[Aleksei Maslovskii]

Lorna, i feel i understand mr. McKibben when he says that problem about climate change – is physics, not politics.
 
I digged into the matter for a couple years. It is my current opinion that no matter what legislation a country would make, – it won’t significantly reduce levels of greenhouse gases emissions. Physics and chemistry of carbon burning in oxygen-rich athmosphere are very straight. In short, burning carbon is the cheapest way of getting energy for mankind. And i mean cheapest not in dollars (but that too), – worse, it’s cheapest physically. We can do it, we can do it on mass scale we need it, and there is no viable alternative so far. Renewable sources are intermittent (solar, wind), times more expensive (labor-wise and matherial-wise) to implement on global scale of significance (note, this differes from “couple millions households” dramatically), and/or dangerous in long run (geothermal 2nd gen), and/or limited (hydro power, nuclear power), and/or many decades ahead to be invented and built (effective fusion reactors global scale, artificial photosynthetic carbohydrates). To feed ourselves, we need energy to power up our agriculture machinery, at very least – which is massive amount of energy even if to count only crop production and needed irrigation. So it ends up like this: presently existing mankind wants to eat (not to starve to death) = we have to keep burning carbon.
 
Whatever legislation you do won’t cancel that. Raising carbon prices dramatically won’t cancel the need for diesel fuel for agriculture machines – it merely will decrease food production. Don’t even think about electric heavy machinery – first, very ineffective weight ratio of available accumulators, 2nd, 80%+ of our electricity is generated by burning carbon.
 
I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though! But as far as i know at the moment, i am right.
 
I am sorry…

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