bill that could result in penalties on animal rights activists who pose as employees or attempt to get inside agricultural production facilities in other ways to expose possible animal cruelty.

The governor said

“If somebody comes on somebody else’s property through fraud or deception or lying, that is a serious violation of people’s rights … “

Of course,  it’s not someone else’s property, it’s a corporation’s property; but then again, corporations are people, according to Mitt Romney.

The rub is that some of this activism has exposed practices that not only are cruel, but which endanger the public health. To say that employees can still be whistleblowers and report bad practices ignores the facts that most employees will not want to lose their jobs, and many are not aware of some of the health implications of many practices.

US$25 million for whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of the Earth’s climate system.

Still, I have the solution, if they want to open this back up and give me $25 million. Here it is: school buses. School bus use is like tent poles: high in the morning, zero during the day, and then high in the afternoon, and then zero after that. All we have to do is put those school buses on the road, criss-crossing everywhere.

OK, maybe an upgrade here and there, and more maintenance, and slight alterations in  work-day hours; but the idea is clear. We can get more people on buses if these buses are running around everywhere, picking up everyone and anyone. The buses are already out there.

building an 18-mile-long hose, tethered by balloons, that would spray tiny particles into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays.

or

ocean-churning technology designed to sap the strength of hurricanes, which appear to be getting fiercer because of global warming.

or having

thousands of big machines to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

But is Gates looping back to things that Richard Feynman might have suggested, things that are so simple that they are being missed or are thought to be way too complicated?

What about radically changing land-use, development, and public transportation approaches, linking these factors in ways that can have a major change on carbon emissions? Sounds too low-tech? Maybe so, but it’s guaranteed, and all this geoengineering is not, and morewver is fraught with danger because of that old Law of Unintended Consequences.

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in new research.