It's dumb to brush off peoples' short term economic pain.

But it's also dumb to blindly preserve the status quo at the expense of the future.

Here's an example: The big 3 domestics have pushed SUVs for the past decade mainly because the margins on SUVs are great (sure, people chose to buy them, but that's a function of fashion and marketing more than a typical commuter's actual need for an SUV- that may sound elitist, but I'll happily admit that I respond to fashion and marketing too. Just not for SUVs).

They would have been foolish to waste money developing decent, small cars with lower margins, right? What fool would waste money developing and building a more expensive car with a lower profit margin for an increase in fuel economy that provides only a marginal payback?

Toyota, that's who.

So here we find the Big 3, continuing to lose market share each quarter (and now, it's a shrinking market). The cars they make are no longer what people want, because they didn't care to plan for the possibility of high fuel prices (high for whatever reason; doesn't really matter). The tragedy of this is that the quality of US carmakers is finally catching up to the Japanese, but they have the wrong product.

The only good news is that GM just might pull the Volt off (I really hope so), and that some of their small cars are pretty good- I've rented Cobalts a few times on business travel; they get 30+ mpg and drive pretty well (they don't have the spongy suspension and steering that I expect from budget GM vehicles).

Cutting down the last tree may let you make a fire so you can keep warm and cook a meal. But maybe only trimming a few branches, allowing the tree to live and reproduce would be a better long-term option. Lame analogy, but you get my point.

487 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions ... or almost 1 ton for a round-trip.

releasing 930 kg of greenhouse gases, or less than 2 tons for the round-trip

OK, maybe I'm a little dim, but isn't 487 kg about 1,000 lbs., or roughly half a ton? And isn't 930 kg about 1 ton (which, admittedly, is less than 2)?

What's going on with the conversions around here?

Also, I have a hard time with the train figures. This guy (http://strickland.ca/efficiency.html) has high-speed rail at 7-8x more efficient than flying...

At best he will be smart and cautious, plodding and middle-of-the-road.

That's pretty much what I'm hoping for. That and a few uplifting speeches.

I'm pretty sick of dumb and bold leadership (with crappy speeches).

Obama isn't a savior. Like all politicians, he has no shortage of BS.

But he's the best of the bunch right now, and I support him enthusiastically.

Well played. I wish I could mod you up.

I'm pretty sure King understands this.

You may notice that he uses a fairly facetious tone when discussing this topic.

Nevertheless, your explanation should clear things up for anyone who hadn't gotten the joke yet.

I generally like Lowenstein's writing (e.g. When Genius Failed, The Making of an American Capitalist), but I agree that this was a pretty lightweight article. Maybe he needs a few hundred pages to have room for nuance.

She loved the seal. Ah well...

I tried, for a long time, to like Carly Fiorina. She gave a nice commencement speech at MIT in 2000, and I really tried to give her the benefit of the doubt at HP.

But in the end, I find her to not be a very compelling figure- she really didn't do a good job at HP.

Even tough she's the heavy in the crowd, I think there are many other female business leaders that are much worthier than Ms. Fiorina. Meg Whitman come to mind, of course. And Anne M. Mulcahy has done a pretty good job in a transformed industry at Xerox.

Mike- I thought WWII covered us with France in exchange for bailing us out in the Rev. war. England still owes us, given that they burned down our freakin' White House in 1814.

Diogenes- Sometimes overblown is right, but totally overblown is not. There are 8,760 hours in a year, so every W of standby is 9kWh a year. Not a lot, but it adds up. An extra 100W of base load (conceivable, if you consider everything in a typical house- computer, TV, stereo, printer [my printer is my worst offender at over 20W!], cable box, cable modem, wireless router, cell phone chargers x3, coffee maker, stove clock, microwave clock, etc) would be 876 kWh, a not insignificant amount given that typical annual use for an American house is in the 10,000 kWh range. Cutting that amount in half or more may "only" be a 5% reduction, but scaled across a country, that's a significant # of power plants you don't need.