Whither Petroleum: You masterfully turned my concern over the environment into a discourse on the necessity of oil and the wonders of emerging technologies. Oh, and you threw in the fact that our air is much better than it's ever been. All true, all true. Karl Rove has nothing on you. My point was (or should have been) that if we are causing the ice to melt, we ought to figure out how to stop it. If we're causing it, the root of the problem is almost indisputably greenhouse gases. These are caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Now, I'm not one to suggest we throw away our cars and start riding bicycles; certainly that would be hypocritical. However, when our response is rather to reduce restrictions on cutting down trees while at the same time, encourage more drilling, we are doing nothing to address the problem, but rather accelerating the causes of the problem. Laughing at Kyoto while not proffering an alternative is so much spitting into the wind.