In what Bizzaro World can you group Al Gore - alleged enviro-lunatic, evil hoax-foister, raging liberal - and Bill Gates - capitalist, American business icon, technologist - together?

In this one.

Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging reports on Bill Gates's (yes, that Bill Gates) TED speech in which Gates describes his plan to get everyone - the entire world - to zero climate emissions.   This isn't about reduction, making slight changes to your lifestyle, being less of a carbon polluter: Gates is talking about zero.  Strangely, everyone who pshawed Al Gore is suddenly listening to Bill Gates.  If Gates's weight comes to bear on the climate issue, it will vindicate what I've been saying all along: that the issue was a political one (as everything is these days), not scientific, and that Al Gore was entirely the wrong guy to breach the topic with the American public.

Some highlights from Gates's talk, as reported by Steffen:

He reckons that because population is going to continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.

and

For most people, a ten percent or twenty percent improvement sounds like a big deal -- in large part because the improvements they're most familiar with involve giving things up. When they do encounter it, the idea of "zero" looms like a giant wall of deprivation in front of them. The idea that zero might not be the end of the good life, but in fact the beginning of a much better way of life, is simply inconceivable to the vast, vast majority of them. When we talk zero, we sound crazy.

But when Bill Gates talks zero, he sounds visionary. Gates, whatever else he did Friday, just made the most important idea on the planet mainstream credible. That's a big, big deal.

and

The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.

We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.

The obvious prediction, of course, is this, and I'll stake it here: deniers will immediately blackball Gates, a once-great man succumbing to age and a slackened mind, a once-strong American capitalist having his ideology shaken due to his philanthropic work and his waning willpower to defind that which made him wealthy.  He has his, they'll say, so he can afford this fantasy.  The rest of us who have to foot the bill for this hoax can't.

And, with the swift pens of our national media news-based entertainment industry, in the blink of an eye, Gates could be politicized and marginalized in the climate debate.  Zero emissions?  Smarter cities?  A new definition of prosperity? Nuclear power? What?

It's the very risk of all that Gates could lose that makes his move incredibly important.  I've never been one to applaud Microsoft or its products, but I am staggered, in the best way possible, at what Gates has done here.

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If Dan Lyons, er, Fake Steve Jobs, keeps penning articles like this one, he might actually see his Jobs schtick slip away in favor of authentic, blunt journalism.  The whole thing is worth reading a few times in a row, but for the sake of emphasis, I'm going to excerpt quite a bit of it right now.

Alternative energy is the next big tech market, the one that will spawn the next Google, or Apple, or Microsoft. But guess what? Those companies probably won't be based here. As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his column a few days ago, the Chinese are racing past us. They're investing billions -- in physics, in nanotech, in material science, in fuel cells, in solar. They're going to own this market.

Meanwhile we sit here with our heads up our butts, debating things like a gas tax or whether power plants should have to cut back on CO2 emissions and whether we can make this leap to a new paradigm without hurting our economy (read: without hurting the companies that sell oil and run coal-powered generators and which contribute loads of money to politicians in Congress.)

You know what? Like it or not, the whole goddamn world is going to shift away from fossil fuels. It's going to happen. And we're going to miss it. We've spent decades underfunding our scientists, treating them like shit, starving them of resources. Now, Obama has promised to boost spending, but guess what? Even if our scientists come up with great new technologies, our idiot politicians will do their best to keep anyone from being able to use them.

The oil companies will unleash Glenn Beck and his army of frigtards to attack the proponents of change, just like the health insurance companies have done on health care reform. Solar energy? It sounds so ... socialist. Carbon sequestration? Isn't that some kind of secret plan to take away our freedom? Glenn Beck gets his ratings boost, and who cares if the country gets fucked? Better yet, it's all done in the name of being patriotic. It would all be hilarious if it weren't so insanely tragic.

So here's what happens to us. We'll shift to new energy, because we'll have no choice. But we won't buy our fuel cells and solar panels and other power-generation technology from American companies. We'll buy it from the Chinese. Better yet, we'll buy it with money we've borrowed ... from the Chinese. Does nobody see this? We're living on heroin here, drugged out and happy. Our drug dealer is happy to keep the China White flowing, at incredibly reasonable prices. Why not? How better to compete with an enemy than to drug everyone in his camp?

And all this talk in Washington about bold action, and what a great and powerful nation we are, how brilliant and innovative? All this stirring music with trumpets blaring and soaring strings? Bullshit. This is all just a lullaby we're singing to keep ourselves asleep, as our empire slides away.

As long as we keep thinking that we're entitled to lead every burgeoning market because, dammit, we're America, were in for a serious asskicking.  As FSJ observes, we're much more interested in politicizing every issue and making it a red v. blue battle.  Bottom line is that so many Americans are afraid of change and in denial that our entitled lives might slip away to the Demon of the Future.  We can rally the troops, have morons like Beck and Limbaugh pine away over the airwaves to fight the onslaught of change and liberalism and socialism and anti-Christian "values," but it won't matter.  It won't matter at all, because change is happening whether we think it bodes well for our Escalades or not.

China and India are doing right now what we did back in the Industrial and IT revolutions.  They're looking at the fabric of future markets, correctly parsing global trends, hiring big brains, cutting to the chase of doing what it takes to lead the world markets in The Next Big Thing.  They're quietly setting themselves up to be the next global powerhouse, and while they certainly have their share of socio-political issues, they aren't fucking around at all with emerging markets.  They see the hole off-tackle, and they're hitting it like a freight train.

They will be the big players unless we can get out of our Norman Rockwell mindsets and realize that we need to get moving on these fledgling technologies and markets.  Where is the American know-how?  Where is the spirit?  Where is the insistence that we lead the world in science and innovation?

It's not here.  Not this time.  And that needs to change, or we'll be very uncomfortable in our role as second fiddle when these markets hit their stride.

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If you're up for some nice, quiet, hyperbolic reading about how global warming not only exists but will plunge the world into a nuclear war-torn, anarchist planet teetering on the brink of complete collapse, well, here you go. The UK's Guardian newspaper claims there is a report issued by a Pentagon defense advisor that claims global warming is a bigger threat to the world than terrorism. The report, heretofore suppressed by US defense chiefs under the Bush administration, says:

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. 'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

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I was half asleep when I clicked on this via DF's suggestion, and within minutes I was laughing out loud like an idiot. It was the “I got a murder boner!” that did me in. Green Team with Will Ferrell

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