As for Carrol saying the political goals are insuperable, that was part of the point too. Wolf calls the obstacles against solving this problem "mountainous" and calls it "the greatest collective action challenge in history." If the past continues to be a good guide the future, the odds are clearly high against this succeeding.
..........
There's a Valles Marineris' worth of difference between acknowledging how difficult (maybe impossible) the job is and declaring any and all discussion of possibilities to be nonsense.
The latter is what what so annoyed me about Carrol's reply.
.d.