Lets face one universal truth here :

The only easy road to solving these problems is to significantly cut down our energy consumption.

Without such a move we can not prevent the developping nations from demanding the same high consumption as we had/have and the growth in energy consumption from them alone will ofset any technological breakthrough we can achieve in the next 50 years. A similar thing is happening with China currently.

I feel that we in the West are looking for our own "Wonderwaffen" (Wonder Wapon) against the developping world Hordes as the Germans were in WW2 against the endless colons of Russian soldiers and tanks.

The hordes have to power of scale on their side no amount of superior technology will be able to stop them when they decide to move. You'll be overrun or in our case the system will collapse.

Whether we like it or not, our societies are going to change with respect to energy consumption, and these changes will eventually become very far reaching. Currently we can still choose between a hard landing and a soft landing. In a while, there will be no longer a choice and then we'll need to brace ourselves for the hard landing.

You may agree with Al Gore or not or support some luny US think tank (of which we have 1000's by now). But what ever you do, you can't reason away the fact that things will change significantly and are indeed changing as we speak.

Note only because of Global warming, but of a portfolio of other causes as well.

Wouter