Was the water wet?

You aren't arguing what you think you're arguing. There's no reason that performing work means that the work can't be useful in its own right.

I think this is the core question. The answer is that these problems happen all the time. For example, there's a large category of perceived problems which aren't actual problems. For example, your claim that power companies don't "add value" when in the next sentence you state exactly the value they provide - power that _everyone_ wants. Since they are actually adding considerable value, the difficult problem of the valueless power companies is easily adverted by not having existed in the first place.

Second, there are the very difficult problems that aren't your problems. I find letting people work their difficult problems out on their own is the best solution here. Among other things, it's an educational experience that allows people to solve other difficult problems they face over the course of their lives.

`Then there's the difficult problem that one makes works by messing with it. For example:

In other words, the Socialist takes their one tool in the box and whacks on the problem happily. Then when the problem results in more problems (such as your DMV example where the supposed "anti-gov't types" fail to behave according to script), there's more targets to whack on. The top-down strategy common to socialism results in all sorts of problems due to both the ignorance and venality of the policy makers as well as the crude nature of the tools.

There is a standard destructive spiral that socialism gets in. First, they create a public good. Then when the rest of the world behaves in a way as to overconsume the public good, the standard tragedy of the commons phenomenon, then a bureaucracy is set up to regulate the consumption of the public good and starts doing its own thing. Then the cycle repeats, this time with a sliver of the society trapped in this bit of waste. This is exactly a place where relatively free markets excel.

Finally, there is the continued contradiction of growing an ever more complex, opaque, powerful, and unaccountable government while saying "Sure, you have to keep an eye on things". No, you aren't keeping an eye on things. You are growing one of the largest problems of societies, known since we first had civilizations. You don't have to "keep an eye" on markets like you do on bureaucracies, whether government-based or otherwise, who have little stake in doing their job.

Don't confuse private opinion with public stance. Most of those self-avowed socialists don't hold an elected position in a moderately conservative electorate.

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.