Your question presumes that both sides are equally bull-headed. The truth is, they aren't. The Democrats have made at least an effort at bipartisanship. The Republicans think "bipartisan" means "Democrats vote for the Republican agenda, no questions asked." Just look at the way Republicans use filibusters these days. They're breaking all the records.

More examples:

* Obama's health care reform plan got zero Republican votes, despite the fact that it was just "Romneycare on the federal level," was originally proposed by The Heritage Foundation, and bears a strong resemblance to the Republican alternative to Clinton's health care proposal.
* Obama wasted months and months during the same health care debate, waiting for negotiations with Senate Republicans. In the end, they had to do it without Republican votes. Arguably the Republicans weren't even negotiating in good faith, but were simply trying to run out the clock.
* During the (Republican-manufactured) debt ceiling crisis, Obama went to the table with a proposal that included $4 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. That was a great deal for Republicans. It would have greatly reduced the deficit and shrunk the size of government, two things the Republican Party supposedly favors. But they stonewalled. Not one penny in tax increases, they said. Republican unwillingness to compromise was directly responsible for America's credit downgrade.
* When Obama was trying to get the Stimulus passed, he tried to court Republican votes by 1) shrinking the size of the plan from $1T to $700B, and 2) loading up the plan with tax cuts for individuals and small businesses. He did so even though his economic advisors were warning that tax cuts wouldn't have as much of a stimulus effect as more direct forms of spending. Long story short: his compromises made the plan worse, and nonetheless attracted no Republican votes.
* The Dodd-Frank bill, a half-hearted attempt to rein in the excesses of Wall Street that caused the financial crisis? Got four Republican votes in the Senate, zero in the House. And if you think that the Republicans were holding out for something stronger, or more effective, or that really stuck it to the banks, you're entirely kidding yourself. They fought like hell to weaken every single provision, then to deny the new consumer protection agency funding, then to deny it a director. The Republicans absolutely cannot compromise on this bedrock principle: the wealthy should be able to do whatever they want.

By "two years" you actually mean "six months." Senator Al Franken's election was disputed until July 2009, giving the Democrats vote #60 (if you count Joe Lieberman, which I don't). Senator Ted Kennedy died two months later, and when Scott Brown took over in January 2010, it gave the Republicans 41 votes, the number needed to keep a filibuster going.

Also, there's no filibuster in the House of Representatives.

Also, senators don't have to vote along party lines, or even be members of a political party. Even a filibuster-proof majority doesn't ensure that the President will always be able to get whatever he wants done. Obama made a concerted effort to get Gitmo closed, and bring the prisoners back to U.S. soil for trial. But cowardly idiots from both sides of the aisle warned that doing so would lead to terror attacks inside the U.S. Too many Democrats chose to demagogue rather than risk being labeled "soft on terror."

And what was Obama doing instead? Fulfilling other campaign promises. Overhauling health care. Economic stimulus. Supreme Court appointments. Regulating the financial sector (over the mad howlings of Republicans, who even today are promising a "repeal and replace", minus the part where they actually replace). Expand CHIP, ensuring that kids get health care. Clean energy. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Singlehandedly snuck into Pakistan, put a bullet in Osama bin Laden's head, then lit a cigarette and said, "Don't fuck with America." *

Sorry, but the people who ask why Obama hasn't gotten more done seem to imagine that presidents hold Rasputin-like sway over Congress. I blame the Republicans for filibustering, the Democrats for not pushing harder against the filibuster, Connecticut for electing Joe Lieberman, and Republicans (again) for being utterly amoral and unwilling to compromise with either the Democrats or reality in general.

* I've heard there's evidence to disprove this account of events, but it's all hidden in Mitt Romney's 2005 tax returns.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

--John Donne

By that reasoning (which I'd only slightly dispute), the massacre in Iraq began long before we invaded. The sanctions on Iraq were undermining its infrastructure since 1990.

Which is something I think about every time Obama brags about how tough the sanctions against Iran are, and every time Romney brags about how much tougher he'd make them. The whole point of sanctions is to make life under the sanctioned government so awful that they have to either do what we tell them or risk open revolt by the common folk of the country. In other words, they use the suffering of the masses as a political weapon.

Something ain't right there.

Translation: You're mad that the ARRA actually built things, rather than just handing out money to a handful of lucky Americans.

Sure, we could have just bought 2.4M spoons, and had every new "worker" go out, find an empty plot of ground, and spend their hours digging holes and filling them back in.

