THe more you remove your anti-environmentalist rhetoric, the more excellent I think your posts are. You raise excellent points that deserve attention. What I hope to be able to do in the future is bring together some people to discuss this in more detail.

Let me start by saying that your more anti-environmentalist comments seriously distracted from your main point. As, I think, does your "realistic" (yes, it does come off fatalistic...my wife describes it as lazy) attitude towards changing energy policy. You did early on throw in some misleading statements about warming itself and your pessimism strikes me as unproductive as you seem to view my optimism. Here is the crux: we need present and consider this issue from the assumption that YES we are already facing problems from global warming and they will get worse and YES we have some hurdles to overcome that should not be taken lightly. There is a need for change and there are difficulties in making those changes.

Once we agree on those two things, your detailed presentation of very real difficulties becomes a very important point and one which I would like to see Culture Kitchen become a good forum for discussion.

Of course my expertise is biology. Add to that considerable knowledge of history, archaeology, and environmental issues (I am not a member of Greenpeace or Sierra club...I am a member of Union of Concerned Scientists, and Scientists and Engineers for America, to give you an idea what I mean by that term). I also am an investor and have discussed these issues with a wide range of people. In all this is little engineering, which is why I have been WELCOMING your entry into this blog from the start. Your expertise is something we need more of here.

Now here is my non-answer to your specific questions. They are not really answers for the simeple reason that I think you are framing the debate far to narrowly requiring ONLY tech details that exactly match your specifications. I am not qualified to do that (though I will be looking into this!), but I am qualified to discuss aspects of the debate that discuss AROUND your specific questions. They are not unrelated in my mind, but rather part of the same equation. I feel you are asking the debate to be limited to a mere two or three variables in a 10 variable equation. But here is what I have gleaned from my own readings and from talking to people whose expertise are somewhere between ours:

1. anthropogenic global warming is far more accepted as a consensus among scientists than you seem to imply at times;

2. the debates among these scientists have started frightening me in terms of the severity of effects their models suggest, and when I say this, I am not talking about fear-mongering environmentalists, I am talking scientists who are at the cutting edge of this who seem to suddenly be scaring themselves with what they are finding. Furthermore, my reading of articles in the journals Science, Nature and Scientific American all convince me that you are underestimating the threat, possibly considerably;

3. the technology for us to be far more reliant on wind power is at least 10 years old to the degree that more than 10 years ago a sceintific analysis of the wind generating power in the Great Plains states predicted that it could be a major energy exporter with technology that is now way out of date. Why aren't we exploring THAT option? Forget how much of an effect it will ultimately have. It is STILL a sane and reasonable thing to do...more reasonable than staying addicted to oil. Making the Great Plains an energy exporter with wind power would create jobs, wealth and clean energy. Period. Just DO IT, I say;

4. Discussing wind power with someone intimately familiar with rural America (mainly Iowa) and wind power, his assessment is that several other parts of America are poised for wind to become a major part of their economy. Iowa farmers, for example, are shifting to becoming wind producers with farming as secondary because they make more money that way. Here is something that benefits farmers, the potential and the will is there right now, it builds the economy and it helps our energy policy. Forget the sum total effect. It creates jobs, wealth and clean energy. DO it.

5. I have looked into biofuels and geothermal to some degree. The potentials here seem less than wind in my non-expert opinion having talked to experts. But they stll add to the equation. Geothermal is something I made some real money investing in. Let's see where it goes.

6. Many technologies exist that can also add to the savings and make sense. One small example of course are compact fluorescents and other such bulbs. Problem with them is initial cost. That is a very real problem. But the ultimate savings are also very real. Our energy bills dropped by one-third when we switched, counting our AC use in NYC during a year with a winter. I think there could be incentives that could help with the initial costs and the ultimate savings will benefit homeowners;

7. At this point, you'd want to know just how much this will help. Good question! And one I also want to see discussed. But even if it is small, IT IS SOMETHING. All of this still creates wealth within the US. It all involves existing technology and existing trends. I am suggesting things that are not very innovative or controversial...they simply have received little attention because the oil industry has dominated American politics for quite some time. So let's start from what is easily achievable right now without major innovations. It is ONLY at the point where we have made use of all of this, which can be done NOW and which from everything I have read will benefit our economy on all levels and would not require an Apollo-program like government effort but rather incentives and information that your questions even become pertinent. I do think we have enough time where we can start with these things and in the mean time be considering the tougher things where your pessimism come into play. If we are smary, in the interim we can find some solutions to those problems;

8. I view everything from an evolutionary point of view. If our society (be it national or global) can't adapt, we will be weeded out. That's not fear mongering, it is biological fact. Doing nothing will, in my view, have a large likelihood of leading to an eventual collapse. Doing the things I mention above have short term benefits as well as being at least the first one or two steps towards greater adaption;

9. Things CAN be done. Societies, including our own, have undertaken enormous effort to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. By coincidence, I just finished a detailed book about the Punic Wars. The gist of why Rome won is that it doggedly focused on overcoming all obsticles even in the face of technological inferiority early on, major military defeats, financial disasters, etc. Here in our society there are many examples people love throwing around and I don't have to outline them. One far less dramatic example for me is recycling. As a child my family inconvenienced ourselves to be one of a handful of families who recycled. People thought we were idiots and said recycling would never catch on. It is now mandatory in pretty much every place I have lived, mostly major cities. Now, there are problems there. This mainly focuses on supply and ignores demand, meaning some things (e.g. glass and newspaper if my somewhat rusty knowledge is still accurate) get thrown away at the recycling depot because the market is small, but other things (metals, white paper, plastic, according to the same possibly out dated info) sell like hotcakes. But major progress was made. My gut feeling is that if you were a Consul in Rome around the time of the First Punic War, you would have outlined all the reasons why Rome, a nation with no naval experience, a local economy and having recently suffered some military setbacks, could NEVER ever attempt to beat the primary naval nation in the world. You would have advised against building a navy to take on Carthage because Rome just didn't have the ship builders, rowers, navagators, or the financial ability to succeed. And that new fangled corvus technology would make no difference in an actual naval battle. Rome would never have built that first navy and hence would never have won the First Punic War and would never have become a superpower. I am more willing to see that if we want to succeed we need to take some risks and I would be advocating building that first Roman navy, trying out the silly-sounding corvus and those two things arguably are responsible for the entire direction of Western Civilization.

Okay, that digression doesn't answer your excellent technical questions. But I think maybe it explains why we are coming at this from such different viewpoints. I see you as saying why bother trying. I see myself as saying what CAN we do that has both short and long term benefits and let's start with those. In the mean time we can be investing in the next generation of technology that still needs developing.

All of the above only addresses (or fails to address) your first point above. I can speak better about our scientific endeavors. Our research institutes are flooded with scientists and engineers from all over the world. Whether or not our public education system at the lower level is providing us with adequate scientists and engineers (and I am aware of the criticisms and good sides of our public school system) we have the best at the higher levels. People come from all over the world here for grad school, post docs and do their damndest to STAY permanently. Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Europeans are fighting our immigration laws to stay here.

Looking at publications in top journals, US is also doing great.

We still have the potential. That doesn't mean that your assessment of the problems should be ignored. They shouldn't and education is one thing I value highly...and unlike others around here I AM a fan of public education having been in public education until my first post-doc. But even now, at the highest levels, which is where the R+D is done, we are still the top. I know this because I am part of the university system and I see the publication numbers.

What we lack more even than the brains is the brawn. Our manufacturing sector is neglected and tends to be resistant to change. That is where some government incentives, tax breaks, etc. could help. But it is a real problem and one you have brought up. But if the market starts to call for more wind turbines, with a little push from the government to help retooling and retraining, a company will want to make them. If we can help companies make them in the US rather than import them from Denmark, we will benefit.

I assume this long non-answer or semi-answer to your questions will be completely unsatisfying to you. But it is where I am coming from and I am coming from a reasonably well-informed but non-expert viewpoint. As to a more satisfying discussion within your narrowly defined debate structure, I'm hoping to work on something that will fit the bill.