Health Care and Climate Change ...

Many are the prognosticators out there and I feel like joining the group. The truth is that there will be no health care bill from the U.S. Congress nor will there be anything meaningful from Copenhagen regarding climate change.

Both will be victims of the same disease ... self interest and acceptance of the status quo and "things as they are". Basically, the world has too significantly high a percentage of conservatives (e.g. Republicans in the U.S.) to do anything meaningful. To them, energy reform means "drill, drill, drill" and global warming is a world wide scientific hoax. The sad part is that there are so many dittoheads that actually buy into it all without making their own assessments of the real data available. Of course, that part of it is just like religion ... very few "believers" ever objectively evaluate what it is they believe in, they believe what their parents and peers have told them to, it's family tradition and it's unchanged for the big three monotheistic religions for at least 2 millenia.

Neither climate change nor health care will be able to get "60 votes" and so a minority along with a subset of the majority will ensure that we do not make any progress in providing health care at reasonable cost nor will there be any new renewable energy industry, at least not in the United States.

It's a sad statement for humanity and humankind. And we will continue to pay the price on healthcare and on the lack of global climate reform. It should be mentioned, regarding global warming, that the wild card, the elephant in the room, is *not* CO2 emissions from developed and developing countries, bad though that truly is. It is the release of methane gas from, for example, the melting permafrost. Methane is many times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat on our planet and it is not yet well represented in super computer climate models, but it will accelerate significantly in the next decade. Regarding climate change, we are not dodging away from a slippery slope, we're already on it, gathering speed. With healthcare, I'm sure we'll probably muddle through, as desired by Republicans, but it seems that you can only be the "do nothing" party for so long before it catches up to you. Hmm, what am I saying, after all ... Bush was elected ... twice. But as Albert Einstein said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."