> But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action. And engineers are hoping that politicians will just

> But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action. And engineers are hoping that politicians will just adopt their ideas without further work on the part of the engineers. Who's being more unreasonable in this situation, do you think? This whole thread is riven with the attitude, sometimes more explicit and sometimes less, that in effect the engineering work to stop climate change is pointless: we have the tools, but that implacable demon Political Viability has condemned, and will always condemn our good works to eternal obscurity - as though the responsibility of the engineer ends when the tool is designed! Which, to be fair, might be the case: the role of the engineer is to express the forms of nature and human craft in ever-more-useful ways. But as humans in a human culture, faced with the grim realities of climate change, can we really say that our responsibility ends with tool-making? Or do we have the additional responsibility to work to see those tools actually used for the common good?