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I generally can’t bring myself to write much about climate change any more, these days. It just seems pretty much hopeless. I don’t want to dwell on it (which is what I just said, I guess), but I basically see two big problems.

One: Preventing dangerous climate change has, for whatever reason, become as pure a “wedge” issue as any; the reactionaries are 100% set against anything of the sort. Which leaves… us. But liberals/Democrats and our causes seem to have hit our high water mark, with the White House, the House of Representatives and (at one point, allegedly) a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. And we still can’t seem to do much of anything. This is as good as it seems likely to get in the foreseeable future (which depresses me more deeply than I can really describe) and it seems very unlikely that any kind of adequate climate change legislation will be passed. Even if it were, the GOP would very likely swear up and down their determination to repeal it and, unlike health care reform, I think that would be a very real prospect.

Second, however much one feels that the United States and other first-world industrialized nations should bear the bulk of the responsibility for containing greenhouse warming—and I’m personally willing to go along with that argument fairly far—we simply can’t do it alone.

Reactionaries, when they aren’t insisting that global warming is a hoax that is, like to make a bugaboo about “China” and its 4 million new coal-burning power stations every day or whatever it is, but their hypocritical concerns aren’t entirely wrong in this case. In a globalized economy, the United States and other “Western” countries cannot solve the problem of excessive global emissions of greenhouse gasses just by cleaning up our own industries. If we put a price on pollution and other nations don’t, much of our pollution will just be “offshored.” This is a global problem which requires a global agreement, because nothing else will really work.

Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, there is a Grand Canyon sized chasm between what might possibly have a chance of being considered everyone’s “fair” shares in the United States, and what might possibly be considered fair in China.

Occasionally one hears a contrarian note, suggesting that oh, the Chinese are actually very concerned about climate change and are making rapid advances while we dither, but aside from all the evidence to the contrary, I find this hard to believe given their attitudes toward any kind of restriction on carbon pollution. It’s like the American coal industry: if their product is really capable of being the “green, clean” energy source which they like to claim it is, then why are they so adamantly opposed to legislation which would penalize pollution? It doesn’t add up.

I suppose that the Chinese could be “bluffing,” or otherwise engaged in some sort of “strategic” positioning game, e.g. attempting to establish “no limits, no international monitoring, no committments whatsoever” as their starting point in order to ensure that an eventual compromise is as favorable to them as possible. But, 1) while I’m no expert, I just can’t buy that and 2) if that is their game, it seems awfully like a little game we in the United States call “chicken.” And basically, I don’t see our own government or China’s as likely to swerve first. Or at all. Thus, I’m pretty fatalistic at this stage.

But, to finally get back to the point (such as it is) which I had in mind when I began this post, it seems that all of this is irrelevant anyway! Ohio’s outgoing Senator George Voinovich has a much better idea! And guess what, it’s that mysterious and wonderful “clean coal” stuff that I referred to above!

Hooray!

Gosh, what a loss to the Senate George-boy’s retirement will be. I mean, why didn’t I think of that? Just solve everything with clean coal! George assures us that for less than a nickel per day, clean coal will be perfected and running smoothly as the answer to all our prayers in a mere twenty years’ time! Wow!!!

Never mind that coal is still a finite resource. Or that barring some additional magical breakthrough, clean coal won’t do anything about the environmental and other problems stemming from our oil-driven transportation infrastructure. Or that the means by which George arrived at his budget and timeline figures are rather suspect. Or that “picking winners and losers” through government industrial policy was supposed to be bad according to America’s defenders of the free market and enemies of big government. Or that, even if we manage to get all the carbon emissions from coal-burning utilities buried under the ground, we have to keep doing so with each new ton of carbon dioxide and keep all that ever-growing total volume of interred carbon dioxide sitting down there, safely, without leaking anywhere, forever.

Nahhhhhh, forget all of that! Clean coal! It’s going to be awesome! What a genius is Senator George Voinovich. He should get the Nobel Peace Prize, not those poseurs like Al Gore or Barack Obama.

If only we could apply this kind of visionary thinking to other problems. Just imagine how easy we could solve rising health care costs by simply inventing a magic cure-all that kept everyone healthy! A magic drone plane that would automatically detect terrorists or insurgents just before they got up to their naughtiness, and whisk them away to a magical extrajurisdictional prison! And hey, we could solve our oil supply problems with a magic new engine that would run forever on pixie dust!

I sure hope that Senator Voinovich will find time to launch the development of a few of these much-needed technological solutions, as well, once he has finished solving global warming. And oh, maybe a magic tree that grows money instead of leaves, to solve our deficit! (Though actually, something quite like that one may be all too plausible.)

Okay, I think that’s about enough. </sarcasm> Good gods. What a fucking tit. What a useless, worthless, brainless execrable little pinhead. What an absolute sack of crap in a suit. I would weep or scream to consider that my tax dollars pay that miserable invertebrate’s salary, were I not torn over which to do first. As well as the fact that I may need to save my tears/screams given the not-certain but still very real prospect that George may be replaced by Rob Portman, who certainly seems to possess the motivation to be even worse.

Must we really live in a country, and a world, with this much active, eager, shittiness?