Rusted Sky

Politicians treat voters like children on this issue offering two options : Cap and Trade or Carbon Tax. What about the third way - listen to the science? It's the sun, stupid. There is no experimental evidence to support CO2 and AGW, or we'd have seen it. The house of cards was built decades ago and all the derivitive 'research' since then has no scientific foundation.

Moreover, we have no practical alternative to hydrocarbons and we must leave the carbon economy in place. The problem however, is the leftie political/intellectual construct of "BIG OIL". The state of affairs, actually is that "REALLY BIG OIL", the national oil companies like Russia and Venezuela and all the rest of the inefficient and uncompetitive national oil companies (e.g., PEMEX) have driven prices through the roof by incompetence. It is fair to call these super giants “REALLY BIG OIL”. They sit on 93% of the resources and reserves. The US is suffering from NIMBY for certain, but gas in Europe is about $9.00 - $11.00 a gallon equivalent and rising for similar NIMBY reasons; unable to build refineries.

We are in for a fight. Most politicians know the truth about CO2 and are aware of the petition of 31,000 scientists who agree that CO2 is beneficial to life on the planet (Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine; released at the Washington Press Club), and that Kyoto would severely affect prosperity for the poor and those on fixed incomes. However, ‘real scientists with Ph.D.s’ (Doctor of Philosophy degrees) is not a constituency and this is an election year. Pols now cater to an humanist educated mass of humanity who are lured by demagogues and driven by fear or worst case fictional scenarios. Interestingly enough, politicians use politically correct subjects to coerce politically correct voters.

It is clarifying to quantify the scale of the economy and our heavy industrial boot on the neck of the environmental construct: Some examples:
British Columbia: The mines in British Columbia have a footprint of 0.06% (6/10,000s) of the total land area of the Province. The prosperity of BC and the world has been enormously assisted by copper mining.
Oil sands: At the present time, after 30 years of mining the footprint of open pit mining in the oil sands is 0.06%; the pits will be backfilled and reclaimed with clean sand. The rest will likely be developed by underground thermal methods. The Alberta-Saskatchewan tar sands spill may reach an equilibrium foot print of 0.10% mining and following reclamation - 0.0%. Considering that the oil sands outcrop and bleed into the river in the summertime, Suncor and the others are cleaning up one of the largest (natural) oil spills on the planet.
Montana: The palladium/platinum mines of Montana have a footprint of 641 acres. That is (1/147,165 square miles) 0.00068% of Montana.
Alaska: Thanks to horizontal drilling, the 2000 acres of Alaska requested from the ANWR have a footprint of 4.7 x 10-4 % or 0.00047% of Alaska.

The risk: reward ratio of these projects is de minimis. De minimis is a Latin expression meaning about minimal things, which is used mostly as part of de minimis non curat praetor or de minimis non curat lex, to say that the law is not interested in trivial matters. De minimis, in a more formal legal sense, means something which is unworthy of the law's attention. In risk assessment, de minimis refers to a level of risk that is too small to be concerned with. Some refer to this as a "virtually safe" level.[1]
[1] Wikipedia