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Seventh Circuit Judge and University of Chicago law professor Richard Posner writes that the future losses of delaying climate change outweigh the present value of cleaning up the problem.

In other words, solving this problem makes sound economic sense.

The U.S. has declined to join an international accord on secret detentions, child soldiers.

Source: Washington Post

Sometime in the last few weeks, the worst insult one could leverage on someone opposing the “war on terror” is not to Hitler, but to Neville Chamberlain. The implication seems to be that appeasing “terror groups” [Hezbollah] or “terror states” [Iran] will lead to the creation of a dictatorship that threatens the security of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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In an effort to curb pollution, city and state governments are forming agreements with other municipal, state, and international governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions. For example, California Govnernor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed last week to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses and to trade carbon pollution credits (although I’m not exactly sure how this will work, since the United States, and thus California, are not parties to the Kyoto Protocol). Also last week, President Bill Clinton brokered a deal between 22 of the worlds largest cities to reduce carbon emissions by those cities.

With all of these agreements between cities, it would seem that the nation is on the right track to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and finally doing something constructive about carbon pollution, right? Wrong.
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Last night I went to see the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth. This movie will certainly make you stop and think about the problem, if only you can sleep at night.
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Playing at the Landmark E Street Cinema. Show times to be announced.

This line from a recent report commissioned by the White House. Somehow, this does not qualify as “global warming.”

According to a story in the New York Times and at the BBC, the Bush administration dismisses the report as merely being one of twenty-one climate change assessments. Despite the report’s finding that “the only factor that could explain the measured warming of Earth’s average temperature over the last 50 years” was the increase in carbon dioxide gas emmissions from industrial activity.

This “logic” is right in line with a speech I heard the president give yesterday, where he stated that “high gas prices should serve as a wake-up call to Americans. It should show them that we have an unsound energy security policy.” I was with him right up until “wake-up call”…

From Wired Magazine:

You don’t change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of ‘Save the Earth’ bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster.