That's a start -- that's the initially (several years ago) recommended carbon tax. It's enough to change behavior and create markets for products that support further future change. If we tried to go from our current habits to zero (or rather, low) carbon in one year, that would probably be unpleasant, and would in fact be bad for the economy. Start small, change gradually, not so bad.
The longer we put this off, the faster we'll need to change to get the same (lack of) effect on the climate, and the larger the actual societal implications. From my POV, someone who advocates delay in order to avoid drastic and unpleasant economic change is setting us up for exactly that just a few years (decades?) down the road when AGW has progressed to a more-obvious state.
The IPCC report is unspeculative, as much as one can be when talking about future outcomes. I think we are in violent agreement on what constitutes conservative science, we merely disagree whether the IPCC is an example of that. The basic science behind global warming is old, simple, and well-understood. The devil is in the details -- the feedback loops, the delays, and the buffers.
"huge societal implications should be reported"
I assume that you're talking about recommended changes in how we produce energy as having huge societal implications. It might not hurt to have models and evidence to justify that. Big industry in this country has a long track record of crying "wolf" about the economy-destroying implications of various regulations (and conservative have a pretty good track record of mispredicting economic outcomes). We could, for example, add a carbon tax, but reduce some other tax (e.g., social security) in a revenue-neutral way. Small taxes (I've heard $40/CO2-ton initially, roughly $.40/gallon for gasoline) would get people's attention, yet not destroy the economy -- anyone who really wanted to drive somewhere, would have extra money in their pocket to spend on gasoline. We also have quite a few existence proofs for countries full of happy healthy people who pay far more for gasoline than we do. So when you say "huge societal implications", suddenly *I'm* going to be a tad skeptical:-). I just don't buy it -- we've actually had other countries run the experiment, and it seems to work okay for them. Why are we so different?
Current political "conservatives" are mislabeled in my opinion. In the scientific sense, "conservative" predictions are those that are supported by as much proof/data/modeling as possible.
In the case of the IPCC, to me, their conservativism says that we should (all) expect AT LEAST the change that they are predicting, and that is precisely what political conservatives are NOT doing. The closest they get to recognizing the work of the IPCC is when they cite it as either (a) an upper limit on what could happen ("and that's not so bad, is it?") or (b) misinterpret it in bogus games of "gotcha" (Monckton apparently did this, conflating equilibrium temperature projections at particular CO2 levels, with the temperature observed when the CO2 level first reached those levels -- it takes decades-to-centuries to hit equilibrium.)
There's a third sense of conservatism, which suggests that we should not only avoid high risks, but that we should also keep an eye out for low-likelihood high-cost events. A bird flu epidemic; that would be bad. An asteroid strike, that would be bad. Some of the we-haven't-ruled-this-out-completely climate projections would also be bad -- on the emissions path we're on, how sure are we that the anoxic oceans won't happen? There have been well-researched possible-predictions of a sudden onset of rapid sea-level rise (5cm/year, for a century or two). At the higher limits of projected temperature rise, some parts of the world are supposed to become uninhabitable -- sometimes so hot and humid that a person could not avoid fatally overheating in the course of a few hours. And all these things, when they appear in the press, are OMG-we're-all-gonna-die!, which is ridiculous, but that doesn't mean that the risk is anywhere near zero, and the cost-weighted risk is pretty high because the outcome is potentially very costly. The fear-mongers are not exactly helpful to anyone.
This is my main problem with current political "conservatives", because in these two traditional senses of the word, they're not. They don't respect sober, conservative science, and they don't take a conservative approach to low-probability-high-cost risks -- excepting terrorism, in which case, the one percent doctrine applies.
And it's that ice cap melting that I think is the subject of a lot of current head and chin-scratching -- is it changing the weather, and if so, how? Apparently some models say yes, some say no, hard to tell. But it would be surprising if it did nothing. Medium-term, a whole lot depends on that ice cap -- the more open water, the lower the albedo, the more heat accumulates in the summer, the more chance of releasing methane when the water warms.
The 2007 report also explicitly ignores sea level chance from Greenland/Antarctic ice sheet melting, largely because they did not feel that they had good models for this yet (I think they say this), and the geological record shows it occurring slowly (they say or imply this), and the actual energy required to melt the ice sheets in place is quite enormous (as opposed to sliding them off into the ocean and melting them there, where ample heat is available -- math here: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/numbers-that-were-larger-than-i-had-imagined/ )
That's what I mean by conservative -- they didn't make predictions, unless they had a bunch of models and data to back up the prediction.
