Ken,

as Deputy Executive Director of Greenpeace USA,
your proposal of so utterly disfunctional a "strategy" does not surprise me that much.

What I do find remarkable is your brazen ignoring of the very widely known facts of the time-lags inherent within the development of Climate Destabilization.

Your proposal that people should withdraw from the campaign until Florida is hit by 2 Katrina's in a year is just not rational -
by that stage we should be far too late to gain control over the feedback loops' acceleration,
and nations would have accepted the US edict of "devil take the hindermost"

- the chance of global co-operation in the equitable allocation of nations' declining emissions rights would be long gone.

What troubles me is that your proposal is exactly how I would frame it if I were working for Big Oil.
"The task is hopeless at present - we should back off and disengage until some future extreme event, and then sweep to the rescue as the global leadership."

Sheer defeatist fantasy.

That said, it would be a real pleasure to see Greenpeace itself adopt this strategy
and get out of the way of more serious organizations working for a Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons
at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

If this note seems abrasive in tone, then I'd ask the reader to consider just how many people have put their faith, and cash, into Greenpeace, to avert the looming prospect of an unprecedented genocide in poor nations.

Billhook

>> How is it possible for the world's best informed governmental and private sector leaders to proceed with this course of action when the consequences are known?  >>

>>  how I would frame it if I were working for Big Oil. >>>>

know, but buried..

>> a race between carbon oil emissions and capital accumulation.

MONEY MADNESS

As I said y'all are poisoned to the crown of ya head.

You percieve the urgency of global warming, but then prescribe an idealistic and unrealistic solution.  Yes, in order to prescribe a strategy of reducing human greenhouse gas emissions as a solution, then our economy and culture would have to undergo a revolution.  Yet, how realistic and likely is that to happen?

Specifically, I find most people have trouble imagining living in a developing nation, where poverty makes cutting emissions less of a priority than economic development.  Of course those developing countries will be hardest hit by climate change, but if the richest countries in the world refuse to sacrifice prosperity to cut emissions, then how can you reasonably expect the poor countries to take on the burden.

Those poor countries are going to burn lots and lots of coal for power generation.  In fact, rich countries are going to burn lots more coal when international sources of oil and gas can't supply enough affordably.  Human CO2 emission are going to go way up, not go way down so fast as to avoid runaway global warming and abrupt climate change.  

Every day you persist in trying to fit a square peg (cutting emissions) into a round hole (the solution to global warming) is wasted.  Instead, identify a realistic solution, and advocate that.

By the way, I just got an email from a Professor who had written an article agreeing with Gore's documentary, who I wrote saying the same thing as this posting.  This is his response:

"The technology exists to switch from fossil fuels to renewables, and there is tremendous inefficiency in our economy. Those have got to be the guts of any serious plan to alter our destructive course."

We are doomed to a bottleneck unless people abandon the unfeasible solution of cutting emissions.  When abrupt climate change occurs in the next couple of decades, it will be too late, and we will be stuck with dramatically a reduced carrying capacity for generations.

>> we will be stuck with

extinction, 100% certain.

To be fair, if (when if business-as-usual) a runaway global warming chain reaction (melting the methane hydrate) is triggered by mankind's greenhouse gas emissions, then the carrying capacity of the earth will be greatly diminished, and mass extinctions will ensue.  BUT, just because existence on the surface of the world will be extremely difficult, it doesn't mean that mankind will all die.  It WILL mean that most people will die, and it also means that for the (relatively) small number left, life will be much more controlled and sparse.

Sometimes I think that a controlled and sparse life-style is more moral than the free-for-all that now takes place on the surface of the earth.  Then I think about the unimaginable misery and pain that will take place as the earth's carrying capacity shrinks, and billions of people slowly die, and all those people yet to born that won't be able to enjoy the life I enjoy, and it makes me want to redouble my efforts to sell a realistic solution to our policymakers.

Because we will surely suffer a bottleneck if people continue to insist upon the unrealistic srategy of stifling human emissions to avoid runaway global warming.  It is too little, too late.  The only solution is to remove the CO2 from the air after it has been emitted.