Wait a second.  It would have to succeed in order for the event that prevents it from ever succeeding to take place.  I'm wondering if that paper was published in early April.

Wow.  That was a superb summary and very noteworthy perspective.  A lot of the money spent to deodorize corporate images with public works is poorly spent and even counterproductive over longer terms.  Sometimes much more is spent advertising their goodwill than is spent inadequately doing it. (I realize that you couldn't throw in a lot of examples without the risk of alienating the very clients you are hoping to attract.)I think the idea for your business is brilliant and wish you the best of luck.  I very much like the idea of carbon credits but think the way we're deploying the idea offers too many avenues for political exploitation and fraud.  Hopefully the organizations that rate the performance of NPOs can play a role in helping to sell your strategy for getting more bang out of that buck.  Perhaps there should be annual public grant awarded to the producers of the most cost effective projects.But I think a far more effective way to create a powerful economic selective pressure leading to greener products and lifestyles would be to give each person an equal share of the net pollution absorbing capacity of our planet.  In this way we can establish a lot of negative feedback loops that can be adjusted to optimize the transition and minimize the upheaval inherent in removing so many large externalities from our economy.

I wish my nation, the United States, would offer other nations the opportunity to expand their foreign embassies here into small (100K - 250K) sovereign cities.  I see this as a solution to a great many of the problems facing the world today, from looking to relocate more of the worlds population to more efficient infrastructures to broadening our awareness of the world's cultures.  We are probably the only nation with enough expatriates from every other nation to actually make something like this work.  Nothing else could better ensure our foreign policy would, forever after, be constructive.

Is there some way to embed these graphics in comments we leave elsewhere?

I blame an artifact of our evolution for most of our problems. (It's certainly preferable to an incompetent deity!) We have brains designed to outwit our surroundings, not to understand them.  Thankfully it just so happens that a little understanding is actually necessary to outwit things or we'd probably be completely clueless and live by our urges alone.  (e.g. George Bush)Unfortunately, one of the things we're designed to cleverly outwit is ourselves, and that seems to be what most gets in the way of being open minded and receptive to even those perspectives that are antithetical to our internal model of reality. We just can't see what we're not actually looking for.  And we see all too well whatever it is we are looking for (sometimes even if it isn't there.)  Having good.is senses helps some, but the real problem is more structural and systemic.  True objectivity is a fantastically unnatural act.Even when our systems fail, we're still very hard pressed to discover what's wrong by any means other than looking for a particular problem.  Prisoners of our own dogma, we would indeed be doomed to generate nothing but heat were it not for the feedback that eventually becomes impossible for even us to miss.  And that's why I have hope that we're in the beginnings of an inverted revolution; a reinvention of society that starts from the top down like a wave and reorganizes all of mankind around a completely new economic paradigm.Another quirk of our design seems to guarantee this will happen; we behave a bit like fermions in that no two of us can share the same model of reality (occupy the same intellectual space) at the same time.  Maybe it's only because that space is so large.  Or maybe it's because we're so small.  But it does suggest that we're likely to try everything, steal and improve what we can't invent ourselves, and eventually stumble onto sustainable economies.  They are almost certain to be sustainable because they unite humanity into a collective struggle against it's real enemy--entropy--rather than each other.It might be as easy as eliminating the externalities that prevent our free market system from achieving sustainability. Suppose that in order to consume more than one share of the earth's resources in a given month that you had to buy that excess from those who must then have used less--at market prices.  I don't believe they'd sell for less than they needed to achieve an adequate standard of living.  Nor do I believe they'd be able to hold out for much more than that since someone would be willing to settle for less in that case.That one change seems to trigger a cascade of changes that address a great many of our most serious problems.  If people didn't need to work to subsist there would be a sort of selective pressure favoring those business models which tended to create jobs people actually enjoyed.  We might even see the emergence of a completely different type of business model--where the employees actually paid for the privilege of getting to do their jobs (but of course shared the resulting profits as well.)It might even lead to a gradual inversion of our very perspective on wealth, leaving us to measure our own worth in terms of how extensively we enriched and empowered everyone else.  My guess is that exploring that enormous space is simply a lot more fun than the tiny sphere centered around ourselves.