"Way too little and way too late," runs the refrain, followed by the claim that nothing less than an 80% reduction in emissions by the year 2050 will suffice - what I call the "80 by 50" target. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have endorsed it. John McCain is not far behind, calling for a 65% reduction...By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.  It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low - even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia."  --"The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change," WSJ

"The realists in the global-warming debate have a new mantra: Too Little, Too Late and Too Much, Too Soon.  According to Jim Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to whom many political and environmental leaders turn on climate-change questions, we must reduce greenhouse gases by 80 percent within 12 years or it will be too late to prevent a climate catastrophe. Hansen thinks this won't happen because it simply costs too much." "When I explain this to elected and appointed officials, business leaders, fellow scientists and others who operate in the public eye, they have two reactions. Publicly they maintain the position that this is a critical problem that requires "serious and immediate greenhouse-gas emissions reductions." Privately they ask me, "What can we do without losing jobs and going back to an 1850s lifestyle? Is there a way to get us more time to shift away from carbon-based fuels?" Happily, there is. It is not a silver bullet, nor is it a permanent solution. But we can give ourselves four or five decades to solve this problem while maintaining our lifestyles and continuing to expand our economy. The response to a climate-change emergency will be geoengineering..." --"Buying Time on Greenhouse Gases," ScrippsNews.com

"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot." --Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008

"Japan, like the European Union, hasn't let its failure so far to meet Kyoto emissions-reductions targets stop it from setting even more ambitious goals, like a 50% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050. But how to do that? If getting within shouting distance of Kyoto's targets could cost Japan $500 billion, how much would it cost to cut emissions twelve-fold more?" --Keith Johnson, WSJ, 19 March 2008

Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide -- a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. "Beware of the scale," he stressed."