The thoughts that hit the nail on the hard heads!

A decade of drought in Congress on climate legislation though there were cloudburst of ideas. Are there any hopes for big, broad and bold to make difference? Or the scarcity of the Political courage would prevail?

Some ideas are non-ideas. For example, one is : we can keep on using fossil fuels and living life as usual as long as we find a way to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that is so called Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS).

Billions of dollar on CCS are spent from 1997. Demonstration projects have been aborted because of massive cost overruns. Power plants equipped with CCS would use more water and energy while producing much more expensive power. Besides, the carbon footprints of fossil fuels are much larger than what happens at the smokestack or the tailpipe. Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels are extracted, processed and transported.

Can we invent our way out of climate change? Falls hopes are killing. Its roots extend deep into our attitudes toward nature, like the obsolete beliefs that we can control it, that natural resources exist for us to consume, and that we are unaccountable to the rest of the biosphere as well as to the rest of the world. We need to reset our human software even more than we need new hardware. If we did that, we'd be spending our research dollars on living in a post-carbon world rather than propping up last century's energy.

SCCN would promote the speedy, sustainable and smart research projects in the universities, where the ideas can become ways for uprooting 'non-ideas'. Time is not on our side. It is running faster than our actions to get away from climate change.

As one European official put it, "We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we've done it".

Unfortunately, Climate Change would have done it before that !!