BERKELEY The story goes like this Since 1979 the peak of the last business cycle before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as President economic growth in the United States has been overwhelmingly a rich only phenomenon. Real (inflation adjusted) wages, incomes, and living standards for America s poor and middle class households are at best only trivially higher.

If all 11 billion were spent on solar and wind in the same proportion as current global spending, global CO₂ emissions would fall by about 50 million tons each year. Run on a standard climate model, this would reduce temperatures so trivially about 0.00002oC in the year 2100 that it is the equivalent of postponing global warming by the end of the century by a bit more than seven hours.