Pirate's Cove

What’s happening now:

Delegates from six of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters — including the United States — gathered last week for the first time to figure out how private industry can help curb global warming.

The Bush administration is promoting this voluntary effort as a practical way to develop clean-energy technology to tackle climate change. But an environmental expert dismissed it as busy-work that would not be as effective as the requirements imposed by the international Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

More than 300 delegates from the six countries — Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea, in addition to the United States — met last week in California for the first working sessions of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

These six countries account for about half of the world’s emissions of climate-heating greenhouse gases. Only one of the six, Japan, is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 under the Kyoto agreement.

That’s all nice and good, but talk is cheap. Heck, few in Europe are going to meet the Kyoto Protocol’s rules. So, instead, why don’t we:

1. Develop a spaceship capable of landing on comments and other ice bearing solar system bodies
2. Create a giant drill to mine said bodies, kinda like a giant ice machine
3. Fly the ice back to the Earth, and drop it into the oceans to cool the planet.
4. If that fails, we can have all the robots point their exhaust outlets up and vent, moving the Earth farther from the Sun, which has gotten “hotter” over the past 60+ years.

Oh, wait, that was a Futurama episode. Well, back to reality.