China keen on action in global efforts against climate change

[Bob Wallace]

17. No 100% guarantee...

But it looks like climate change has already changed our weather and is bringing us a lot of extreme, deadly events. We can't hang a tag on a specific event and declare that without a doubt global warming caused it.

But we can look at the frequency of major weather events and see that they are becoming more frequent.

Now that we're starting to work our way back out of the Bush Recession and getting our troops out of the Bush Oil Wars people are likely to pay more attention to what's happening with our weather. Give us a couple more years of increasing extreme weather and an Arctic summer melt out and I think we're going to see major pushes to get carbon off our electrical grid.

What will really help move away from coal is the fact that solar is becoming very affordable. And it looks like we may have some storage solutions in the works.

Give us a more motivated public and a reasonable cost alternative and I think we'll let coal go.

In the meantime, do what you can to get people to understand how expensive coal-electricity really is. Keep the drum beat of coal's hidden costs going....