The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has released another update (about 2 weeks old now) - available here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf

This report keeps on methodically showing how the present energy practices of humans is altering the climate of the planet. Doh! Of course, most humans on the planet aren't doing much of this, and most of the grief is being caused by The Usual Suspects - U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, China, India, Russia, although odds are, if the money was available, most everybody would want a piece of the energy gluttony.

And, still not much of an acknowledgment that melting in Greenland of the icecap is not easily predicted with linear models. These icecaps are likely to be disappearing in a way that is more apt to be modeling as landslides a more analogous situation, a "non-gradual" process. Anyway, after reading a bit of this, the one thing that popped into my mind was "Welcome Aboard the Hellbound Train". Your only ticket is your energy consumption, though no doubt, special discounts are available for habitat destruction.

They also have a related energy section on the IPCC website. You can learn all about the 26.1 gigatonnes/yr of anthropogenic fossil fuel derived CO2 added each year, or that 1120 Gtonnes of CO2 has been dumped into the garbage dump that also goes by the name of "Our atmosphere". Needless to say, it's more than a mouthful for our oceans, which tend to be the eventual destination for this CO2, given enough time, and its why atmospheric concentrations keep mimicing the rise in oil prices (or is it the other way around....just coincidence).

Well, there may be lots of technical solutions to this atmospheric FUBARing of our climate control system for the planet. And one of the ones that may now need to be added is REMOVAL of CO2 from our atmosphere. Odds are, the easiest way to do this is to let plants and other photosythesizing entities gather up the CO2, and then we have to stash either the carbon that they have gathered up as either CO2 or carbon in the ground and keep it stashed for some time. This carbon/CO2 stashing will need to be done in addition to not using fossil fuels to throw out any more fossil derived (= previously stashed) CO2 into the now overstuffed garbage disposal unit that we call our atmosphere.

But all the technical ways of doing this (which will also involve some cost based rationing/selection of energy approaches) are not going to be of any use if we don't go back to basics. And we do have to acknowledge that we don't have the money that we may have had a decade ago, so things like deploying mass quantities of PV cells in Alaska would not be all that wise - sort of like trying to provide enough liquid fuels from biomass for a society insistent on using Mack trucks to drive on down to the local Quickie Mart for that 6-pack of beer that makes the day tolerable (SUV's are so wimpy by comparison....). But there are a lot of ways to provide some energy (and also energy for water) at reasonable rates/quantities needed to get by on.

Translated, this means if no jobs are available to people to make a living/obtain food and energy, most people will not buy into a environmentally viable future, even if this means that their descendant's future will be by and large thoroughly trashed into a society with more in common with Mad Max than we would want to contemplate. And the production of energy seems like a fine place to be creating mass quantities of jobs. The same for energy efficiency, though this may be more difficult to pay for even if the payback is relatively fast. That's because many potential beneficiaries of efficiency improvements have no access to the money to do this, or legal ability to use it (= renters) and/or benefit from this investment in time/labor/money.

It all reduces to the job creation. We really do have millions of people that need employment in the U.S. for anything, and not much employment for them that does anything useful as far as making our country energy efficient, or renewable energy based. And it's even worse in the "Second World", "Third World", and in those zones where "Third World" conditions are something to be envied, that proverbial "Fourth World". In effect:

Global Warming (GW) Solution = Peak Oil (PO) Solution =
New Job Creation

Any solution to the GW and PO that does not do much for job creation is not going to go far, unless we go totally facist/corpratist, and look forward to a world significantly more bifurcated than the one we have right now. Or at least, that's my take on our U.S. and global energy "pickle vat". That, and that the U.S. really can only have a say in the world energy scene by actually doing something/setting a good example. The words emanated by our present and future leaders (governments, corporate, and even environmental) have so little meaning now due to a long list of bad examples (the Bu$hies being the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak) - only deeds will now cut it. That and our buying habits...why should we buy Chinese crap if we also don't want to buy the pollution that goes with it.

Food for thought as what passes for winter approaches in the Northern hemisphere...

Nb41