Stephan:   Yesterday I went to a small gathering my friend Rick Ingrasci organized and listened to one of the lead authors of the IPCC climate reports talk about about how The American Geophysical Union, the world's largest professional association of scientists studying climate, is planning to hold a conference in San Francisco to try and figure out how to get the public and politicians to understand how really desperate the situation is. We are, he said, befuddled, by what we see as the willful ignorance of policy makers. We don't understand why our alarms have so little effect. But what really caught my attention was this: We could make the transition from a carbon based energy system to a non-carbon based system for about two per cent of the American GNP. When I talked with him I pointed out that we now spend each year about 17 per cent of our GNP on the illness profit system. So, if what he was saying was accurate, and I trust both his passion and his proven expertise, then if we could achieve approximately a 12 per cent reduction in healthcare costs we could pay for the whole energy transition. The reduction plus the cost would mean that the total would be no more than we are paying now. Inasmuch as the French pay 11 per cent of their GNP to have the best healthcare in the world, and we pay 17 per cent to get the 37th worst healthcare, it is clear that the only thing stopping the transition is the corruption of our Congress, and the greed of the uber-rich and the corporations they control. Think about that insight. Nothing is going to save us but ourselves. If you value your children's and grandchildrens' lives you better start working and organizing your friends to make your voice heard through voting and social activism. And here is the realpolitik truth as I see it: The Red value states are not going to wake up to the coming disaster in time, so the Blue value states have to overwhelm them, by changing election financing laws, and voting for men and women with fact based world views, and enough integrity and guts to see this change through. The alternative is the end of world as we now know it. -- Stephan