I DO agree that the possible natural causes of the Global Warming that 98% or more of all scientists agree is happening are not discussed enough (though that is probably because vested interests would use them even more to muddy the waters), however, I also think the deniers are disingenuous in holding forth a view that basically we puny humans cannot significantly affect the environment around us. Mountaintop mining and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (not to mention the burning of the Cuyahoga and many other rivers not to mention the Exxon Valdez and Gulf oil spills among other incidents) pretty well disprove that.

There are basically three reasons to
1. Peak Oil
2. Pollution from Oil and Coal
3. Developed renewable energy is cheap and will create an economic renaissance
4. If Global Warming is primarily due to man-made CO2 buildup, then it will be too late if we don’t make more progress toward renewable energy fairly quickly.

My main point is that we cannot fully and accurately determine how much CO2 is affecting the atmosphere (our only one and the one that all animal live on earth depends on and shares) so we should do all we can to safeguard that without destroying the national and global economy (and all indications are that it will rejuvenate the U.S. economy, particularly if done correctly). IMHO the main resistance to renewable energy is that people in charge of large energy companies don’t want uncertainty and will profit hugely from oil that costs $100 a barrel or more. They hate disruption and uncertainty. The other important point is that our national security and economy depend on affordable energy (oil is getting no longer affordable and we have probably reached Peak oil worldwide) and the Industrial revolution and economic boom of the last 100+ years have been built on the foundation of cheap energy. If we can figure out how to have relatively inexpensive, abundant AND clean energy from energy conservation, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and renewable liquid energy (all while probably rejuvenating the job market) we should do all we can to make this happen. It just so happens in my view that big business (which prizes predictability, the status quo and quashing disruptive innovation above all) has done a great deal to make sure this doesn’t happen. I also think, as you probably took away from the article, that if we get away from nuclear power that uses steam generation (basically Gen IV and later designs) we can have incredibly safe and stable base power generation so that all these other clean and almost infinitely renewable power sources can be developed. My cousin used to say, “oil is too valuable to burn” not to mention too dirty along with coal (which by the way outputs far more radiation than nuclear ever has) so we should get off it and generate new businesses in the U.S. that can export this type of equipment and knowledge to all developing economies. After all, who would you rather have developing and building nuclear plants across the world (and it will happen) us or the Chinese and Indians?

I enjoyed reading this article but always get concerned with the term “Global Warming”. I prefer the way you address the real issue here which is c02 emissions. Anytime I see global warming I cringe, because I believe this is largely reflective of solar cycles more so than any man made occurrence. It is also easily refutable, where CO2 emissions are measurable and quantifiable. That along with water pollution are in my opinion the best way to attack waste. Global Warming is a catch phrase that is to easily refuted. I can simply say the globe is warming on every other planet in our solar system, and our globe has been warming since the Ice Age.

Doug

It’s nice to find somebody that thinks the same stuff that I do. I could not agree with you more about your position and the best practice to solve the problem. If we could just persuade the other 99% of folks in this market things could be much better. Thanks.

One thing I wanted to start with was the seemingly pervading axioms that “debt is bad” and “we must balance the budget”. I have debt on my house, from some school and revolving on a credit card or two. Having debt at various times has been good for me and debt and finance have driven much of the economic growth in the U.S.A. since WWII. As almost any businessman and if they are honest they will tell you that they always have some debt and credit is absolutely vital to not only the growth of their business, but to its survival. It is disingenuous to say we should have no deficits and debt when many many households and businesses run occasional deficits and almost always have debts. Bottom line too is that households and businesses do not print their own money or have guaranteed income (taxing authority) like a sovereign nation (which is why macro economics is different from micro). With this in mind and the absolute fact that the only 7 times we have balanced the budget and begun to pay down the debt have led to serious depressions and recessions I began to study economics again and choose MMT in particular because it is neither “left” not “right” but more “descriptive” than political. This doesn’t take away the need for fiscal responsibility, but highlights the necessity to talk honestly about it, particularly in light of the recent recession, problems in Europe and our slow economic growth.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson, once explained about the “balanced budget assumption” when he said, “I think there is an element of truth in the . . . superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times. Once it is debunked, [that] takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. There must be discipline in the allocation of resources or you will have anarchistic chaos and inefficiency.”

