Comments veritone has made

I am impressed by this thoughtful piece. I have arrived at the same conclusion. I cannot give up, not until I drop dead. To do anything less is to seek the grave before the fact. Thanks for writing this.

"beckscrement," what a lovely and apt formulation. I'm going to borrow that with honor and use it widely. Thanks!

Do you run knitting needles through your ears every morning or when was it you first wondered that your brain went missing? You repeat nonsense you hear from Glenn Beck and his ilk without doing any fact checking whatsoever. Van Jones is not nor has ever admitted to being a radical communist as near as I can tell. Of course people like you are convinced that Obama is a socialist and a fascist (those are on opposite sides of the poilitical spectrum, by the way). Can you actually define socialism in perhaps one sentence?

By the way, we know you're shouting, your type always tries to make a point by raising the decibel levels, so capitalizing your remarks isn't necessary. My favorite remark you made, reminiscent of George W. Bush is "IT CAN HAPPENED." You don't say? No surprise that your command of English is on par with your command of the facts or proximity to reality.

Randino is right, you are just another troll. Go find a bridge to hide under.

I'm based in Columbus, Randy. I have colleagues who work in your area, but we monitor all the news, state and national. I remembered your name from Grist, so it was gratifying to see you hold forth in print.

You prove my point, movetotheright. If I were as ignorant as you, I'd keep it to myself. I almost admire the zeal with which you display it. Got any more gems to share with us?

Do your knuckles scrape the ground when you walk, movetotheright? Thinking is clearly something you don't do. Describing Obama as a socialist is laughable. Clearly Glenn Beck provides all your talking points. Or is it Rush Limbaugh? I want to thank you, however, for making it clear that your views are those of a thoughtless buffoon.

Easyjet and Ryannair, like all airlines, have been successful at externalizing the true cost of their emissions, i.e., they pay nothing for all the pollution they incur. Like so many other "energy markets" they are an example of market failure. To point to their price as proof of their efficiency is a failure of intellect common among cargoists like yourself. Your confidence that technology and markets will always save us is misplaced, regardless or your condescending arrogance. You clearly are also ignorant of the enormous role Peak Oil will play in the demise of air travel. It is equally clear you are poorly informed about the likely impact of Global Warming.

Is this some kind of spam?

As George Monbiot points out: "Any change worth fighting for will be hard to achieve; indeed if the struggle in which you are engaged is not difficult, you may be confident that it is not worthwhile, for you can be assured by that measure that those from whom you need to wrest power are not threatened by your efforts. We will know that our approach is working only when it is violently opposed."

Seen in this light, perhaps even the near violent encounters at Town Hall meetings might be regarded more encouragingly. If the quantity of dollars corporations are devoting to defeat health care and comprehensive clean energy legislation are an indication, we are surely on the right path. Can anyone doubt that this change is worth fighting for?

I used to have some admiration for Conrad, but now he's beneath my contempt. Not only is he clubbing in with delaying this bill, but he's the leading champion for the brain dead healthcare coop idea. The health insurance industry and big pharma know that coops can never scale to threaten their market dominance in the way a government run plan would. It's the psuedo public option. And of course the healthcare industry has been helping themselves by inspiring near fascist performances from the terminally stupid, emotionally supercharged morons that this nation appears to have a large supply of. It is hard to watch this colossal tragedy play out on the national stage. It must be opposed with every fibre of our being, those of us who have a brain and backbone. If healthcare fails, effective climate energy legislation will fail also. And this dreadful outcome would be please our corporate masters no end.

I'm glad to see Lester Brown calling out the twin civilization stopping threats of Peak Oil and Climate Change, while pointing out one of the key drivers: population growth, and the key remedy: political will. "The obscure we learn to see eventually," Edward R. Murrow once observed, "the obvious, it seems, takes much longer." Regrettably, "much longer" is a luxury we simply do not have. Grist continues to be an invaluable source of tremendously useful information.

I don't think your argument scales well world-wide. George Monbiot, looking at this from a planet-wide perspective observed that "we can either feed ourselves or our livestock, not both." The reason I no longer eat meat is because of that conclusion which I believe to be true. Also, I'm enjoying tremendous health benefits from not eating meat. I still think there is a case to be made for becoming vegan. I do agree that current agribiz practices are the culprit and applaud you for making that point. Nonetheless, the claim the Monbiot makes is true, I think and I'm wondering if you'd propose to debunk him with information I'm unaware of.