But if you want to actually build stuff, you gotta buy some actual backhoes. You've got to buy cement, and lumber, and steel, and nails, and wiring. The value of the things that actually got built by those jobs has to be accounted for.

And let's not forget that $288B of the ARRA's price tag actually did exactly what you're suggesting: handed money back to people in the form of tax credits. This was Obama trying to make the bill "bipartisan", giving the Republicans some of what they said they wanted. Result? Zero Republican votes in the House, two-and-a-half in the Senate.*

Obama's own economists told him that these tax breaks would have little stimulus effect, but the Republicans demanded that they be included in a bill that they had no intention of voting for anyhow.

There's also a lot of other "just give money to people" provisions, like unemployment benefits, food stamps, WIC, TANF, etc. These transfer programs incur very low overhead. There's $80B in direct giveaways under "aid to low-income workers, unemployed, and retirees," the aforementioned $288B given away in tax credits, and a couple of other nickely-dimey programs that amount to handing deficit money to people in the hopes that they spend it.

Given that the ARRA basically followed your source's "hand out money" plan for about half its budget, by The Weekly Standard's reasoning, the other $400B spent on scientific research, weatherizing buildings, energy efficiency, upgrading the electrical grid, building roads, and a laundry list of other things... all that may as well have been flushed down the toilet.

The point is, the ARRA did so much more than just put people to work. It invested in scientific research, improved the energy efficiency of homes and businesses, modernized health care records and information services, sent young men and women to college, and a bunch of other things that will pay long-term dividends.

* I'm counting Arlen Specter's vote as half a vote, because he switched to the Democratic party a few months later.

RELEASE THE MORLOCKS!

I will totally donate $100 to the Kickstarter for this one.

Define "should be." Most users are never going to download an extension and install it themselves. There's even risk of shipping it with a bunch of extensions included and enabled, as somebody will go in and disable them by mistake.

Now, if those default extensions were only disablable from about:config, then maybe we'd be talking.

But if we have no way to distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones, how do you know that good CEOs are rare?

I'd also point out that, while the supply of good CEOs may be small, so is the demand. I mean, c'mon, how many Fortune 500 companies are there?

My suspicion is that, once you eliminate the most obvious ways to run a company badly, it's all a big crap shoot. I mean this in the same way that you don't see heavily managed investment funds outperforming index funds over the long haul. So it's not clear what value is being added.

You're wrong. Preaching abstinence is great... for making yourself feel morally superior to all those knocked-up sluts.

For preventing pregnancy, not so much.

By analogy, if we cleaned the mercury from the city's water supply, people would be liable to drink more water, resulting in greater exposure to mercury.

Me, I never asked to be in the gene pool in the first place. And I've noticed that the gene pool is already seven billion strong. I understand why my genes might want to stay in the gene pool, but guess what? I'm not my genes. I'm just this contraption the genes built, in the hopes that I might fulfill their vision. Well, they dun goofed, and I'll choose my priorities for myself, thankyouverymuch.

>> "I remain similarly unimpressed by the blind stereotypes you put out. Human existence is far more, and I repeat this, far more important to me than the existence of a certain number of species that are specialized to a very particular environment and can barely hold on."

Well, yes, it's obvious where your priorities are. And if it were a question of "our survival or theirs", I'd choose ours. But that isn't the choice we face, not by a long shot. The choice is actually between "their survival" and "our making a few mildly inconvenient changes to the way we do things." So again, yes, I consider your attitude pathologically selfish.

>> "Further, the people who complain about mass extinctions are very capable, just on their own, of moving species around so that the plant or slow animal that can only tolerate certain conditions can live a little distance away where those conditions still exist."

So, I'm supposed to devote my life to tranquilizing and capturing woodland creatures so as not to trample on your inalienable right to use incandescent light bulbs and to pay 5c/kWH for the electricity to power them? Please explain to me why I should have to clean up your messes for you. Why is it fair that I should pay to prevent the damage that your choices inflict on the broader ecosystem?

Introducing a species into a new environment isn't a quick or simple process. The way you're describing it reeks of scientific ignorance of the "I don't understand it so it can't possibly be hard" variety. Did you know that reintroducing wolves to the Yellowstone area cost $200K-$1M per wolf? And we're supposed to transplant every single plant or animal in the entire ecosystem a few hundred miles north, so that you don't have to insulate your house? I don't know whether I'm more in shock of your ignorance or your laziness.

