organizations such as my own are less than effective on this front, I am nevertheless personally very concerned and will tell you what I am doing to avert the coming disaster: I INVEST IN GENERAL ELECTRIC. GE is one of the greenest companies in the world and is currently the world’s leading manufacturer of Wind Turbines! GE is leading the way to america’s green future. So whenever one of my bosses boards a flight to another confab I just “offset” the damage he is doing by buying a few more shares of General Electric. It helps me with the guilt.
Beatus ille qui procul negotiis … paterna rura bobus exercet suis, solutus omni fenore….. Horace