You are absolutely right when you note:

"And the big idea is that the independent, juried data and models, for the most part have predicted, that we are seeing large scale climate change that will have an enormous devastating impact on the future of humanity.  The question is how will our leadership respond and how will we hold them accountable?"

Lovelock has descended into a peculiar form of self-loathing that I refuse to join him in. Mobilizing political will to look at this problem unflinchingly and address it squarely should be the order of the day. Lovelock clearly doesn't help the matter.

You clearly elaborated what I've suspected to be true and I appreciate the confirmation. I also relish the additional details, thanks!

One of the clips I read had that in a headline.

This is good news indeed and I applaud you for drawing attention to it. I'm sure, however, you also know, that because of wind's intermittency, that growth of wind energy doesn't completely de-couple us from conventional, and far more polluting, energy generating sources -- at least for now. If, however, we also make huge committments to curtailing overall energy use, while exploring opportunities for energy efficiency, then we might start moving in the right direction. I mention all this as an anti-dote to what William Catton Jr. refers to as "Cargoism," the belief that technology will always save us. And let me be very clear that I'm not accusing you or wind enthusiasts of engaging in cargoism. As I said at the outset, this is good news.

I ordered Hartmann's book and yours! Thanks for the recommendation.

It is so patently obvious that the media has done a horrible job reporting the truth of climate change. I followed both your links and was impressed only by how puerile you seem in print, much like your comment on this page.

If it weren't for Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and free access to Doonesbury, I'd give up visiting nytimes.com altogether. I fully agree with your assessment of this very disappointing "newspaper of record."

In the letter you quote they say:

"The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them."

That's flat out not true. the best of the models did predict this. As noted by The Credibility Project:

"Deniers of global warming often cite the occurence of a temporary cool period since 2005 (cool only in relation to the extremely hot years before) as reason to doubt the science of global warming. Far from defying scientists' expectations, this cool period was predicted by the best climate models before it occurred. This shows that climate models have passed a critical test of physical theories -- namely, that they have demonstrable predictive power. Worryingly, these same models predict that another very sharp temperature rise will occur in a few more years."

Asserting that the "Alarmists" seek only to enrich themselves is classic right-wing manufactured tripe. Indeed the CBO estimates that legislation like ACES will actually reduce the deficit, not increase it.

Citing any meteorologist's views on global warming is more than a bit ridiculous. The NOAA and NWS, which regulate their curriculum, require no training in climate science whatsoever and so most institutions training them don't offer it.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance," President Madison observed. Let me recommend you keep your ingnorance and hysteria to yourself.

Welcome back! You've penned yet another excellent piece.

PatrickS: I am as unimpressed with your facts as you appear to be with mine. JJPro: Reports that people didn't like their electric cars certainly wasn't evident in the documentary you are so quick to dismiss as sensational. Two women even got arrested because they didn't want to part with their vehicles. Indeed the notion of people not liking electric cars appeared to be largely corporate propaganda coming from Detroit and elsewhere. Of course Motor City's vehicle paradigm was SUVs and Hummers, not a particularly successful strategy in its own right, but no need to go there.

If being "professional" in your view includes ignoring people's vested financial interests that might readily cloud or otherwise confound their judgment, color me unprofessional. There's too much at stake to maintain cocktail party manners when discussing vital issues. I continue to believe that in an era of increasingly scarce resources, squandering funds on Hydrogen technology is unwarranted. We live in a country replete with climate denying, industry funded sycophants and lying corporate shills are as thick as fleas on a dog's back. Being deeply suspicious seems a prudent posture and I remain deeply suspicious of all the claims posted here. If you are earning a paycheck from this industry, which I suspect many are who've posted here, then I have excellent reasons to question every utterance.

Having said all that, I will check out many of the links posted here. The first one I pursued, however, made it clear that the poster had a financial interest which renders his pronouncements questionable, at best and casts suspicion on many others as well. How about telling us, PatrickS and JJPro about your relationship to this industry. Or would that be "unprofessional"? I have no skin in this game at all, either way. How about you?