>> "A lot of this sounds like "coming to the nuisance" where the externality is created because someone built near an existing coal mine."

A couple of points here: California's air quality is made significantly worse by coal burned in China. So where exactly were these people supposed to move to avoid the burden of being "near" a coal mine? Iceland?

In the same vein, during the summer, half of Maryland's ozone pollution comes from out of state sources. This line of reasoning ignores just how difficult it is to avoid the pollution of others.

But even if we assumed that the coal plant was there first, why does that make it reasonable to pin the costs on the person moving in? Say I have a thousand acres of land that I'm considering putting residential housing on. But it's downwind from a coal plant. By operating the way they do, say that every person who moves into my planned neighborhood incurs $500/year in medical/cleaning/bottled water/whatever costs. As a landowner, my land is therefore less valuable than it otherwise would be. The coal mine is making my land less valuable.

Or, to put it another way, if your house is adjacent to my empty lot, and your dog craps on said empty lot, when I decide to build a house you don't have an easement for your dog to crap on my lawn.

Regardless of who ultimately pays the costs, shouldn't these costs be subtracted from the economic benefits of "cheap, abundant coal (TM)"?

"A similar situation occurs with the cost of monitoring. This cost should be borne by the party that wants the monitoring, namely, the taxpayer. I don't even consider that an externality since it is not a cost imposed by fossil fuel burning, but by politicians and bureaucrats allegedly acting on behaft of the public."

That makes perfect sense, in some make believe world where the stuff coming out of the smokestacks smells like fresh pine and cannot be linked to any negative human or environmental effects. In the real world, those who do the damage (and profit mightily from doing that damage) should be responsible for mitigating that damage.

Of course, you believe none of this. Since you believe in the free market, and you seem to believe that we have a free market, it's hard to imagine trillions worth of lucrative investments just being ignored by the markets.

Apparently not hard for you.

Well excuse me for trying to engage with a potential objection.

Are you even glancing at the links I've been providing? The list of misaligned incentives alone should be enough to convince you that there are at least a handful of opportunities for wringing CO2 from the economy at a net profit.

I would think that the Empire State Building case study would get you thinking. I guess not. Did you think, "There must be something unique and weird about the Empire State Building to make that sort of ROI possible?" Because opportunities for lucrative energy efficiency investments like this exist within pretty much every structure, every appliance, every vehicle on the planet. Is your free market ideology so immune to evidence that you deny the existence of the $20 bill on the ground in front of you?

When I write the sentence, "in this project, carbon emissions were cut at a net profit to the economy," do any synapses fire? Explain to me, very carefully, what you conclude from the case study.

>> "I don't buy it. This anti-science crap has to stop and here is a good place to start."

Says the guy who has no training in climate science, hasn't made a single argument against the actual science, and defers to the expertise of a college-dropout-turned-weatherman-turned-blogger rather than people who are active and publishing within the field.

>> "I find the comparison of evolution to anthropogenic global warming a good analogy. Evolution didn't become the dominant explanation for biological diversity and hereditary traits through the playing of political games, an insistence on consensus, or developing a complex, opaque theory that couldn't be understood or checked by the layman. Nor did it become standard theory by changing the name to hide what it was about."

Sorry, but anthropogenic global warming is the dominant explanation. The fact that the media and the public is still arguing over what the scientific establishment considers settled says nothing about the science. The public doesn't accept evolution, and a number of individual scientists also consider evolution unsettled. So, according to your criteria, evolution hasn't yet achieved scientific legitimacy.

As for the name change, you clearly think that there was something nefarious going on. I don't see why, unless you're one of those deniers who actually believes that global warming stopped in 1998 and the name change was a clumsy attempt to cover up this made-up fact. As far as I'm concerned, both names are valid, but "global warming" better describes the cause, and "climate change" better describes the effect.

>> "Exceptional claims require exception evidence. If you're going to claim that we should radically change our society to protect against a threat far in the future, you need to back that claim up with exceptional evidence. That's just how it should work."

I don't think the changes needed to halt climate change are particularly radical. Solar isn't as expensive as you claim, and is getting cheaper every year. Energy efficiency is a cheap and abundant source of clean energy, and harvesting it will actually improve our standards of living. Coal is far more expensive than your electric bill indicates, and every step we take to wean ourselves off it benefits to our economy. In short, we can make a huge dent in the problem without demanding major sacrifices to our bloated consumerist culture. So by your reasoning, my burden of proof is lowered significantly.

