A reader points me to this delicious YouTube conversations between two gushy American women gushing profusely over the just oh-so-wonderful way Cuba has adapted its energy needs to the end of all those Soviet subsidies, including by organic gardening: 

I gave up after the first few minutes, when they had not mentioned the option of people freely choosing to vote for a different system as one plausible way of adapting. That apparently is not an Option.

Moving on, back here on earth is a punchy analysis of the real problem of making a difference over time at the global climate level even if that is what we all decide to do, namely the roaring carbon-intensive development in India and China and some other hitherto ‘less developed’ countries:

… China, which currently emits 30% more CO2 per year than the U.S., has not promised to cut actual emissions. It and other developing nations have promised only to cut their carbon "intensity," a technical term meaning emissions per unit of GDP…

True, China’s CO2 per capita is only a quarter of the U.S. emissions rate. But warming doesn’t come from emissions per capita, it comes from total emissions.

China’s carbon intensity is now five times that of the U.S.; it is extremely carbon inefficient. By the time the Chinese cut emissions intensity by 45%, its yearly total will be over twice that of the U.S. And in the proposed Copenhagen dream scenario, by 2025 China’s emissions will actually surpass those of the U.S. per capita.

If the issue is rising emissions in the next several decades, the bottom line is simple: The developed world is rapidly becoming irrelevant.