Think your hybrid and goofy-looking light bulb are helping to save the planet? Think again.

George Will?s latest Newsweek column explains how such steps ? even if adopted universally ? would have negligible impact upon a planet that?s much more resilient that most of us can comprehend:

Laughlin acknowledges that ?a lot of responsible people? are worried about atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. This has, he says, ?the potential? to modify the weather by raising average temperatures several degrees centigrade and that governments have taken ?significant, although ineffective,? steps to slow the warming. ?On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn?t care about any of these governments or their legislation.?

Buy a hybrid, turn off your air conditioner, unplug your refrigerator, yank your phone charger from the wall socket?such actions will ?leave the end result exactly the same.? Someday, all the fossil fuels that used to be in the ground will be burned. After that, in about a millennium, the earth will dissolve most of the resulting carbon dioxide into the oceans. (The oceans have dissolved in them ?40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world?s coal reserves.?) The dissolving will leave the concentration in the atmosphere only slightly higher than today?s. Then ?over tens of millennia, or perhaps hundreds? the earth will transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, ?eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene.? This will take an eternity as humans reckon, but a blink in geologic time.

This information leads one to wonder why North Carolina ever thought it could take steps that would help limit or reverse global warming.