One of Ulf Bossel's points is that compressed as a liquid it would require about 22 equivalent fuel transports to charge a hydrogen filling station as it does to do so today with a gasoline filling station. And you,Patrick S, mention this:

"As for hydrogen transport, the vast majority of hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles is today transported in gaseous form, not liquid."

So if it was 22 trucks when hydrogen was compressed to a liquid form, doesn't it follow it would be quite a few more when transported in a gaseous state? If you are considering this a plus, I'd suggest you reconsider.

Mindful of Upton Sinclair's observation that it is hard to get a person to understand something if his job depends on not understanding it, I wonder how many of you leaping on this page to criticize Joe Romm are part of the Hydrogen industry? Since one commentator mentioned how the "fuel cell community is well aware of. . ." it seems like Sinclair's observation is relevant and begs the question.

I'm not, nor am I part of any competing industry. Nor is Joe for that matter and the major points he's made, most particularly his first one in the second paragraph have not, as near as I can tell, been effectively refuted by any of the figures and data thrown with such abandon on this page.

 I'm also aware of how a fuel cell bigot who chaired the California Air Quality board (or whatever it was called) helped kill the Electric Car -- see the excellent documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car" -- and never mentioned his conflict of interest holding a position in the fuel cell industry.

George Monbiot, in his excellent book, "Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning," also came to have a low opinion of hydrogen's prospects. Reacting to the British governments strong interest in hydrogen he concluded: "Given that the alternatives are so much easier to develop, our government's obsession with hydrogen cars seems incomprehensible." (p.165) For all these reasons I remain unconvinced by any arguments I've heard presented thus far.

Then there's the matter of Dr. Chu being a Nobel Prize winner which makes his views certainly noteworthy. As a scientist facts speak most loudly to him and he had a good look at them and made what appears to me to be a sound decision. I think he's looking out for my interests while Congress rather notoriously caters to various industries in exchange for the legal graft received.

I realize the economy is tough and if some of you were counting on that $100 million to keep your jobs I can see why you might be alarmed. I, however, am a taxpayer and can think of many better uses for that money. I plan on finding out how my congress member voted and intend to vociferously complain if she voted with the majority.

I certainly see how the fact that Jamie Lee Curtis bought a hydrogen fuel-cell car disproves much of anything that Joe Romm wrote in his article.

DOCFORESIGHT: Your claim about the EPA and CO2 is right-wing nonsense that originated from Rush Limbaugh or some other similar ditto-head. Unless you are wing-nut, you might want to be careful repeating their mindless and baseless claims. If you are one, best of luck -- I believe your numbers are diminishing. Otherwise, do us all a favor and be more thorough in your research.

I recently joined my daughter and ex-wife at a Cheesecake Factory. It was the first time since I've become a vegan and I found the pickings there slim indeed. Also the portions were ridiculously large. There was something obscene about the whole experience.

Sorry, Robert, but it is you who have your facts wrong. Please read: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-stavins/the-wonderful-politics-of_b_208581.html

Or read one of several posts Alan Durning has submitted to this site. Of the 85% of permits not being auctioned, 80% of that figure (68% overall) is going for the purposes I previously mentioned. Only 20% of that figure (17% overall) are going directly to industry for their purposes alone. And Big Business is largely opposed to this bill. Exxon-Mobil certainly is as well as most of the American Coal and Oil industry overall. It is true that some companies that could be described as "Big Business" support this bill, but the majority do not.

Now you may insist that Joseph Romm, Robert Stavins, Alan Durning, and David Roberts are all wrong and Robert Moen isn't, but I don't think many of our readers here would be convinced by that claim. I certainly wouldn't be.

Hey don't sugar coat it now, Randy! I applaud everything you said: one big fat ditto!!

I think you have pegged Monbiot incorrectly. He's not wild about Waxman-Markey but is on record saying he hopes it passes.

That "Kook" was also a serious math jock at Harvard and will make a formidable Senator. And as for comedy, I recommend you find the YouTube clip of British Parlimentarian Galloway tearing strips our of the now defeated Norm Coleman over Iraq. Now that's truly funny to behold.

I liked this article too, but would argue that had "street heat" been turned all the way up many months ago the various compromises we now confront might not have occured. As Randy suggested, I think that many were resting on the laurels of Obama's victory thinking he'd take care of it all, or something along those lines.

