Can you model?

A rash of energy related articles in my morning paper today.

1) A debate on the future of US green energy in specific and solar power in particular

2) Bud McFarlane gives us strategic advice on petroleum

3) An update on the new oil fields being developed in the western hemisphere

Enough to spoil a perfectly good cup of coffee. Especially the American Enterprise guy going on about solar power.

Here's the rub: We're at 390 plus PPM of carbon dioxide. More than 400 and Texas the state becomes Texas the desert -- and not in too many years, if this year is anything to go by. Maine gets the climate of Virginia or Georgia by 2090.

And the second rub, which combines with the first in a double whammy of super-geo-strategic proportions: Extrapolate 85 million barrels per day, or 32 giga-barrels a year, by roughly two thirds of your favorite global economic growth rate between now and 2050.

If you like six percent, use four percent.

If you like four percent, use two-point-five percent.

It doesn't matter, actually, which one you use. Two percent is enough to do the job just fine.

Just be sure to get the exponent right.

(If you don't know how to do that, please stop talking about oil and climate change.)

For extra credit, take your new, very hypothetical, global oil demand number, and convert it to annual carbon dioxide contribution to the atmosphere.

For extra, extra credit, spell "impossibility theorem."