No, I am not conflating, that is just the first paper (as opposed to panicky science-light article, which are plentiful) that a search turned up. And that was the abstract, not the article.
IPCC is hardly the last word; they're quite conservative in their predictions, and this is (I think) generally regarded as a low-probability event even by the people studying it. But note, asteroid strikes are also low-probability, and we study those.
The work exists, some people are studying the problem (I know references would be helpful, but so would lunch, and Google works for this). I am sure that there are *some* people who think this is going to happen, but I am not sure that any of them are (at this point) climate scientists. The Wikipedia article alone ought to be enough to inspire some small percentage of them.
To restate -- it does take money to form an insurance company, so if there is not money out there looking for investment, it's not too likely someone would invest in the insurance business. The existence of a healthy (urk) market for CDOs and similar investment gadgets, pre-bust, indicated that there was money out there looking for profitable investments. If an insurance market is overpriced (and my parents certainly believed that it was, relative to buying storm shutters), then an investment in entering that market and charging lower-but-still-risk-profitable rates should be profitable.
And if the invisible hand (of the market) works, those profitable investments will occur, especially since no innovation is required, just fair and accurate pricing. People are always looking for a way to make a buck.
So maybe the invisible hand doesn't work, or maybe insurance is priced close enough to actual risk that the investment in forming a new insurance company would not be profitable. But insurance rates have definitely gone up in recent years. Hurricane-statistically, the year Katrina occurred was damn creepy; I believe that year half of the top-6-most-intense storms for the Atlantic were replaced (Katrina, Rita, Wilma).
Not so fast. There's a low-but-larger-than-happy-making probability of the oceans going anoxic, and that would make the planet uninhabitable. Latest I've read (don't have a citation handy, sorry) says that things would have to go pretty far out of spec to make this happen, but there's error bars on both good and bad news.
Do I think this will certainly happen? No, not today, but I'd like to be a good deal more certain that it won't. In my opinion you overstate the certainty that it won't happen. The risk is affected both by the range of warming and the rate of warming -- slow warming releases frozen methane slowly (it has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere compared to CO2), rapid warming might deliver it all in one geologically quick burp.
The state of the art has been pretty good at predicting rates and ranges of maximum and minimum temperatures. We don't know for sure what the temperature will be, but we can state with pretty good confidence that it will be between a lower and upper limit. For example, it is a good bet that on any given day, the temperature that day will stay between the maximum and minimum temperatures observed that day in the last 100 years. And it should be a safe bet (in general) that it's equally likely that we would exceed the minimum or the maximum temperature.
However, recent trends have made these two bets not so safe; it is more than normally likely that we will set a record, and the distribution is skewed warm -- we tend to break high records, not low records.
Given all the money sloshing around in recent years that drove demand for silly stuff like CDOs, etc, there's ample opportunity for someone with a more-accurate assessment of the risks to undercut anyone charging too much and make a killing. Hurricane-related insurance costs in Florida spiked a few years ago -- my parents eventually dropped that part of their coverage, and spent money on storm-proof shutters for their windows instead.
So, does the invisible hand not work so well after all, or are the insurance companies pricing risk close enough to what it really is?
Counterexample (science! we loves our counter examples): national health insurance and health care in various countries, delivering better results (longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality) for less money (dollars per capita, percent of GDP) than the not-national health insurance/care that we have here.
This makes their government somewhat bigger (if you ignore our military spending) yet costs less money.
To put it slightly differently, if you aim your government at market failures and "bad games", it will be good government. Reducing its size so it does not address these things is likely to cost more money overall.
Never mind that recent results from science might be the moral equivalent of three boats and a helicopter; who's to say the scientists aren't doing God's work in figuring out how to not shit our own nest?
As others have pointed out, citations would be really nice, because you appear to be living in some alternate reality. The reasons I recall for adding lead to gasoline (and I could recall incorrectly, and I will check Wikipedia in a moment as a sanity check) were as an octane booster, and as a valve lubricant (in particular, friends of mine with old VW vans were grumpy about unleaded gas and the need to replace their valves).
Exodus 21:22 is used to say: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." or "If men chide, and a man smiteth a woman with child, and soothly he maketh the child dead-born, but the woman liveth over that smiting, he shall be subject to the harm (he shall be subject to a fine), as much as the woman’s husband asketh (for), and as the judges deem (appropriate)."
