The "problem" David identifies with Waterworld makes me wonder how the alternative - the waterworldians find no dry land and die off? - would have helped that troubled film succeed. (Of course, it doesn't help that the science is bunk - the complete melting of the polar ice caps would not cover everything below the Himalayas. There just isn't that much ice.)

Having said that, it does suggest a large part of the problem in motivating Americans to act when it comes to global warming - we are too damn certain of our own cleverness and survivability. The consequences of climatological disaster seem distant and unreal because we are convinced they will happen to other people. Americans, surely, with our vast resources, ingenuity, gumption, grit, etc. will prevail. We'll just do something incredible, like build giant seawalls around the entire country. Or failing that, we'll just abandon the old cities and build new ones (come to the beautiful Pennsylvannia coast!) Climate change doesn't have the "oh my God the world is ending" bang of a megavolcano or comet impact. We tend to view it as something that humanity will knuckle down and get through.

All of which sounds very nice, until millions of starving refugees are camped out in your neighborhood.

The problem as a whole is all we got is cleverness, if we don't have cleverness we don't have anything.

Let's be real here. A carbon negative world (recent studies suggest that the damage of CO2 is already past a tipping point and will take centuries to rectify) is an impossiblity without the unnecessary death of millions if not billions of people, and the utter end of our technological society.

So we hope we are clever enough to figure a way out, because that's our only option. If we aren't as smart as we think we are, we are doomed anyway, and might as well enjoy our last few decades before the smokers come.

Essentially you have a 0 sum game. Either, we stop using fossil fuels, and let millions of people starve and die on purpose due to a sudden change in our environmental policies, or we continue on our current course and eventually watch millions of people die when the climate makes our life style unsustainable.

In the end the earth cannot raise in temperature enough to kill even a large portion of life on the planet and will certainly not get hot enough to kill off all humans. So we either activly kill each other (which might explain why waterworld is populated by white english speakers) or we try and clever our way out of the mess.

There is no easy solution, it's either fascism or entrepenuerism. Either we start culling the heard or we hope someone is smart enough to figure out a solution. You don't save the world by changing your lightbulbs. You would need to change your entire concept of what your life is. Barring that, barring returning to a preindustrial society, we need to find a new way.

Which means windmills, solar panals, nuclear energy, and if necessary floating cities.

That's what humans do, that's all we do. We figure things out, and if we can't figure things out, then we're doomed and I wish the rats well on their wacky journey of evolution. Who knows by the time they make it to being tool users like us, there might be a fresh batch of oil just below the surface waiting for them.

Oh definitely, and that's my hope. But what I see is the societal equivalent of laziness. Reminds me of:

"Yeah, I hear what you're saying about exercise and diet, doc, but can't you just give me a magic pill?" I'm not into this whole 'effort' thing."