Clearly we need all the heat we can muster now. I fear that while a certain amount of strong debate is healthy, it is now moving to the point where we are becoming fractured in the face of an increasingly unified opposition. I know I'll be pulling out all the stops to warm up the streets. And let me underscore this quote from Glick's article above:

We need to act as if the next six months, leading up to the big United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, is the most important half-year of our lives for those of us who get it on the urgency of the climate crisis.

Truer words were never spoken!

I agree with everything Randino said. I'm an actual activist who fought tooth and nail to ensure that it got passed. That it was done so with only one vote over the bare minimum is testimoney to everything Randino observed above. If W-M hadn't passed yesterday, we would probably get nothing for at least two years or more. This is something we can build upon. The best scientific minds who have no reason to lie to you or I say we have between 96 and 120 months (!) to make major changes. Imagine squandering 24 of those precious months.

Time to roll up your sleeves, Ed, and set you studied and naieve cynicism aside. We have only a few months to build a grass roots movement capable of overcoming the aristocratic inertia we're likely to encounter in the Senate. Or if you prefer sitting on the sidelines being snooty and maligning what you call "Big Green," imagine the conversation you're likely to have with our descendants when they ask you what you did to solve the problem. I have no difficulty imagining that conversation myself, nor, do I suspect will Randino.

Thom Hartmann has made valuable contributions in this area with his impressive book, "Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision."

I'm also reminded of a piece Joseph Romm wrote, that I read recently, savaging Nordhaus and Schellenberger whose writings only aid the Deniers and Delayers.

Keith Olbermann outed Newt on his Countdown segment yesterday pointing out that the 527 that sponsored this ad received around a $250,000 from Peabody Coal. Small wonder, huh?

I don't know who Buiter is, but I think his analysis is simplistic in ways David Roberts' is not. In fact, I think it's downright inaccurate. While I would've hoped for higher GHG emission reduction targets, the net effect, by 2020, will be the equivalent of taking 500 million cars off the road. Clean Air legislation and the Montreal Protocol were both made stronger than when they originally emerged. W-M is a Landmark piece of legislation that will allow us to sharply turn a corner if we maintain our resolve and work to improve it.

You make many good points, as usual, but I am growing more concerned about the Obama administration. Gays have been thrown under the bus three times now. Guantanamo shows no signs of closing down anytime soon. Military tribunals are going to be made friendlier, not eliminated as Obama said on the campaign trail. His administration still supports rendition, it appears, and has no difficulty holding people indefinitely, completely throwing habeus corpus out the window. And then there's the matter of Afghanistan, which could prove to be Obama's Vietnam.

Let's not forget that Tim Geithner and Larry Summers continue to screw up the financial crisis, but that shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with either of them. Summers helped repeal Glass-Steagal and Geithner, when he worked in NY for the SEC, completely looked the other way as the financial crisis percolated into disaster on his watch.

I concede Obama has made some great cabinet picks in the area of energy and the environment, but then again he put Agribiz toady Tom Vilsack in charge of the Department of Agriculture, which now, thanks to Peterson, may have a hand in overseeing the agricultural dimensions of W-M.

Like Craig4Survival, I'm placing my faith in what "We the People" can organize for ourselves. The fight will really begin in the fall and I intend to enlist every atom of my being to see it through.

For an honest and no holds barred assessment of the Obama administration, I recommend reading Paul Street. His "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics," is about to come out in paperback. Referring to this book Noam Chomsky declares, "It is a very welcome contribution in complex and troubled times."

I don't agree with your assertion that Peterson is a skeptic. His remarks show that he didn't even open the cover of the report that was released earlier this week. If I were told that Joe Barton had made those remarks, I wouldn't have been surprised. I think Tom Philpott nailed it by comparing him to Alfred E. Newman. Perhaps some of his constituents appreciate his anti-intellectual, "aw shucks" approach to vital science, but it truly sounded idiotic to me. Yet I don't think he's an idiot. He's playing the fool for a number of audiences.

Peterson may pose as someone interested in what farmers want, but he gets way too much money from Agribiz to be anything other than principally concerned with their interestes. The rest is window dressing. And the rate at which Agribiz actively destroys the prospects of any farmers other than those self-same titans should settle the matter of his true allegiance quite firmly.