Lately certain translators have been replacing words meaning "miscarriage" with words meaning "premature birth". Why that, you might ask? Notice that penalty for miscarriage is not the same as the penalty for murder, implying that according to the bible itself (Old Testament, even, none of that namby-pamby turn-the-other-cheek Jesus stuff), a fetus is not a person. Whoops! Looks like the inspired word needs a little clarification.
(If you care to argue, follow the link and read it first. They've documented it rather well.)
I don't think this is a long-term nationalist POV that you describe. #1, as oil gets more expensive for everyone (it will, due to increasing difficulty of extraction) other countries will go solar/nuclear/biofuel/whatever, even if we don't. That might push them to use other currencies besides the dollar (according to your theory), no matter what we do. So we might focus on other things besides just having our currency being the trading currency. #2, it's not just resource trading that sets the reserve currency; there's perceptions of stability, and fear of irresponsible currency tinkering. I think until recently, the Euro was looking interesting as a potential trading currency for everyone, but with recent events it is not. I don't think most of the world trusts China to not play games with their currency; we're not too happy with their current policy w.r.t. the dollar. #3, are we that sure that having our currency be in demand is a good thing overall? If you have money and want to buy shiny toys from other countries, it's great to have a strong dollar (to use a different word, less positive than "strong", how about "overvalued"?), but if you are looking to be employed making shiny toys to sell to other countries, that "strong" dollar seems like it would depress employment. (This is a theorem, it is mine, it is my theorem. I have not floated it past an actual economist.)
We were doing just fine (with our surplus) till we got the bright idea to (s)elect Bush. What you describe most nearly fits the (recent-decades) Republican approach to government deficits. As recently as Bush-the-elder, Republicans were somewhat more responsible in their approach to taxing and spending. (Yeah, you can tell where my sympathies are, but I think I am merely recounting history with a healthy dollop of snark.)
Taxes should be fairly applied. If one company gets breaks and the other does not, that's effectively a subsidy.
And what would you call our military presence in the Middle East, if not a subsidy? Yes, our economy depends on the oil flowing, but that the cost of keeping it flowing should be paid by the oil companies, instead of by taxpayers. That cost would at least cause us to ask the question "hey, is this oil really worth it?" instead of bitching about taxes and deficits and buying (relatively) cheap oil.
Right, but other people pay higher rates. A whole lot of the alternative-energy stuff is situational -- if the wind blows, you might want a windmill, if you live in a sunny place, you might want solar, and the cost of electricity figures into all of it. If you've got a sub-6-mile commute, you might ride a bicycle. If you've got (ugh) oil heat, you might be seriously motivated to look into solar for heating instead of electricity (because we don't have gas on our street, and by the time that we do, I fully expect our US gas glut to be exposed to the world market, and poof! go the low natural gas prices).
What was the interest rate, if it was so significant? I thought the government was currently able to borrow money for less than the rate of inflation, or nearly so.
And in our current situation, we SHOULD be borrowing/printing, and spending. The economy is underperforming, people are unemployed, and have been for some time. When the economy is healthy again (as it was during the latter Clinton years) we can run surpluses and balance the budget.
So, interesting question. A friend of mine, who worked for a while at Sun, and a while at Apple, late 80s, early 90s, both places on or near the graphics system, did the experiment of recompiling their graphics libraries (NeWS at Sun, I think it may have been QuickDraw at Apple) to use floating point. I can't tell, from reading the patent whether this is prior art, or not (a floating point frame buffer?) or if this work was ever published beyond talking to friends.
This was back in the days when Apple sold both 68040 and 68040LC (no FPU) boxes, because his rant at the time was that it made the rendering faster, and fixed a half-dozen fence-post-y rendering bugs, but he couldn't ship the code because it was no good on the FPU-less boxes. Similar experience with NeWS (he worked on the PostScript interpreter, replacing Gosling's monster switch statement with a threaded-code interpreter). Don't know if that code made it into development, or not.
The (actual) usefulness of a horn is overrated. Most times I see them used to signal irritation. People think they use them to "prevent" accidents, but most of the prevented accidents, the horn is not as effective as using brakes is/would be.
Unfortunately, not, not for more recent definitions of modern. We lose a pretty fair amount of energy now through "insulators", or so I was told by a chip designer once. Ah, not quite insulators, but "off" MOSFETs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subthreshold_leakage
So we don't need better conductors, we need better not-conductors.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a start -- that's the initially (several years ago) recommended carbon tax. It's enough to change behavior and create markets for products that support further future change. If we tried to go from our current habits to zero (or rather, low) carbon in one year, that would probably be unpleasant, and would in fact be bad for the economy. Start small, change gradually, not so bad.
