Breaking: Shockingly sane opinion piece posted on the LA Times site

Climate change: Bare-knuckled politics won't save the planet - latimes.com

McKibben's idea is to confront a technological problem with political and economic pressure. We must put a "stiff price" on carbon, he says, because otherwise fossil fuel won't go away.

Aside from the fact that most people wouldn't want it to go away until a viable substitute is found, I doubt that coercion of any kind will help scientists think harder or faster. Man's first moon landing came 66 years after Kitty Hawk. Could we have gotten there sooner by imposing a tax on any manned flight that involved a propeller?

Here's an idea for scaring up revenue in lieu of a carbon tax: Let's stop paying organizations millions of dollars to "prove" anthropogenic global warming. The only practical purpose of such research is to tell us we need alternatives to fossil fuel. Let's put our money toward developing those alternatives, as well as making existing technologies cleaner and greener. While we wait for the revolution, we may as well produce something more useful than collective guilt.