Whether he can be "worked with," remains to be seen. I daresay Waxman is trying mighty hard to work with him, but so far to no avail. I see all the compromise emanating from Waxman's side and all Peterson appears to be doing is digging his heels in for his Agribiz clients.

Why not stop using dishwashers altogether? The amount of energy they use could fuel a crane that might lift your house 40 feet into the air with every load. I don't have one and actually enjoy the ancient art of washing my dishes by hand. While I'm glad that "Spotless but concerned" is concerned, we are going to have to commit to far deeper changes than simply finding better chemicals to use in our dishwashers. Can you imagine trying to reassure your grandchildren, doomed to live in climate purgatory, that you did all you could do. Why you even carefully selected better chemicals to put in your dishwasher! I'm sure they'll be overwhelmed with your self-sacrifice.

According to George Monbiot, Lovelock has gone off the deep end in other ways too:

"Renewable power is drifting away on the wind like thistledown. The credit has gone; the price of fossil fuels has fallen; it is impossible to work in a country whose people treat wind farms like the Black Death. The investors have blown overseas or put their cash back into coal.

So James Lovelock’s timing is, to say the least, eccentric. Just as several major companies reveal that they are packing their bags, the venerable father of Gaia theory, possessor of one of the world’s greatest minds, announces in Sunday’s Observer that “intemperate injunctions about green imperatives could make [environmentalism] as dangerous” as the ideology of the Axis Powers(1). He told the Guardian that a new planning regime for wind farms is “an erosion of our freedom [that] draws near to what I see as fascism.”(2) His grounds? The energy secretary Ed Miliband had mused that it should be “socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area - like not wearing your seatbelt or driving past a zebra crossing.”(3)

I have great respect for Professor Lovelock. He has done more to advance our understanding of the planet’s response to climate change than any other living person. But he appears to be suffering from an acute case of bellamoids*. He is old enough to know what fascism looks like. It embraces a wide and contradictory set of movements, but its common feature is violence in the pursuit of political aims. If Professor Lovelock knows of people who have been killed as a result of their opposition to wind farms, he should tell us." 31-Mar-09

The entire article can be found at: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/31/an-attack-of-the-bellamoids/

Julian Darley, author of "High Noon for Natural Gas," and founder of Global Public Media was rather convinced that Natural Gas has peaked in North America. Perhaps that's not true. I also didn't see any mention of the EROEI for Shale Gas. I would've thought that would be something useful to know. And then I'm not inclined to trust industry sources too much. Still, I have the greatest respect for Joseph Romm and am willing to hear more. Is there more?

I'm very sorry to report that you've been rather badly "Madoffed." Just as thousands of people presumed they could trust Bernard Madoff, including Elie Wiesel and Steven Spielberg among others, you've been misled by people you thought you could trust.

You must be unaware of the vast, well-funded climate denial industry which has been actively trying to create confusion around the truth of climate science for nearly two decades. You can go to the Union of Concerned Scientists website, www.ucs.org, and download their chilling report: "Smoke Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science."

The 31,000 signatures you mentioned (or is it 30,999 + 1 dog) was the work of another industry funded organization: The Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine. You can find out all about it and the "Oregon Petition," they're responsible for at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine.

It should go without saying that the challenges we face in the area of climate and energy are unprecedented on every level and it is easy to understand why so many reach for the comforting "truthiness" omnipresent on the Internet -- the place where lies never die. Clearly you have done so, but as an adult you would set a better example by being grown up enough to admit that you've been punked and cease cooperating with those whose are motivated only by short term profit and are quite prepared to destroy the future of at least 50 generations of our descendents to improve their bottom line.

Returning to the subject of Senator Allen's new found courage, I admit that it is possible for a known racist and anti-Semite to turn over a new leaf. This effort, however, is very far from that.

Shortly after his "Macaca"incident, he discovered that he had Jewish ancestry. His reaction to that was as if he had been freshly circumcized without anathesia. Maureen Dowd, if memory serves, dubbed him "Senator Macacawitz." And now he's being trotted out as a spokesperson for the trogolodyte rump of the energy industry. One of Napoleon's maxims went like this: "When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt him."