The longer we put this off, the faster we'll need to change to get the same (lack of) effect on the climate, and the larger the actual societal implications. From my POV, someone who advocates delay in order to avoid drastic and unpleasant economic change is setting us up for exactly that just a few years (decades?) down the road when AGW has progressed to a more-obvious state.
The IPCC report is unspeculative, as much as one can be when talking about future outcomes. I think we are in violent agreement on what constitutes conservative science, we merely disagree whether the IPCC is an example of that. The basic science behind global warming is old, simple, and well-understood. The devil is in the details -- the feedback loops, the delays, and the buffers.
"huge societal implications should be reported"
I assume that you're talking about recommended changes in how we produce energy as having huge societal implications. It might not hurt to have models and evidence to justify that. Big industry in this country has a long track record of crying "wolf" about the economy-destroying implications of various regulations (and conservative have a pretty good track record of mispredicting economic outcomes). We could, for example, add a carbon tax, but reduce some other tax (e.g., social security) in a revenue-neutral way. Small taxes (I've heard $40/CO2-ton initially, roughly $.40/gallon for gasoline) would get people's attention, yet not destroy the economy -- anyone who really wanted to drive somewhere, would have extra money in their pocket to spend on gasoline. We also have quite a few existence proofs for countries full of happy healthy people who pay far more for gasoline than we do. So when you say "huge societal implications", suddenly *I'm* going to be a tad skeptical :-). I just don't buy it -- we've actually had other countries run the experiment, and it seems to work okay for them. Why are we so different?
Current political "conservatives" are mislabeled in my opinion. In the scientific sense, "conservative" predictions are those that are supported by as much proof/data/modeling as possible.
In the case of the IPCC, to me, their conservativism says that we should (all) expect AT LEAST the change that they are predicting, and that is precisely what political conservatives are NOT doing. The closest they get to recognizing the work of the IPCC is when they cite it as either (a) an upper limit on what could happen ("and that's not so bad, is it?") or (b) misinterpret it in bogus games of "gotcha" (Monckton apparently did this, conflating equilibrium temperature projections at particular CO2 levels, with the temperature observed when the CO2 level first reached those levels -- it takes decades-to-centuries to hit equilibrium.)
There's a third sense of conservatism, which suggests that we should not only avoid high risks, but that we should also keep an eye out for low-likelihood high-cost events. A bird flu epidemic; that would be bad. An asteroid strike, that would be bad. Some of the we-haven't-ruled-this-out-completely climate projections would also be bad -- on the emissions path we're on, how sure are we that the anoxic oceans won't happen? There have been well-researched possible-predictions of a sudden onset of rapid sea-level rise (5cm/year, for a century or two). At the higher limits of projected temperature rise, some parts of the world are supposed to become uninhabitable -- sometimes so hot and humid that a person could not avoid fatally overheating in the course of a few hours. And all these things, when they appear in the press, are OMG-we're-all-gonna-die!, which is ridiculous, but that doesn't mean that the risk is anywhere near zero, and the cost-weighted risk is pretty high because the outcome is potentially very costly. The fear-mongers are not exactly helpful to anyone.
This is my main problem with current political "conservatives", because in these two traditional senses of the word, they're not. They don't respect sober, conservative science, and they don't take a conservative approach to low-probability-high-cost risks -- excepting terrorism, in which case, the one percent doctrine applies.
Sure. Blogwhoring, but here: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/this-looks-bad/
And it's that ice cap melting that I think is the subject of a lot of current head and chin-scratching -- is it changing the weather, and if so, how? Apparently some models say yes, some say no, hard to tell. But it would be surprising if it did nothing. Medium-term, a whole lot depends on that ice cap -- the more open water, the lower the albedo, the more heat accumulates in the summer, the more chance of releasing methane when the water warms.
The 2007 report also explicitly ignores sea level chance from Greenland/Antarctic ice sheet melting, largely because they did not feel that they had good models for this yet (I think they say this), and the geological record shows it occurring slowly (they say or imply this), and the actual energy required to melt the ice sheets in place is quite enormous (as opposed to sliding them off into the ocean and melting them there, where ample heat is available -- math here: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/numbers-that-were-larger-than-i-had-imagined/ )
That's what I mean by conservative -- they didn't make predictions, unless they had a bunch of models and data to back up the prediction.
No, I am not conflating, that is just the first paper (as opposed to panicky science-light article, which are plentiful) that a search turned up. And that was the abstract, not the article.