You know what I think is radical? Thinking that we can pour trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, with no consequences whatsoever!

As for your demand for evidence, it's the easiest -- and most useless -- thing in the world to sit back, demand evidence, ignore the evidence presented, demand more, and then call the evidence "unexceptional." The evidence is out there, but I can't read and comprehend it for you. Tell you what: read the How to talk to a climate skeptic series, starting with whichever article titles make you nod in self-satisfaction. If you find big holes in their reasoning, then show me the specifics.

But I'm not going to regurgitate easily available material for you.

"I'd say 10C is more the limit and I'm probably setting it a bit low."

Well, I'm reassured. Tell me, do you have any reason for believing that number, rather than the numbers being given by people who actually study the issue?

"Remember that most of the current and forecast warming is in the upper northern hemisphere which doesn't have a lot of biological diversity (both because of the arduous environment and because most of it used to be ice-covered ten thousand years ago). Also, your "mass extinctions" do not include humans or species we depend on."

So you don't care about mass extinctions, as long as it doesn't directly lead to human extinction? Wow. I'm constantly impressed by the selfishness of global warming deniers like you. Do you care about anything beyond your immediate personal comfort? Screw other people, screw other species, screw other generations, screw the people downwind and downriver from the coal plants, because I think light from CFLs looks a little weird.

You think climate is unpredictable? Well, take a look at the whole frakking ecosystem, where millions of species living in tense, fluctuating equilibrium with all the others, each with very specific habitat requirements. Do you really think we have a shot in hell at fixing it once it's broken? Do you really think we can choose where the dominos stop falling? Do you really prefer testing the limits of evolution's adaptability in order to avoid "crippling the economy" by ratcheting growth back by 8% over a couple of decades?

In short, are you completely, suicidally insane? Somehow I doubt that. And yet the path you're proposing sounds that way.

"So what is it? Is solar going to vastly reduce costs or not? If it does, then the whole argument about reducing carbon dioxide emissions can be tossed. Because it will happen anyway as solar replaces fossil fuel burning for more and more applications."

I believe it will happen eventually. There are only two questions in my mind:

1) Whether we'll be buying solar panels from China, or China will be buying solar panels from us. Judging by what's happened to American solar companies this last year, I fully expect the former.

2) Whether the transition will happen soon enough or completely enough to make a difference. There is a lot we could do to accelerate the trend, but frankly you typify the sort of attitudes that could delay it for crucial decades.

We're already well above the 350ppm "safe zone", and 2011 was the biggest year ever for CO2 emissions. The transition needs to happen a lot faster than the free market will support. Consider that the capital investments in coal are for the most part already paid off, and the oldest plants aren't even compliant with 1970's era air quality standards (they were grandfathered in under the misguided assumption that they'd be shut down soon).

It's also got an uphill battle because coal is more expensive than your power bill would indicate. By hundreds of billions of dollars.

Here's what the study included: "government coal subsidies, increased illness and mortality due to mining pollution, climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, particulates causing air pollution, loss of biodiversity, cost to taxpayers of environmental monitoring and cleanup, decreased property values, infrastructure damages from mudslides resulting from mountaintop removal, infrastructure damage from mine blasting, impacts of acid rain resulting from coal combustion byproducts, water pollution." All this must be paid for, but none of these costs are charged back to the electricity users.

Force coal companies to pay the full costs of their product, and solar would be cost-competitive right now.

We could also accelerate the changeover by increasing funding for research in alternative energies. For example, home solar would be much cheaper if we could get the price of the non-panel parts down (batteries, grid tie in, regulators, etc.). There's a DOE project working on that right now, but it doesn't have all the funding it needs. What's standing in the way of more funding? People like you who object to the government doing pretty much anything, and who claim despite mountains of evidence that solar and other alternative energies will never be cost-competitive. Oh, and using doomsday rhetoric about "crippling the economy" to justify the status quo doesn't help matters.

"There are plenty of ways we can reduce energy consumption, but so what? No one has demonstrated a need to do so. Energy cost is cheap which means right there, that there's no reason to waste a lot of effort conserving energy."

So, you don't want $4M a year? You keep structuring your arguments to imply that large reductions in CO2 would negatively impact national wealth. It would not. Especially in the first 25-50% or so, cutting emissions would save us money. There are literally trillions of dollars worth of energy efficiency projects that we could start right now, that would result in positive long-term growth, practically risk free.

