Like all articles dealing with some aspect of environmental limits on consumption, the comments posted on this one show just how far we have fallen. I know most people in our country are too young to remember, but not that long ago most families had only one car. Interior temperatures well outside of our current comfort zone of 70-74F were the norm. We have gotten so physically lazy over the past 45 years that it is no wonder obesity is a major health problem (Britain's National Health Service is laying plans to deal with it as their single largest (ha ha) health problem).

We can enjoy a modern productive life without consuming like pigs. Can we ask ourselves which we love more, driving or our children? How about endless YouTube and 72F buildings or our grandchildren? The current climate change data leave very little doubt: we can take major steps to dramatically reduce the unsustainable aspects of our current lifestyles or we can kick the largest problem in human history down the road to our kids. Unfortunately, there may be very few options for them by the time they face up to what we have done.

Okay, I'm too old to remember the exact numbers and too lazy to go look them up, but in 2006 a right-wing economist for the British government named Stern published a report dealing with the economic costs associated with climate change. He concluded, using very conservative assumptions and now out of date data, that the cost of taking bold action to mitigate climate change is much less than the cost to the global economy of doing nothing. Since as the global economy goes so goes the U.S. economy, maybe we are a bit overdue to start doing something. Of course, if the Republicans want us to have a stone-age economy then their stance makes sense.

"...it will be very hard for a virtually unknown conservative to beat a moderate who also has the advantage of incumbency."

Who's the moderate referenced here? I thought we were talking about Specter.

If I was in an industry that has been shown to need to disappear, I sure would want to appear to be on the side of reform in order to avoid disappearing. Here's hoping President Obama is struck deaf to their pleas and starts supporting what most of America wants: first world single payer healthcare.

Now that we supposedly no longer torture people and are moving in the general direction of a nation of laws, maybe we can go all the way and join the civilized world. Since all first-world countries have single-payer health care for all, adopting it would be the signal that we have come in from the cold, dark place that thirty years of Reaganism put us.

"Questioning, at this point, the commitment of the Obama administration to tackling the challenge of climate change is just silly."

Obama's plans are demonstrably too moderate. We have maybe fifteen years to drop our GHG emissions by over 80%, not forty years to do 50%. This president clearly has a go-slow approach to reducing coal use and has no plans whatsoever to ditch the steel wheelchair driven transportation "system". In my city, where cars account for over half of all GHG emissions (northwest, lots of hydro), the city is spending twice as much money this year as its previous record on repaving surfaces for cars. No money is being spent for public transit, sidewalks, bike lanes and paths, traffic law enforcement, or any other aspect of transportation that does not involve surrounding oneself with tons of steel and terrorizing those who don't. Where did the extra money come from? Two guesses and the first one doesn't count.

Considering that there is an inelastic supply limit of around 92 million barrels of oil per day (a limit that will likely get lower in the future), our current dependence on cheap oil as an economic driver leaves us trapped. If the economy recovers, oil demand increases and, when demand approaches the supply limit, oil prices will explode and the economy will be pushed back. Perversely, oil producers have little incentive to increase supplies as prices rise since they will have a reasonable expectation that the future will bring still higher prices.

If we are going to get out of the oil trap, we need to find ways to manage our economy without using so much oil. Considering the immense quantities of oil wasted by Americans' choice to use cars as their only means of local transportation (and the fact that most of this driving does not contribute to our economy in any way other than to increase the value of my oil stocks), the answer is as obvious as the rather large deposits of adipose on an average American. Our economy is literally being driven into the ground.

Over thirty years after anthropogenic climate change became a solid hypothesis, fifteen years after it became a testable and tested model, ten years after it became irrefutable, we still have no regulations limiting the emissions of greenhouse gasses (except chlorofluorocarbons, but for a different reason). I know Obama has only been in office a few months, but for him to not hit the ground running on the most critical problem in human history is a bit disappointing.

I suppose it is up to those of us who would like our grandchildren to have a livable world to make it happen. If the millions of Americans who CLAIM to want something done about climate change would just stop heating their buildings over 60F and stop driving, things would happen. Unfortunately, right now people who take substantial steps to reduce their carbon footprints are scoffed at, ridiculed, and, in the case of bicyclists, attacked and killed. Let's give the President some political cover by being the change we say we want.