IPCC is hardly the last word; they're quite conservative in their predictions, and this is (I think) generally regarded as a low-probability event even by the people studying it. But note, asteroid strikes are also low-probability, and we study those.
Here's an example: http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/36/3/231.abstract (from searches for "global warming anoxia")
The work exists, some people are studying the problem (I know references would be helpful, but so would lunch, and Google works for this). I am sure that there are *some* people who think this is going to happen, but I am not sure that any of them are (at this point) climate scientists. The Wikipedia article alone ought to be enough to inspire some small percentage of them.
To restate -- it does take money to form an insurance company, so if there is not money out there looking for investment, it's not too likely someone would invest in the insurance business. The existence of a healthy (urk) market for CDOs and similar investment gadgets, pre-bust, indicated that there was money out there looking for profitable investments. If an insurance market is overpriced (and my parents certainly believed that it was, relative to buying storm shutters), then an investment in entering that market and charging lower-but-still-risk-profitable rates should be profitable.
And if the invisible hand (of the market) works, those profitable investments will occur, especially since no innovation is required, just fair and accurate pricing. People are always looking for a way to make a buck.
So maybe the invisible hand doesn't work, or maybe insurance is priced close enough to actual risk that the investment in forming a new insurance company would not be profitable. But insurance rates have definitely gone up in recent years. Hurricane-statistically, the year Katrina occurred was damn creepy; I believe that year half of the top-6-most-intense storms for the Atlantic were replaced (Katrina, Rita, Wilma).
Not so fast. There's a low-but-larger-than-happy-making probability of the oceans going anoxic, and that would make the planet uninhabitable. Latest I've read (don't have a citation handy, sorry) says that things would have to go pretty far out of spec to make this happen, but there's error bars on both good and bad news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event
Do I think this will certainly happen? No, not today, but I'd like to be a good deal more certain that it won't. In my opinion you overstate the certainty that it won't happen. The risk is affected both by the range of warming and the rate of warming -- slow warming releases frozen methane slowly (it has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere compared to CO2), rapid warming might deliver it all in one geologically quick burp.
The state of the art has been pretty good at predicting rates and ranges of maximum and minimum temperatures. We don't know for sure what the temperature will be, but we can state with pretty good confidence that it will be between a lower and upper limit. For example, it is a good bet that on any given day, the temperature that day will stay between the maximum and minimum temperatures observed that day in the last 100 years. And it should be a safe bet (in general) that it's equally likely that we would exceed the minimum or the maximum temperature.
However, recent trends have made these two bets not so safe; it is more than normally likely that we will set a record, and the distribution is skewed warm -- we tend to break high records, not low records.
Given all the money sloshing around in recent years that drove demand for silly stuff like CDOs, etc, there's ample opportunity for someone with a more-accurate assessment of the risks to undercut anyone charging too much and make a killing. Hurricane-related insurance costs in Florida spiked a few years ago -- my parents eventually dropped that part of their coverage, and spent money on storm-proof shutters for their windows instead.
So, does the invisible hand not work so well after all, or are the insurance companies pricing risk close enough to what it really is?
Counterexample (science! we loves our counter examples): national health insurance and health care in various countries, delivering better results (longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality) for less money (dollars per capita, percent of GDP) than the not-national health insurance/care that we have here.
This makes their government somewhat bigger (if you ignore our military spending) yet costs less money.
To put it slightly differently, if you aim your government at market failures and "bad games", it will be good government. Reducing its size so it does not address these things is likely to cost more money overall.
Never mind that recent results from science might be the moral equivalent of three boats and a helicopter; who's to say the scientists aren't doing God's work in figuring out how to not shit our own nest?
As others have pointed out, citations would be really nice, because you appear to be living in some alternate reality. The reasons I recall for adding lead to gasoline (and I could recall incorrectly, and I will check Wikipedia in a moment as a sanity check) were as an octane booster, and as a valve lubricant (in particular, friends of mine with old VW vans were grumpy about unleaded gas and the need to replace their valves).
Wikipedia agrees with my memory, except, not replace valves, but replace valve seats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
Speaking of religious texts, check this out: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/03/22/mischief-follows-in-partisan-bible-translations/
Exodus 21:22 is used to say: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." or "If men chide, and a man smiteth a woman with child, and soothly he maketh the child dead-born, but the woman liveth over that smiting, he shall be subject to the harm (he shall be subject to a fine), as much as the woman’s husband asketh (for), and as the judges deem (appropriate)."
