1. Death to beavers! The next time you hear someone discussing the environmental benefits of vegetarianism for cutting methane production, see if they are equally as enthusiastic with regards to hunting down beavers in order to cut into some of the 800 million kg of methane they cause. [Edit: Not 800 million kg of methane, but methane to be 800 million kg CO2 equivalent]
Warning: Pointing out the various ways in which politics is not actually about policy is not the best way to make friends at parties. [Edit: And the search for counter-intuitive insights can often lead to inaccuracies]
2. India is attempting to stimulate growth by parring back environmental rules. Considering their current environmental rules are organized, they would need to be replaced anyway. The question is whether this cuts back on the need of bribery or if it just centralizes the bribes into the hands of centralized officials.
3. The Economist on geoengineering.
"And the mere fact of experiments going ahead might lead people to assume that geoengineering could easily be made feasible, and thus to give up on reducing carbon emissions."
This sounds a lot like the people who in 2009 wanted to pretend that monetary policy was impotent because the fed funds rate were at the zero bound. They made these claims this in order to maximize the size of the fiscal stimulus. Once it was realized that more stimulus was needed, monetary policy became the only game in town and the Federal Reserve implemented QE2 and other programs.
At some point, geoengineering will be the only game in town and the people fighting it today are just ensuring that we will have less data on the long term impact of many potential solutions.