Politics is a trivial pursuit. It focuses tightly on irrelevancies while paying no heed to larger and longer term issues. It has to do so since power is won and lost due to such skirmishes. The complaint that publicly traded businesses live or die by quarterly performance figures and so have little incentive for longer term investment is perhaps even more true of governments. Government is, after all, a business too. Fluctuations in stock prices make or break business executives, and popularity polls do the same for politicians.

The recent scramble to attract the attention of Democrats - now that they have regained political power - provides many examples of this. The economy as a whole may be troubled but it's boom times for sales of Presidential knee pads and sanitary lubricants to supplicants hoping to be granted boons in return for their obeisance, an opportunity that they have been denied for some years.

One example comes from James Hansen, the NASA dingbat and climate hysteric. He has composed a wish list - a letter to Santa might be a seasonally appropriate description - that includes a great deal of obligatory flattery and subservience of no significance, but buried in it are a couple of points worth expanding since they are longer focus and non-trivial.

The world’s temperature has increased about 1°F over the past few decades, about 2°F over land areas. Further warming is “in the pipeline” due to gases already in the air (because of climate system inertia) and inevitable additional fossil fuel emissions (because of energy system inertia). . .

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that solution of global warming is to phase down total fossil fuel emissions by some specified percentage. That approach will not work as a strategy. The reason for that conclusion and an outline of a better strategic approach follow immediately from geophysical boundary constraints. . .

Despite uncertainty in the magnitude of undiscovered reserves, their amounts are certainly enough to yield atmospheric CO2 greater than 500 ppm. . .

A carbon cap that slows emissions of CO2 does not help, because of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2. In fact, the cap exacerbates the problem if it allows coal emissions to continue. The only solution is to target a (large) portion of the fossil fuel reserves to be left in the ground or used in a way such that the CO2 can be captured and safely sequestered.

Saving little green teacups of emissions accomplishes nothing. Slowing emissions won't avoid a wreck. There is enough fossil carbon to fill the skies and it will be used by someone. Once used the CO2 stays in the air for a long time and so concentrations continue to rise. Delaying the end point by a few years - less than a decade - is the best that emissions controls can accomplish.

The imperative of near-term termination of coal emissions (but not necessarily coal use) requires fundamental advances in energy technologies. Such advances would be needed anyhow, as fossil fuel reserves dwindle, but the climate crisis demands that they be achieved rapidly.

The real issue is the need for improved energy systems. Climate change is an excuse to ratchet up government meddling. The energy issue would be the same even if fossil fuels had no carbon emissions.

The short term political focus is on emissions since they can be manipulated to provide a revenue stream, and that's what government is about. This will provide power for executives and the money to increase the size of their departments, their kingdoms, as they increase staff and facilities. It also provides many opportunities to exercise the perquisites of intimate tyrannies as they put the screws to their political and cultural competitors. They get money, power and satisfaction from casual abuse of their opponents.

Hansen may be deranged, a noisy clown or a court jester, but buried in his shtick are these two useful points. Restated: 1) the ship has sailed, the iceberg is waiting, rearranging the deck chairs changes nothing; 2) the real issue is the need for better transportation systems, not the feng shui of deck furniture or even unsinkable ships.

Our focus should be on advanced energy technologies rather than carbon emissions. Hansen's flirtation with new systems - such as fourth generation nuclear designs - is closer to being useful than any of his previous efforts. It's strange how this has all played out. The opposition to nuclear power in past decades contributed a great deal to current carbon angst, which in turn raises the prospects of nuclear power. Politics is stupid.