The energy you don't use is far cheaper than the energy you get from your utility companies.

As I said before, fossil energy is artificially cheap right now. Take the subsidies we're now giving to fossil fuel companies (including the de facto subsidy of not charging them for the pollution that we don't regulate) and put it into energy efficiency projects, and it would create a small economic renaissance. Require all new buildings to attain something comparable to LEED Silver certification, and the small addition to the mortgage will be more than offset by long-term savings on their energy bills. Raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks (as has just been done) and save consumers hundreds of billions a year, money that can go somewhere other than the gas tank.

Of course, you believe none of this. Since you believe in the free market, and you seem to believe that we have a free market, it's hard to imagine trillions worth of lucrative investments just being ignored by the markets.

From the first paragraph of the link: There is an old joke in which two economists are walking down the street when one of them spies a $20 bill lying on the ground. He says to his friend, “Hey, there’s a $20 bill on the ground!” To which the other economist replies, “That’s impossible. If there were a $20 bill on the ground, someone would have already picked it up.”

Markets aren't perfect, and even a small increase in energy costs could make these energy-saving opportunities much more stark. Which is why I don't think that the Republican "drill baby drill" plan makes any sense. It just means we're using a finite resource more quickly and less efficiently, to an ultimately smaller economic effect.

First, the IPCC is actually a very conservative document. The sea level predictions ignore the possibility of large-scale ice shedding from Greenland or Antarctica. The temperature predictions ignore a lot of uncertain-but-very-scary feedback mechanisms, like the potential for mass methane releases from the Antarctic. In short, it ignores a lot of potential trouble spots where the science isn't settled.

The IPCC does not predict "a couple of degrees," in the sense that 2.0C is the upper boundary. That's about a midline case. The upper predictions (which may themselves be inadequate to describe the situation) range from 4C to 6C, depending on the scenario. 2C is probably the very upper reaches of what the ecosystem can handle without large-scale extinctions, so yeah, "we're fucked" is a pretty apt turn of phrase.

>> "Humans are only responsible for a small fraction of the CO2 going into the atmosphere."

That's true. But we're responsible for basically all of the change in CO2 concentrations over the last hundred years. Before we started burning fossil fuels in earnest, the Carbon Cycle was essentially in equilibrium. Once we started pushing CO2 into the atmosphere, the equilibrium changed, and CO2 concentrations went higher. We now see the higher concentrations in the warming atmosphere and in the oceans, where it increases acidity and ruins fragile underwater ecosystems.

>> "America is only responsible for a fraction of that (on track for 1-10% by 2050)"

But currently closer to 25%. And where the hell do you get 1% from? I can't see 1% happening unless Dennis Kucinich wins the next ten presidential elections.

Never mind. No country can make a huge difference alone. But just about every other country in the world seems to be taking better responsibility for their emissions than we are. We keep using China as an excuse for ignoring our own responsibilities, even though they only emit about a quarter what we do on a per-capita basis.

>> "We also know that with current technology, alternative energy sources are something like 2-3x as expensive as what we're using and doubling energy costs would completely cripple our economy which is heavily dependent on mechanisation."

Talk about providing me with a target-rich environment.

First, we only spend about 8% of GDP purchasing energy. So if we did indeed double our energy costs, we would lose about 8% GDP. Leaving us essentially as well off as we were in 2005. You call that "crippling the economy?"

Second, your projections assume that alternative energy technology will remain at its current cost. That simply will not happen. The cost of photovoltaics has been dropping by 50% every six years pretty much since the things were invented. It's a veritable Moore's Law of solar power, and it hasn't shown any sign of slowing. So within ten years, it's very likely that the cheapest way to add new energy to the grid will be with solar power. Within twenty years? It's a certainty.*

Third and most important, we could be spending a lot less on energy without significantly impacting our quality of life. Right now, the cheapest form of energy isn't coal or natural gas: it's energy efficiency. There are so many ways to reduce our CO2 footprint at a profit that it is absurd to be talking about CO2 reductions "crippling the economy" until all that money we're flushing down the proverbial toilet is reclaimed. For example, the $20M they sunk into an energy retrofit of the Empire State Building is yielding up $4M/year in dividends.

* Barring fusion/vacuum energy/other energy source that doesn't exist yet.