Gamestorming

Gamestorming -- The admixture of games and brains to solicit profitable, progressive solutions to real-world problems. My definition to my word (though not the first to think of it).

The Schweeb
Two years and 150,000 submissions later, Google this week announced the final 16 winners of its 10^100 contest to find world-changing ideas. One of the recipients, Schweeb, proposes a human-powered monorail. The idea came from an amusement park in New Zealand where people paid $35 to race each other around tracks. I can see why. Google says this crazy-cool idea gets $1 million of its cash to test the system as public transportation in an urban setting. I can imagine some issues to work on. For one, how do you keep the cars clean in a high-use and public context? Think intimacy with the subway floor. But having said that, please, please, please, build the prototype in Austin. The promo clip is less than a minute. A more interesting clip that includes thoughts by the inventor last four minutes. Both are on YouTube.

Solar Highways
GE has concluded the public voting round on its Ecomagination Challenge. Lots of good ideas here. One that caught my eye, Solar Highways. Here's my favorite pitch from the couple who came up with the proposal, which finished in the 5, 7, and 8 spots in the Challenge. This idea is audacious. It might be impractical from a current engineering standpoint. I can only say that it would be a game-changer for the world if such a thing could come into being. Roads could be our upwardly mobile superhighways instead of motorways to hell (apologies Chris Rea).

Is Environmentalism up to the Climate Crisis?

Climate Change

I posted this comment at Grist.com this morning.

David Roberts recently asked a provocative, timely question. As I understand it, Is the American environmental movement an effective vehicle for galvanizing mass public opinion around climate change, or, is it too compromised by its own history and culture to do more than achieve within limits?

For me, this thread illustrates that, no, American environmentalism is a poor platform for climate change. Environmentalism is truly un-American. Americans don't believe in limits to growth. The mythos is the city on the hill, the boundless frontier, the proximity of personal freedom with natural abundance, more recently, of super-abundance through technology. Environmentalists believe in limits to growth, are respective of constraints on individual liberties (an authentically conservative principle), and most radically, do not entirely believe in linear progressive history. Setting history and culture aside, it's literally not in our nature not to procreate. The critique of reproduction that has been going on at Grist is perfectly rational and desirable, but it's outside of our evolutionary makeup, let alone our culture heritage. Environmentalism can't focus mass concern on climate when it is wont to put the polar bear cub, not the human child, on the milk carton.

Now, before I piss off everyone at once this is not a bad thing. If the environmental movement were truly able to speak to the psyche of the average American suburbanite, like say advertisers or movie producers do, than it could be deformed in a way that would compromise its integrity. Keeping environmentalism at arms length from the center of the public square will protect its ability to severely, trenchantly critique the master narrative of progress through unbridled growth and consumption. With any luck, that has to endure the climate crisis.

Commentary in this thread reflects thinking that is typical of environmental culture and which is a-typical from mainstream thought. I wouldn't want it any other way. However, it means to me that some other medium has to carry the torch respective of a goal for broad public policy consensus on climate.

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-01-discovery-hostage-taker-population-obsessed-kid-hating-eco-wacko/#comments

The Energy Blues

On Friday, Austin Energy set a new all time peak demand record, 2,628 megawatts (MW), "power sufficient for about 525,000 homes during very hot weather with associated air conditioning," according to Austin Energy's blog. The peak occurred between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. with the temperature at 104 degrees. The previous all-time record was set last June at 2,602 MW.

Texas also set a new all-time peak record yesterday, the fourth over the last three weeks. Peak demand for ERCOT, the electric grid for most of Texas, was 65,715 MW. The state peak occurred between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m.

AE this week announced a volume purchase of 2 MW of volume solar to be installed on public buildings at $1.85 per watt. These will be track mounted panels, 235-watt rated. AE made a similar purchase last summer for $2.98 per watt. The price has dropped almost 50 percent in one year due to improved manufacturing techniques and silicon, says AE.

Will Elliott's school house rock with solar?

Energy ... You can get it by dammin' up a river
Energy ... A windmill can make the breeze deliver
But even with millin' and dammin'
Our needs are so much more demanding
For energy ... We have to use some kind of fuel.

