Two quotes that hit home for me in this article:

"If we leave it in the ground then we won't have to worry about any of the terrible side-effects we currently do. But we rely on it for energy, so, whilst this ultimately needs to be the end-game, it might not be absolutely achievable in the next couple of decades."

I am reading Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest, so last night I read, about finite and infinite games. Hawken talks about it here on the Paula Gordon show -- " Mr. Hawken closes with stories built on James Carse’s big idea of “finite games” (Wall Street and the NBA and politics) and “infinite games” (the whole point is to keep the game going) and offers a suicide prevention strategy for life on earth."

and

"So what will we be using coal in the ground for, a thousand years from now? Exactly what we're using that coal for today. Holding up the mountains."

As the Midtown Brews talk last week wrapped up, I began to have visions of coal being extracted or blown off the tops of the mountains in Appalachia and then just to the west of that glorious swell of earth, carbon being "sequestered" in wells of toxic liquid mire and some will call me a naysayer or a Cassandra, but I imagined the Ohio River Valley becoming a river of toxic mud as we foolishly undermined (pun intended) the structure of the ridge and pumped gallons of waste into the ground just west of the river. (Check out the fact that this testing began in October 2007.) Now this Ohio River flows along until it reaches the Mississippi and then to the Gulf of Mexico. Who gave us the big idea that we should so radically rearrange the geography? We have tried to dam Lake Okeechobee and fill the River of Grass that is the Everglades, we have dammed the Colorado -- there are numerous other examples, but nature is redundant and resilient, and it just adjusts and grows back or sneaks around and fills in somewhere else. It cares little about the indignities we inflict on it. It will adjust. We, however, may not. Are we playing an endgame?