This is really a historian problem, not a science problem. India and Pakistan have a long and difficult backstory with regard to nationalist historiography: following the overthrow of the British empire, they quite understandably had a bit of anti-Western sentiment and a re-appreciation of indigenous history and culture. Unfortunately this translated into some pretty jingoistic "we created everything" hypernationalism, which was most prominent in the '60s and '70s, but continues today.

Case in point: I once wrote an essay in college on the science and math knowledge of the Indus Valley civilization circa 1800 BC. One of my sources claimed that these folks invented everything from relativity to calculus to quantum mechanics, but the best bit was an archaeologist who measured the ruins of a circular well, noticed that the ratio of its circumference to its diameter was about 3.1, and argued that this meant the Indus River folks knew the value of pi.

Nobody really needs to be free of malaria and polio either, but it is a pretty nice luxury.

Our goal for the future shouldn't be to get rid of everything we don't need to survive. Our goal should be to see how many of the awesome fruits of modern society we can keep around for the long haul. No, jet aircraft aren't *necessary*, but they make the world a better place in a ton of different ways, and their fossil footprint is small enough that we can afford to keep using them, if we make it a priority. And I think we should.

In our efforts to decarbonize our society, aircraft should be the last to go. There's no renewable technology that's likely to match what a passenger jet can do (try to design a battery-powered Airbus. You won't get far.) Also, the amount of carbon dioxide they emit is pretty minor, relatively speaking. I'm a pretty big global warming doomsayer, but even I want to live in a world where I can fly to the other side of the planet in 24 hours if I really have to.

I already mentioned multiple floors in my comments. If you're imagining something like the Burj Khalifa, imagine ONE THOUSAND of them side by side.
Or maybe you're prefer something wider and flatter, like the U.S. Pentagon building? No problem, just build EIGHT HUNDRED of those stacked on top of each other.

This is the world's largest building by floor area. 430 km^2 would be 400 of them.

Replying to my earlier post, I suppose it's possible some PR flack screwed up a unit conversion, and it's actually 430,000 square meters. Which is still a gigantic building you could never build for $194 million, but is significantly less ludicrous.

You can't build anything 430 square km in size for $194 million. Certainly not in central Moscow, because that's roughly the land area of *all* of Moscow. Even if you're just counting internal floor area and you build it 100 stories tall, it'd be the largest building in the world by floor area by a factor of 400, would be about the size of lower Manhattan, and be the largest building in the world by footprint by a factor of eight.

Post-soviet Russia has a long track record of announcing glorious plans for amazing science and technology and not doing them. Going by press releases, they've got what, six Mars missions underway right now? Occasionally Russia does something cool, but I say, give 'em credit for their achievements, not their plans, because 99% of their plans are just pipe dreams. Goes double if it's announced by RT.com.

"We're trying to get shopkeepers to install stronger windows", said the kid throwing bricks.

Guys, "lost revenue" is not the same as "loss". If I buy widgets for 99 cents and sell them for a buck, and my customers start buying fewer widgets, I'm not losing $1 for each widget they fail to buy from me, but that's exactly what the paper is suggesting.

Now, if my customers can make their own widgets and force me to buy them for $1 (as some states require utilities to do), I can claim that I'm losing money on that deal. But my losses are a penny a widget, not a buck.

Fossil fuels are cheap because their costs are externalized: the person buying the coal doesn't have to pay for the climate change. The obvious and correct solution is to internalize that cost, and put a heavy tax on carbon fuels.

My pet proposal is a carbon tax collected at the source: as the coal or oil or gas leaves the ground or enters the country. This extra cost would be passed along through the economy, raising the prices of things in proportion to the CO2 generated in making and using them. You can return the tax revenue to the people as a flat rebate, a reduced income tax rate, you can keep it to balance the budget, I don't care: run your donkey-and-elephant politics however you like, it's the environmental benefits of the strong tax disincentive that matter to me.

For the value of the tax, I propose a tax that gradually ramps up to effectively equal the current price of oil by the end of the century. This is steep enough to kill off coal power in under a decade, but otherwise would let us gradually transition to green technologies and minimize the economic shock to the economy.

One last thing: goods imported from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax should be charged an additional tarrif when imported, to compensate for their lower tax burden.

Many Slashdotters are free-market libertarians, and find taxes disgusting. I'm right there with you, but this is not a problem the market can solve on its own. But by taxing the problem, you allow the market to find an optimal solution for you, which is much more libertarian than allowing the government to pick and choose green solutions. If on the other hand you deny that there *is* a problem, that's a whole other conversation.

I like a data-driven blog post as much as the next guy -- probably more, actually -- but where's the data? I already know that leaving Boston on Tuesday is a bad idea. Give me a graph of hourly traffic volumes on the Mass Pike, and this post would be actually useful.

I'd be willing to bet it's intercity rail tickets + airline departures. So if you go from Shanghai to Chengdu by way of Wuhan and Chongquing, that's three passenger trips.

No doubt fiber is expensive, but what's the incremental cost to provide *cell* service? There's a reason many third-world countries are skipping wireline service altogether. Sure, a cell link can't compete with fiber for speed, but then neither can the satellite. The correct comparison is between satellite and cell, not fiber.

Nope, read up on the Iridium system, which already exists. You don't need satellite tracking, you can use an omnidirectional antenna to communicate with low earth orbit. You just need more power.

That said, Iridium ping times are horrible, but that's more a function of 1980s technology than the speed of light or information theory.

This suffers from the same problems that Iridium had:
* The people in the world with money to buy this already have good Internet access.
* The system doesn't work until it's global: you need to pay for the entire system before you get customers.

Land-based networks can build out a region at a time, starting in the wealthiest areas, creating paying customers who provide the capital for the next phase of expansion. Satellite systems are egalitarian, which sounds nice but is a problem: if you need 700 satellites to cover the globe but can only afford 350, you get global coverage that only works half the time, which nobody wants to pay for. And you have to set your asking price lower than what the poorest community that can't afford cell service can pay, which is a very low limbo bar to get under, and getting lower all the time.

Let me demonstrate the authors' "precautionary principle", which says that if an action has even a slight or unknowable risk of causing absolutely devastating harm, you shouldn't do it.

If I leave the house tomorrow morning, there is a chance I might get run over by a truck and killed -- as far as I'm concerned, that's the ultimate in devastating harm. In contrast, the benefits of me leaving the house on a given day (earning some money, keeping my job, seeing the sun) are modest. Therefore I should just stay in bed.

It's ridiculous, but that is *exactly* the argument they're using against GMOs.