Watching the news and a commercial literally popped up just now from American Petroleum Institute with the message "Power Past the Impossible".
Something that seems to be missing out of the climate debate is the reason why deepwater drilling, fracking, and shale are buzzwords these days. Eventually it will get so expensive to extract what's left out of the earth's crust that economic growth will become impossible, but that's such a politically distasteful message that nobody could get elected with it.
On one hand you have the energy giants who killed the electric car and created suburbia to sell more toxic waste as transportation fuel.
On the other there's the con artists who are always looking for an angle and preying on people's good nature, include the "public servants" who hypocritically fly around earning millions of dollars in speaking engagements.
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/01/31/31climatewire-europes-carbon-emissions-trading-growing-pai-74999.html?pagewanted=allSo here we have humanity narcissistically flapping our gums at each other as we round the corner to 400ppm and a mass extinction already in progress. The solution both sides are pushing is to Power Past the Impossible, but that only works if you have the fossil fuels necessary to create "alternative energy" which require rare earth minerals, vast transportation networks, economic stability, and lots of cheap petroleum for raw materials. These things are all much harder to find when major cities start to disappear under the waves.
Instead of building up Kakaako we should be relocating essential services to Mililani, but our species doesn't have the best track record when it comes to being reasonable.