MIght be a good question to ask the Roman emperors, the French and English Kings and Queens. They seemed to have managed to leave a legacy without electricity. Besides, its not as if the only way one can generate electricity is by burning coal. In fact, solar and wind are proving progressively more and more competitive by the day and will likely be cheaper within 5 years time, which is one of the reasons Stanford is smart to get out while the price of their shares still has some value and they can get in on the ground floor of emerging alternative energy companies.

No need to nationalize these industries. Alternative energy and natural gas are putting them out of business soon anyway. Stanford just doesn't want clunkers draining their portfolios going forward. Its not as if global warming isn't actually occurring.

One can only imagine buggy whip and slide rule salesmen had the same sentiments as you express. How dare they divest from our anachronistic products. Stanford is simply wise to be the first institution out before the stock prices tank.

They live on the interest and capital gains. Think about it.

Stanford is simply selling coal stocks while they are high and moving into alternative energies, which are on their way up. From an investment point of view this is a no brainer.

By selling Stanford will put downward pressure on the stock of coal companies, which means they have less capital against which to borrow and pay executives their stock options. It will take more and more stock options to keep the insiders happy, which will put further pressure on the stocks as other stockholders recognized they are soon to be the last guy out and the one holding the bag. If owned stock in a coal company, I would be selling as quickly as possible and moving into solar, wind and other renewables, since these will be the growth industries of the future, while fossil fuels will be creating more and more pollution and health problems for more and more people, leading to more litigation, more calls for regulation and less profits, especially as the world grows hotter and hotter and the 99% figure out they are being stuck with the tab. Its bad enough that oil companies have been raising prices recently to fund lobbying and campaigning for their favorite republican candidates. As fracking leads to more earthquakes and health and water issues, expect to see the profits in the fossil fuels sectors decline as those in the alternative energy industries rise as new technologies power increase efficiencies and growing public acceptance. It will only take one El Nino to drive this point home to all but those most deeply in denial.

To the contrary, Stanford is simply astute enough to be the first to sell, while the price of companies involved in coal are still high. Its now just a trickle, but soon it will be a flood. The smart ones always get out first. The rest won't be able to afford not to and will begin to sell as their portfolios in these companies as they decrease in value. With new solar technologies capable of energy capture at up to 70% likely to start hitting the market within 5 years and wind energy becoming cheaper and cheaper and the electric car industry just around the corner, fossil fuel dinosaurs will be returning once again to the depths. Only those locked in will ride coal and ultimately fossil fuels all the way to the bottom.

The energy barons of the future will be those that invested in renewables first. Its inevitable and of course, the reason that China is now spending 3 times more on solar ($147 billion in 2011) than the US ($52 billion in 2011). No one can say the Chinese don't know how to grow their economy, which will be the world's largest this year, if it isn't already.

Never too late to change that. We need to start organizing the "little people" rather than reflexively bending over every time a CEO wants a raise.

Never too late to change that. We need to start thinking about organizing the "little people", rather than reflexively bending over anytime a corporate CEO wants a raise.

One might pretend that the chunk missing from the rock on one side looks like the Gulf of Carpentaria, but there is no corresponding Great Australian Bight on the other side.

This article only provides evidence of possibly three things: 1) to many in the media and general public are geographically challenged or 2) the Mars Rover Mission is desperate to find a handle on maintaining public interest and relevance or 3) Slahdot has once again found yet another way for slashdoters to waste their time by entertaining themselves with nonsense and to make itself even less relevant as a site informative with regard to technology and science. A more informative piece would have involved a discussion with some experts on Martian geology suggesting what the shape of Martian rocks tells us about the red planet that we don't already know.

You confuse scientific evidence with opinion. There is NO scientific evidence that suggests that it is anything other than human activity resulting from the burning of fossil fuels that is the cause of the observed warming. If that were not so, then those who deny its getting warmer wouldn't be so reluctant to explain how it is that, if the world isn't getting any warmer, all of the world's glaciers and icesheets are melting faster than at any time in recorded geological history.

There are lots of very good scientific reasons to be concerned about GMO's creating artificial environments that can rapidly alter the rest of the natural world. There is abundant evidence for concern with many GMO crops already.

Safe for who? Those who benefit from company profits or those whose survival depends on an environment that has up until now sustained humanity because we haven't generated enough artificial selection to as yet noticeable muck it up?

What we need is a census for redistricting purposes every 5 years, not every 10. The modern world is simply moving too fast for a 10 year rule to keep us competitive with other nations. This would make gerrymandering less advantageous and hence less of a problem. This also makes sense from an economic perspective as well, since the population is so much larger now and its impacts on ecosystems that sustain it larger and of more consequence now.

Better yet, lets start insisting that all politicians pass scientific literacy tests, if for no other reason than amusement.

If teachers are going to be held accountable, why not politicians?