Projects, a load of them, costing tens of billions of dollars each now to avoid tens of trillions of dollars of losses and suffering for future generations. See the problem?

We live in a culture of "everyday low taxes." The guy who promises bigger tax cuts tends to be the guy we put in office.

So what's this business with a bucket full of projects at ten billion a pop? Think polar. Think ice caps. Think sea ice. There's a proposal to arrest and possibly reverse the ongoing loss of all that white stuff by implementing a variety of multi-billion dollar geoengineering options.

Scientists have outlined plans to build a series of mammoth engineering projects in Greenland and Antarctica to help slow down the disintegration of the planet’s main glaciers. The controversial proposals include underwater walls, artificial islands and huge pumping stations that would channel cold water into the bases of glaciers to stop them from melting and sliding into the sea.

The researchers say the work – costing tens of billions of dollars a time – is urgently needed to prevent polar glaciers melting and raising sea levels. That would lead to major inundations of low-lying, densely populated areas, such as parts of Bangladesh, Japan and the Netherlands.

Only it's not so much to fix everything. It's more about buying time.

“We think that geoengineering of glaciers could delay much of Greenland and Antarctica’s grounded ice from reaching the sea for centuries, buying time to address global warming,” the scientists write in the current issue of Nature. “Geoengineering of glaciers has received little attention in journals. Most people assume that it is unfeasible and environmentally undesirable. We disagree.”

Ideas put forward by the group specifically target the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic because these will contribute more to sea rise this century than any other source, they say. Their proposals include:

• Building a 100-metre high wall on the seabed across a 5km wide fjord at the end of the Jakobshavn glacier in western Greenland. This would reduce influxes of warming sea water which are eroding the glacier’s base; 

• Constructing artificial islands in front of glaciers in Antarctica in order to buttress them and limit their collapse as their ice melts due to global warming; 

• Circulating cooled brine underneath glaciers such as the Pine Island glacier in Antarctica – in order to prevent their bases from melting and sliding towards the sea.

I'm sure Donald Trump can't wait to put ten or twenty billion dollars a year into the plate, right? Maybe Justin would like to put all that pipeline money aside as Canada's chip-in.

Yeah, right.