Lately certain translators have been replacing words meaning "miscarriage" with words meaning "premature birth". Why that, you might ask? Notice that penalty for miscarriage is not the same as the penalty for murder, implying that according to the bible itself (Old Testament, even, none of that namby-pamby turn-the-other-cheek Jesus stuff), a fetus is not a person. Whoops! Looks like the inspired word needs a little clarification.
(If you care to argue, follow the link and read it first. They've documented it rather well.)
Hey, I think your posts are awesome. Keep up the good work.
I don't think this is a long-term nationalist POV that you describe. #1, as oil gets more expensive for everyone (it will, due to increasing difficulty of extraction) other countries will go solar/nuclear/biofuel/whatever, even if we don't. That might push them to use other currencies besides the dollar (according to your theory), no matter what we do. So we might focus on other things besides just having our currency being the trading currency. #2, it's not just resource trading that sets the reserve currency; there's perceptions of stability, and fear of irresponsible currency tinkering. I think until recently, the Euro was looking interesting as a potential trading currency for everyone, but with recent events it is not. I don't think most of the world trusts China to not play games with their currency; we're not too happy with their current policy w.r.t. the dollar. #3, are we that sure that having our currency be in demand is a good thing overall? If you have money and want to buy shiny toys from other countries, it's great to have a strong dollar (to use a different word, less positive than "strong", how about "overvalued"?), but if you are looking to be employed making shiny toys to sell to other countries, that "strong" dollar seems like it would depress employment. (This is a theorem, it is mine, it is my theorem. I have not floated it past an actual economist.)
We were doing just fine (with our surplus) till we got the bright idea to (s)elect Bush. What you describe most nearly fits the (recent-decades) Republican approach to government deficits. As recently as Bush-the-elder, Republicans were somewhat more responsible in their approach to taxing and spending. (Yeah, you can tell where my sympathies are, but I think I am merely recounting history with a healthy dollop of snark.)
Taxes should be fairly applied. If one company gets breaks and the other does not, that's effectively a subsidy.
And what would you call our military presence in the Middle East, if not a subsidy? Yes, our economy depends on the oil flowing, but that the cost of keeping it flowing should be paid by the oil companies, instead of by taxpayers. That cost would at least cause us to ask the question "hey, is this oil really worth it?" instead of bitching about taxes and deficits and buying (relatively) cheap oil.
Right, but other people pay higher rates. A whole lot of the alternative-energy stuff is situational -- if the wind blows, you might want a windmill, if you live in a sunny place, you might want solar, and the cost of electricity figures into all of it. If you've got a sub-6-mile commute, you might ride a bicycle. If you've got (ugh) oil heat, you might be seriously motivated to look into solar for heating instead of electricity (because we don't have gas on our street, and by the time that we do, I fully expect our US gas glut to be exposed to the world market, and poof! go the low natural gas prices).
Space solar is not likely to be a win under realistic assumptions, especially when we could be deploying solar on the ground right now. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
What was the interest rate, if it was so significant? I thought the government was currently able to borrow money for less than the rate of inflation, or nearly so.
And in our current situation, we SHOULD be borrowing/printing, and spending. The economy is underperforming, people are unemployed, and have been for some time. When the economy is healthy again (as it was during the latter Clinton years) we can run surpluses and balance the budget.
So, interesting question. A friend of mine, who worked for a while at Sun, and a while at Apple, late 80s, early 90s, both places on or near the graphics system, did the experiment of recompiling their graphics libraries (NeWS at Sun, I think it may have been QuickDraw at Apple) to use floating point. I can't tell, from reading the patent whether this is prior art, or not (a floating point frame buffer?) or if this work was ever published beyond talking to friends.
This was back in the days when Apple sold both 68040 and 68040LC (no FPU) boxes, because his rant at the time was that it made the rendering faster, and fixed a half-dozen fence-post-y rendering bugs, but he couldn't ship the code because it was no good on the FPU-less boxes. Similar experience with NeWS (he worked on the PostScript interpreter, replacing Gosling's monster switch statement with a threaded-code interpreter). Don't know if that code made it into development, or not.
The (actual) usefulness of a horn is overrated. Most times I see them used to signal irritation. People think they use them to "prevent" accidents, but most of the prevented accidents, the horn is not as effective as using brakes is/would be.
Unfortunately, not, not for more recent definitions of modern. We lose a pretty fair amount of energy now through "insulators", or so I was told by a chip designer once. Ah, not quite insulators, but "off" MOSFETs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subthreshold_leakage
So we don't need better conductors, we need better not-conductors.