Chuck Gould wrote:

Anything burning less fuel than my boat (about 2 gph) is probably under
sail; but darned if I would assume some moral soap box to insist that
others conserve fuel that I am personally unwilling to conserve. Every
drop of fuel burned in a pleasure boat, every drop of fuel burned in a
motor vehicle for a pleasure trip, and nearly every drop of fuel burned
in any private passenger vehicle larger or more comfortable than a
Mini-Cooper is a discretionary waste.
Show me the guy who uses nothing but solar or wind energy, walks, bikes
or rows everywhere he goes, eats no commercially grown, processed, or
transported food, buys nothing made of plastic or imported from a
country with few meaningful environmental laws (China), and that will
be the guy who has earned the right to tell the rest of us we need to
change our living standards to forestall global warming.

That's an interesting view. According to you, one has to have a
completely clean record to be able to expect anything from others.

Personally I think one can set an example with any little action - it
may not be much but already that gains some high ground - then one can
say, OK I gave up my SUV but you still have yours and continue to
endanger our common environment, how come? Of course, the more you give
up the more leverage you have... It looks like the carbon trading
scheme is based on a similar frame of mind: give up a little (money or
carbon credits), gain a little, give up a lot and gain a lot.

There are few people who actually demand that we go to zero carbon
emissions. That might result in a good and enjoyable life style, but,
you're going to have a bit of a work to convince modern people about
that, and hopefully, it's not really necessary in anyway, or at least
it looks like that in the face of current knowledge.

It's a tradeoff of risk, cost and values. You can pay a bit now and
avoid most of the risk, provided that you have worked through the
political inertia of creating a system of effective payments. Or you
can wait and lose much more money later on, besides natural values that
can be hard to estimate financially. (How much does it cost to replace
an extinct species?) Even with a consensus on a human-induced global
warming, it is very difficult to tell how soon and how strong the
effects will come. But in the end, one could view global warming as a
purely economic risk calculation.

There's a chance that we're no more than a generation or two from the
next Dark Age.
When radiation poisoning, famine, warfare, and disease reduce the
population to a small fraction of what it is today, the survivors will

From the PoV of the ecosystem, we are living in a Dark Age, sometimes
called the holocene extinction event as well. You can read that on
about a half of the global land area the original ecosystem has been
replaced by monoculture, a far cry from biodiversity. Likewise almost a
half of all biomass is either humans or used to feed humans (not sure
if they count the oceans in that though...).

(But if you own a boat, you have no creds in the "global warming"
discussion)

So it's a moral discussion, not a scientific one?

Risto