It's about as useful as Punxsutawney Phil - nobody in power is affected by it
and anyone who is influenced by it is powerless to do anything about it.

Still, symbolism still has a place in human society so I have no problem
with it being kept (along with its annual rituals) and revered as a semi-religious
artifact for the modern world.

That's a shorter summary of his words:

> The fourth industrial revolution will enable firms to extend the use-cycle of assets
> and resources, increase their utilization and create cascades that recover and
> repurpose materials and energy for further uses, lowering emissions and resource
> loads in the process. In this revolutionary(*) new industrial system, carbon dioxide
> turns from a greenhouse pollutant into an asset, and the economics of carbon
> capture and storage move from being cost as well as pollution sinks to becoming
> profitable carbon-capture and use-production facilities.

(*) "revolutionary" = "non-existent and totally infeasible fantasy of a"


> The growth of “the human cloud” may end regular employment, with pensions and benefits

Glad that they put that bit in to keep everyone happy.


Fuck all economists with a spiked pole then burn the bastards in combined heat & power
plants (so they can actually contribute to the public good - for the first time in their lives).

... for testing the integrity of the housing & infrastructure ...

I seriously doubt anything will be done until it damages the governor's home
and, even then, his paymasters will just ensure he can move into a better
place, further from the risk zone.

That, my friend, is the smell of corruption rising from the ruins of democracy.

You've managed to shut up the corporate mouthpieces.

Not one single dissent or excuse for the fact that Bayer have admitted that
their previous responses - so dutifully parroted by the local astroturfers - was
bollocks and that, rather than being "anti-science" or "Luddite" or "tin-foil",
the criticism was “quite good and scientifically sound”.

The Truth is a powerful disinfectant.

As in, showing the same breakdown categories for a direct comparison?

I'd be quite interested to see how (/if) the different segments have changed
in five years as the total amount has definitely increased.

Ideally, I'd also like to see "biomass" treated correctly too and not combined
(albeit conveniently) with solar & geothermal (for heating) or with wind & solar
& geothermal (for power generation) as well as the "biofuels" category.

As it is, it is painfully obvious that over 90% of the global energy is derived
from "burning stuff": fossil fuels + traditional biomass + biofuels + biomass
contribution to two other categories + (stretching a point slightly) nuclear.

It's only the 3.3% from hydro + the unstate wind/solar/geothermal (less than
4.2%) that *doesn't* involve burning shit - with all of the polluting end-products
that result ... call it 7.3% to be generous ... that is dismally low (even for 2010).

Is there a more hopeful recent update to this diagram please?

No, as others have noted up-thread, the hysteresis (and sheer scale) precludes
even rapid re-planting from being a "silver bullet" but there are still three good
reasons to push for this:

1) Clearance is primarily for meat production. Conservation & re-planting will
assist/encourage the (globally beneficial) move to reducing meat consumption.

2) Conservation & regrowth will preserve (and expand) the habitat of those
rain-forest species that we haven't yet pushed into extinction.

3) It is a visible & tangible cause that provides an entry for people's consciousness
to be awakened, a "first case" that gets the attention of folks who are neither
malicious nor embedded in the problematic industries first-hand but who need a
"something" to give them that nudge to move to the path of environmental
awareness. Some people mock the "photogenic causes" but they overlook the
fact that many people start off by helping to save whales, the cute dolphins,
the panda (one animal that is quite capable of ambling into extinction without
a single human being involved!) but that leads them to become aware of the
network of life, the connections, the importance of creatures to the biosphere,
krill, tuna, mosquito, bat, shark, turtle, elephant, everything enormous or tiny,
beautiful or plain, all of it. It takes that first step to move onto the path.


JMO.