while I agree with Jason it would be enormously wiser to leave the coal in the ground, and that all efforts should be made on that front, I have real doubts about whether it is possible as oil prices drive people in precisely the opposite direction.

I think it's quite possible that people will decide to leave the coal in the ground. I just don't see why they'd pump the oil to the limits of what's physically possible, yet at the same time agreeing to keep the coal in the ground.

Either we have restraint with all fossil fuels, or with none.

And they completely miss deforestation, just blandly assuming that we could have some grand world forestation campaign. The fact is that people's efforts to stop deforestation came decades before any ideas about climate change were about. And yet still 17.5% of greenhouse gas emissions are from deforestation, illegal logging is rife and responsible for more than half the logging done in Asia, and so on.

That does not to me suggest that deforestation could stop, let alone be reversed. This is especially true in the Third World where most deforestation takes place, because... well, let's imagine that we stop pumping oil and gas and digging up coal. We in the West are wealthy enough to put in wind turbines and the like to make up for it. But what's Senegal going to do? Or Colombia? They'll cut wood and burn it, that's what.

So any effort at reducing greenhouse gases has to look not only at burning fossil fuels, which are after all just 55% of all emissions, but also at deforestation, and so on. If we don't want these countries to keep chopping down their forests, well first up we need to stop buying their timber, and second we need to give them an alternative. I'd begin building wind turbines not in Australia or the US, but in Senegal and Colombia and the like.

This would also help with rapidly rising in emissions countries like China and India, to show that you can have a good quality of life without burning fossil fuels.