The value is unaffected by finance. If it's a good idea, how you finance it does not matter. Fear of debt should not be used as a reason not to finance a good idea.

By US law, the Fed returns its profits to the Treasury every year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01...

The point is, he uses less than he could. Harm reduction.

Arizona, southern California set record highs over the same winter. Nebraska has had a multi-year drought. So your local weather has been canceled out in the averaging.

You're pulling those figures out of your lower orifice.

Besides being a carbon sink, trees also scrub pollution and hold groundwater, working to prevent landslides.

"Although forests do release some CO2 from natural processes such as decay and respiration, a healthy forest typically stores carbon at a greater rate than it releases carbon."

http://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/47...

I think you're wrong:

"To grow a pound of wood, a tree uses 1.47 pounds of carbon dioxide and gives off 1.07 pounds of oxygen. An acre of trees might grow 4,000 pounds of wood in a year, using 5,880 pounds of carbon dioxide and giving off 4,280 pounds of oxygen in the process."

http://www.forestecologynetwor...

Let's go to Mars. The technology is available, only the will is lacking.

The stock market will keep going up in the long term, right? What it does tomorrow doesn't affect the long-term trend.

So does the US. The Constitution gives the government the power to coin money. The Fed gives the government zero cost borrowing. The Modigliani-Miller theorem of finance shows that how you finance a good idea doesn't matter. If climate engineering is a good idea, we can finance it.

Finance should never be used as an excuse not to carry out a good idea.

How much compared to the Koch brothers' houses?

I've watched Voyager too. I challenge you to cite sources about the scarce resource aspect.

The characters don't ever talk about the holodeck or replicators as being a scarce resource. They don't think in terms of scarcity. It's a post-scarcity society. Any scarcity is being imposed by your brain, not by the script-writers.

Also should have probably added that "the universe was expanding" at an accelerating pace.

Correcting the last sentence:

It wasn't until later work (by Schmidt, for example) provided solid observational evidence (which hadn't been available before, because the telescopes weren't big enough, and theories hadn't been developed as to why supernovae explosions differed in the length of their explosions), that a coherent theory was presented.

The way Schmidt explains it, is that new technology and ideas about supernovae permitted him (and others) to measure distances and redshifts farther and in greater number than before. It was those additional observations of farther-away objects that hadn't been detected before that led to the discovery that the universe was expanding.

The other instructor in the class, Paul Francis, described his work in the early 1990s determining the age of far-away galaxies, which appeared to be older than the Big Bang. He said that the results appeared stupid at the time, and there was no serious theory to deal with the discrepancies. It wasn't until later work (by Schmidt, for example) provided solid observational evidence (which hadn't been available before, because the telescopes weren't big enough, and the knowledge of why supernovae explosions differed in the length of their explosions, that a coherent theory was presented.