KUNSTLER: One pet theory of mine about the Af-stan adventure is that we wanted to make a baloney sandwich out of Iran by posting armies on both sides of them, with Iraq and Af-stan as the Wonder Bread

One thing you can state pretty categorically about the Af-stan war: it sure is a good way to blow an additional one trillion dollars worth of capital.

SHOOT: I have a theory on why the USA is in Af-stan. It's like a big kid anticipating a food fight, so takes the first slice of cake hoping to get possibly a second. The odds of this backfiring are of course pretty high but then, as I said, it's a big kid.

clipped from kunstler.com Are we shocked to learn that scientists fight among themselves and cheat as much as congressmen?  Does that really change the relationships we understand about parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere and the weather? What the people of the world can do or will do about a change in climate is something else. My guess is that the undertow of entropy is now too great to provoke any meaningful unified change in behavior.  The collapse of the US economy is too close to the horizon, and the so-called developing nations will have problems equally severe. In the meantime, it is unlikely that any of the major players will burn less coal and oil, or not cheat on each other even if they pledge to burn less.  People who are not knuckleheads will make the practical arrangements that they can. These will, by definition, be localized, small-scale, and non-global communities, doing what they would have to do anyway.