One of the things that has gotten this country’s public finances seriously on the wrong track is the idea that there was an implicit limit on deficits imposed by the political system. Hence, tax cuts would necessarily “starve the beast” by forcing spending cuts. The idea was plausible in the 1970s, but unfortunately has been proven beyond doubt by 30 years of experience to be completely wrong. In practice, there is no limit to deficits beyond those imposed by financial markets.

My friend also said he “(has)have serious doubts that our economy will outgrow its debt burden.” which I do too, but it doesn’t really worry me. I have few doubts that we will have another innovation revolution of some sort (green, medical, etc..) which will reduce the “debt burden” significantly. The honest fact is that in a fiat money economy we not only print the money, but we set the interest rates so as long as our “debt burden” is in dollars it doesn’t matter, we can always pay our debts and we don’t need to pay ANY interest on it if we don’t want to do so (look at the bond markets today paying almost nothing in interest). The main thing we have to worry about is inflation and that is not a serious concern at this point. This doesn’t obviate the need for responsible and effective spending, but that cannot be done if you don’t understand and can’t talk about how things actually work. The worst thing IMHO is $1 to $2 Trillion spent on wars which is like rolling the money and burning it rather than spending it on infrastructure and education.

I tend to agree with you. I installed TwInBox from http://www.techhit.com/ which give me a good Twitter reader within Ooutlook. The company fefrs also a Facebook integration but I have not used it.

You can also try the Outlook Social Commector, free download from Microsoft http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/outlook-social-connector-partner-listing-FX101812910.aspx it shows the LinkedIn identities for all your contacts and allows you to invite them right from Outlook.

The RSS reader in Outlook is OK. I am sure Outlook 2010 is a bit better.
You can blog via email to blogging platforms like Posterous. If you use Office Communicator, it is nicely integrated into email – i.e. you can launch a conference call from an email message, you can go from IM to email mode seamlessly (or viceversa) or you can get presence information as you write an email to someone.

Not perfect, I know, but clsoe to teh ideal you described.

I have seen first hand how compensating the sales force on metrics and for objectives/goals that are not easily defined results in terrible implementation difficulties and disgruntled disconnected unengaged employees. Sales staff closes the software sale with no attention to the implementation because in being compensated on RevRec they (believe they) are likely to never get paid on anything other than the software license. Even if they are paid, it is usually only after a large lag time, hassles with accounting and management so it if often viewed as not worth the trouble. Sales tended to view using RevRec as simply a way to cheat them out of hard work so they avoided doing any more work or communication on the consulting and implementation than absolutely necessary to get their software license commission and the rest of the sale be damned. In the end most of the sales staff simply promised the client anything they wanted in implementation to simply close the license sale and get the initial commission with little regard to a long term relationship (since the project could take 3 to 6 months to kick off and go 9 to 24 months – by that time the sales person was likely at another company) or the success of the project. The only success the sales people seemed to be tied to was the total amount of the sales deals closed and there was no connection to how many successful projects were closed or how much revenue was eventually recognized or lost. In other words, there was no penalty for messing up the sale from inception since they got to keep the software license commission no matter what and viewed getting paid on consulting, implementation or training as a long shot or too little to be worth the trouble.

This is classic compensation theory in that if the person being compensated can’t easily understand and define what it is they are being compensated on and have some control over those, they will focus on the two or three things they can understand. In this case, they sold licenses and got paid well for it so consulting, training and OnDemand were too new, different, difficult to merit attention and they could maximize their salaries by focusing on software licenses and doing the minimum on everything else even though it impinged directly on customer corporate long term success.