An obvious one is small scale experiments on oceanic plants, possibly engineered, that could sequester carbon dioxide. For example, the ideal plant would be a carbon-fixing plant that has relatively small iron and phosphorus needs and sinks once it dies. You could drop a lot of carbon into the bottom of the ocean fast with a plant like that. And if it's a huge monoculture, then eventually something will figure out how to eat it.

Or nonexistent. Of course, I don't see a problem that needs fixing either.

The latest IPCC report widened the range on the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of carbon dioxide. It also backpedaled on the previous reports assertions about current and future effect of AGW on extreme weather.

It means they're solving a harder problem.

Your links show predictions with large error bars. So no, they aren't very good at predicting.

Facts trump propaganda. Those links don't explain why there is a factor of three uncertainty in the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere or why actual climate change is coming in at the bottom of their predictions.

The problem here is that there are obvious problems with monkeying around with the world's energy infrastructure. So this is a standard engineering approach to see if we can preserve that energy infrastructure without incurring huge risks. Right now, it does appear that doing nothing is a better choice than 80% reduction in CO2 emissions.

Urban environments were never the way things were. We can reduce their albedo to be lower than the natural terrain that preceded the cities. Similarly, there have always been some degree of natural coal fires. We can have less coal fires than were originally present.

I'll buy that. But I think it's worth noting here that all of our choices are geoengineering choices, including emission reduction and doing nothing. I find it a dubious argument to heavily favor one approach and then rule out a whole category of other strategies on the basis that we don't know enough to implement them. That should be a warning that we don't know enough to implement any of them.

Also there's some low-lying geoengineering fruit such as albedo changes in urban environments in hot locations which is a considerable part of the world, reforestation, and putting out large coal bed fires.

Obviously, I don't see it that way. My ultimate point here is that we can do a lot to change what we perceive as innate value. Gold, for example, has long been a store of value, namely, that it has a perceived innate value and some physical properties that make it a nice thing for this purpose. Originally, it was because it looked pretty and was easy for bronze age people to make and handle. Now, it has a bunch of other industrial uses propping up its "innate" value.

And currencies can have value beyond their utility in everyday trade. For example, the US government and its subordinate governments accept only US dollars for tax payments and many other transactions.

While Bitcoin might not have a utility past its use as a currency, there is no reason we couldn't make a currency, using the Bitcoin model, which does. The key reason is that Bitcoin depends on computation to validate currency creation and transactions. Those computations are inherently useless outside of their derived value from Bitcoin transactions.

That needs not be the case. We could make a system where every unit of currency created and every transaction done happens to be done via a measurable unit of useful computation (say it tests a number of possible protein configurations or some other computationally intensive, readily parallelizable problem). Then in addition to the currency's value as medium of exchange, there would be add on value from those computations as well.

I have to agree with tmosley, there isn't much distinction to be made between "policies" and "tools of politics". What you're observing is that certain policies, which centralize power are popular with all members of the political oligarchy.

No, I think a better argument here is that these two parties have plenty of incentive to keep the status quo as is and to create and harden divisions of all sorts. For example, a single issue voter who always will vote for the pro-choice or the pro-life candidate is a safe voter. You can get away with quite a bit and you will always have that voter in your pocket because they will never vote for the other side (the well known "lesser of two evils" effect). The worst that will happen is that the voter won't vote at all.

But it's not quite a single party because of the voters who aren't so compromised. Voters who go for the person with the better deal create a bit of competition.

There's no such thing as innate value. Food doesn't have value, if there's no one to eat it. People don't have value, if they're just another mouth to feed, breeding more mouths to feed.

Inflation tends to nail both labor and capital. Resources and materials hold their value, but wages don't track inflation. And capital gains tax is a problem for capital.

Regulations aren't taxes because for the most part the state isn't getting revenue from the regulation. There are ways to turn such things into an effective tax such as US police departments generating funding via civil forfeiture laws, but it's not the default state of regulation.

I agree.

Yes, it does Mark.