Hell on Earth?

Sources of California Greenhouse Gases

Some now say the Arctic ice cap will be gone by 2012: Wired. Those worried about carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect need only cite Venus. Earth's sister planet,which once had oceans, is now hot enough to melt lead. Those who want to go to hell, because that is where all of their friends will be, may get their wish.

California, unlike most places, knows where its greenhouse gases come from: Spreadsheet

Is "reduce, reuse, recycle" truly a moral imperative? Or, is it something you say to children, like, "clean your plate, you can't waste food when there are starving people in the world?"

Reducing carbon emissions may be the imperative.

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Is recycling paper even a good idea if natural gas or corn is burned to generate the heat to recycle the paper?

One of the approaches to reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases is called carbon sequestration. Here, carbon is put in the ground to replace the carbon that is burned. If instead of recycling the paper, we landfill it, and if it does not degrade, then we have sequestered the carbon.

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A couple of Berkeley professors wrote in 2004 about "The Death of Environmentalism." They say that environmentalism is not powerful enough to address the critical challenge of our time, global warming. They say that dealing with global warming is fundamentally different than dealing with pollution: audio.

(The authors of Freakonomics suggest that environmental hero, Jane Fonda may be one of the biggest global-warming villains of the past 30 years, based on the success at slowing the growth of the zero greenhouse emissions nuclear industry.)

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It costs a significant amount of fuel to make ethanol. Would just burning corn kernels and not making ethanol produce more energy with less emissions?

Google is launching an energy initiative RE<C". 'RE' stands for renewable energy. 'C' stands for coal. The idea is to come up with renewable energy that is less expensive than burning coal. The web page discusses high altitude wind power and solar power as options, so perhaps what they really mean is that they want to eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases. They should add a second mathematical acronym: GHG->0, to explain that they want to develop technology where greenhouse gases approach zero.

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I hope that that is how they frame the issue here.

As someone who believes that science and technology can get us past even this problem, it is refreshing to hear that there may be a presidential debate covering these issues.