Obviously, the thread is not about politics, and even if it were I am not sure I see obvious connections. Moreover, GW is a world-thing, not a US thing, right? China has already overtaken the US on GHG emissions, not even counting their one coal plant going into service every four days; Jakarta has (if I recall the number right) GHG emissions from all the 2 cycle motorbikes equal to 6 billion SUVS; etc.
For some rather technical reasons I agree with you about the rain forest issues. The best evidence I have seen indicates that forests are worthless for sinking carbon; the exception is tropical forests (actually there is a latitude band for this) and these sink about 3x what they source.
The reason Exxon was being discussed was because there was apparently an organized media campaign -
216 "regular starburst media campaign, eh?"
221 "Why exxon may have been anti-Kyoto"
228 "why Exxon is the good guys"
353 "Newsweek editor apology"
that brought back up the "Exxon funding anti-AGW conspiracy theory" as first promulgated by Greenpeace/Exxonsecrets.org, later by UCS. This campaign emerged right before the disclosure of the data errors in the NASA climate numbers by Steve McIntyre on 8-10-07.
It was the same old conspiracy theory that had already been discredited. And Exxon had given $100M to Stanford for climate research. So they were not the bad guys they had been depicted.
Post 353, the Newsweek editor concurred. I'm open to change my opinion on Exxon if you have any actual new evidence to consider. Otherwise, I consider this a closed issue. To me Exxon is just a company traded on the stock exchange and a gas station down the street.
Also please note that if carbon sequestreration plants are needed in the future, it will be a small group of heavy industry companies that build them. Basically, those will be built by the same companies that build powerplants. Not necessarily Exxon, but cohorts of them; and yes, Exxon could easily be involved. Same logic applies for nuclear powerplants - same heavy industry companies.
It's those heavy industry companies that can build the equipment that is a technological way out of any AGW problem that may be believed to be critical enough to require actions.
By contrast simple calculations shows that "behavior change", and "carbon neutral footprints" make negligible differences. I'm not convinced there is or will be a significant AGW impact, but that's another issue entirely.
There seem to be a lot of people who think GW, and AGW particularly, is a crisis that will flood New York, Florida, etc., within a few decades. This is misinformation. It's pretty easy to back up this up with facts.
That has been also discussed at length here, there are various opinions on it of course. I'm defining "alarmism" as say, someone who takes the worst case scenario computed by the IPCC in their computer models for a 1000 year time frame and who asserts that that will happen within a few decades, not the 1000 year timeframe, and who conveniently forgets to mention that it was the computation of the "worst case scenario".
Don't you think that people should be informed of the facts?
