I would add, however, that the atmospheric vortex engine is the cheapest known method of producing electricity, and it's carbon-free, to boot!!!

By producing electricity "by other means" we don't have to produce CO2 (and therefore electricity) from complex organic pyrolysis processes, allowing a much greater fraction of the carbon atoms to be converted to char, which can be sequestered directly on the surface of the ground, rather than in "underground" reservoirs as CO2, the existence of which has yet to be substantiated, much less shown to be in any way an economic method of accomplishing this.

Given the urgency in resolving the problem, I urge all of you, especially the staff at EDF to become familiar with the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, which I endorse as a low-cost, carbon-free means of producing electricity in a decentralized fashion (see http://vortexengine.ca)

This technology, using a man-made vortex, provides a means to access the troposphere as a cold heat-sink, increasing the electrical-conversion efficiency of thermal heat engines, regardless of the source of heat.

The fact is that an enormous amount of money is spent in the USA on International Offence, and nowhere near enough on REAL defence of which ecological (climate change, biodiversity loss, etc.), food security, energy self-sufficiency and health should be at the very top of the agenda.

Too much money has been spent on making the already wealthy wealthier, and on the domination of other countries for the purpose of appropriating their natural resources. In the process, the US has been impoverished to such a degree that the environment and the economy, and social quality of life have been seriously compromised and are now threatening the homeland's stability.

The message I would send to Mr. Obama is that he bring the US back home and reinvent American stability at home by developing sustainable small local green economies everywhere across the country. This will help lead other countries towards reinventing their own home-grown stability and making their contribution towards taking the planet out of danger.

It has been predicted for some time that the economic crash would occur before the eco-crash. Money might be able to bail out an economic crash, but we have nothing in the bank for bailing out an ecological crash. Without a healthy, self-sustaining, self-renewing biosphere, there is no economy.

What's the point in bailing out banks, GM or anyone else, anyway?

The only conclusion we can draw from the industrialized countries' economic growth model is that it is a stunning failure.

Take a healthy, properly functioning ecosystem. It has a balance over time of interdependent, interrelated species contributing to the natural functions within the ecosystem and with the larger natural cycles and processes beyond. Wastes are created and recycled within the ecosystem. In contrast, our wastes are piling up in the air, soil and water, and inside living things everywhere on Earth. We are changing the climate, creating huge dead zones in the oceans, heading towards driving half the species on Earth to extinction by the end of this century, and making humans sicker and sicker. Not by any stretch of the imagination (but perhaps through stupidity) can we call this anything but a COMPLETE FAILURE.

The lot of us need to focus on bailing out of this obviously failed system and start to recreate ourselves in a way that restores the damage we have caused to this once beautiful planet and sets us on a course for ecological sustainability. If we don't get moving quickly, there will be no viable environment, no economy, and no us; just the Earth orbiting around the Sun with its biosphere in tatters, taking around five million years to recreate its diversity of life (for the sixth time in its history) and recover from our abuse and neglect.

I'd like to see a seat created for the Earth in the White House with a requirement that a simple question be addressed to the seat's occupant before any decision is made: "How will this decision affect you and the life forms that depend upon you for survival both now and in the future? The problem would lie in exactly who would be charged with answering the question. Of course, it would have to come from quarters with no vested interests other than those involving the health of the Earth.

But first we have to wake up and recognize that we need a complete rethink of our failed global growth model. We are currently attempting to rearrange the deck chairs on our business-as-usual model even as we sink, but this will not work any more than placing a microscopic Band Aid on a gigantic gaping bleeding wound.