A consumer-driven culture requires that we all live in fear, so we'll buy the products we need to protect ourselves. Our learned helplessness is central to the "success" of the economy.

I had occasion to speak a number of times with a nephew of Tesla's. He claimed that the family always privately believed that Edison had torched his uncle's New York lab.

The microphone, the transformer (both making Bell's telephone usable), the gram-o-phone (using mass-producible flat discs rather than Edison's cylinders), advances in the science of acoustics, one of the earliest working helicopters, the tilting tail rotor, rotary engines. He composed music, crusaded for pasteurization of milk and women's rights.

For an excellent review of the climate change issue without the "hot air", check out http://www.withouthotair.com/ "David MacKay FRS is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Nine months after the publication of 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', David MacKay was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change."

Your project management people need to provide data to management to demonstrate the capacity of your department, then make the case for either reprioritization of existing projects, or addition of more people to do the work.

There has been a rash of temple and mosque firebombings in suburban NJ. This may explain the sensitivity. The reporter should have put this story in its context.