VX, money has something to do with everything. But the deep pockets have always been industry's. Why would money be on the side of the scientists who agree with the GW hypothesis? It doesn't make sense. Even the US govt has been hostile to it, so you can't finger government money. If anything, the "money talks" argument works against the GW deniers.

But ignore that. Just look at the data. If you don't, you're just declaring what you prefer to believe, not what you have any support for believing.

Ethanol in the US is a boondoggle for the most part. That's been obvious for a long time. Scientists do not, for the most part, endorse the ethanol craze as a rational response to GW. It's political. And it has nothing to do with whether GW is happening.

Many environmentalists and ordinary Americans are deeply distrustful of nuclear energy. Partly, this is a fear of anything having to do with the word "nuclear". (The original term for "Magnetic Resonance Imaging", or MRI, was "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" or NMR. Some people were too scared to go into the machines until they changed the name.) Partly, it's the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents. And it's also partly because people are bad at assessing risk. I've always been a fan of fission reactors. I think we can resolve the waste problem (which is big), and I think today's designs are safe. Fission reactors will have to play a major role in the response to GW; those who deny this (and there are many) are fooling themselves.

Coal is an environmental disaster. It's dirty and it spews out tremendous amounts of CO2. Coal mining is dangerous and destructive. We can't do without it now and for a good long time in the future, but we really need to minimize its use to the extent practicable.

I have never understood the rush to pump out our own oil. Keep it in the ground while it's cheap, I say, and use the oil being sold by those dopes in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela while it lasts. When it's $150 a barrel, we'll be glad we didn't use up all our own. Think of ANWR as an auxiliary long-term Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I honestly don't believe that drilling in ANWR will do serious environmental damage. If we really needed it now, I'd say go for it. But we don't need it now--there are plenty of nations willing to sell it to us for $55 a barrel.

Environmentalism is hugely popular with Americans because it has produced tremendous benefits. You and I are old enough to remember Pennsylvania before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It stank, literally. People were coughing and dying in many cities around the country. I clearly recall the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth of the corporations that swore they'd have to shut down if they couldn't dump their poisons into the water we drank and the air we breathed. They lied. The environmentalists won and everyone is better off for it. They thus deserve the high esteem they have earned with the American public, even if a few of them abuse it with alarmism. Most are quite sensible.