Carbon Stalks the Neighborhood

I asked a Grist member whom I trust to vet an idea I had for personally getting involved in my local community in regard to climate change. He didn't endorse it. So, I'll likely let it go.

It's hard to remain recumbent in the face of impending catastrophe. It's difficult to listen to intelligent, well-meaning friends speak about the banalities of daily life given what I know to be the inexorable outcomes of geophysics. It would be something akin to living in Herculaneum, amidst the bustle and pleasures of daily urban routines, with the foreknowledge of events to come.

Friends talk about raising kids up with the character and skills they'll need to fit into the world. Understandable. They're only creatures of history. Lost to so many of them is the tragedy that the world will not be fit for their kids.

Our Fate Didn't Rest with the 2010 U. S. Senate

"Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?"

The quote above is by Jeremy Grantham, American investor and Chairman of the Board of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), a Boston-based asset management firm. GMO is one of the largest managers of such funds in the world, having more than US $107 billion under management as at December 2009. Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets.

As I've said before here, I think that big money likes to live in a reality based world. To the list we can add Beluga Shipping which has discovered it can save $300,000 per ship by transiting its container vessels over the melting Arctic. We can add the Pentagon, which broke with the Bush administration on the factual reality of climate change and now considers it serious enough to include its main strategic planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review.

I could pile on other institutions (the CIA, the National Academy of Sciences) and governments (Saudi Arabia and Russia, of all places) and businesses (the property insurance sector and the C. I. C. E.) and power brokers (John Doerr, Bill Gates, James Hanson), but at the end of the day, if all the evidence of the kind that I find persuasive does not start to get a wider public audience, than it is a reasonable proposition that future generations will lose the Blue Planet.

For those who believe for whatever reason that we need to move to a low-carbon energy economy, none of the above answers the question, what now? 2010 has been a miserable year for climate watchers. First Copenhagen, now the U. S. Senate. There are opinions about where to go from here. Ill link to some of the more interesting and influential ones.

Bill McKibben, "How to Create a Real Climate Change Movement"

Shapiro, et al. "What did the Climate Bill Die?"

National Journal, "Can the U. S. Keep Up in the Clean Energy Race?"

The following is extracted from a panelist editorial at the National Journal. Mr. Muro's assessment and proscription is dead-on.

Energy Innovation -- Now What?

By Mark Muro

Fellow and Director of Policy, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings

So, the flickering chimera of a climate bill centered on a cap-and-trade system finally flickered out last week -- perhaps for a long while.

Which is really troubling. Instead of an economy-wide carbon pricing system or even a utility sector-only one, the nation will be lucky to obtain from Congress some modest oil-spill response measures, some oil industry regulatory responses, and some incentives for home energy efficiency retrofits and natural gas vehicles. No major energy efficiency standards seem in the offing. No new renewable energy standard seems on the docket. And as to any other of the dozens of powerful ways to begin accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy in which clean energy becomes cheap, well they are not here or at all forthcoming.

Meanwhile, competitors forge ahead with regulations, incentives, creative financing tools, and strategic investments designed to capture the Silicon Valley of the next, low-carbon economy.

So where do we go from here? Some alternative ways forward remain, but none with such broadly catalytic p...

So, the flickering chimera of a climate bill centered on a cap-and-trade system finally flickered out last week -- perhaps for a long while.

Which is really troubling. Instead of an economy-wide carbon pricing system or even a utility sector-only one, the nation will be lucky to obtain from Congress some modest oil-spill response measures, some oil industry regulatory responses, and some incentives for home energy efficiency retrofits and natural gas vehicles. No major energy efficiency standards seem in the offing. No new renewable energy standard seems on the docket. And as to any other of the dozens of powerful ways to begin accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy in which clean energy becomes cheap, well they are not here or at all forthcoming.

Meanwhile, competitors forge ahead with regulations, incentives, creative financing tools, and strategic investments designed to capture the Silicon Valley of the next, low-carbon economy.

So where do we go from here? Some alternative ways forward remain, but none with such broadly catalytic potential to change habits and investment calculi across the economy, and none alone likely to win the United States the clean tech race.

Stronger federal and state regulatory efforts will be one way forward. Here the EPA looks poised to play a significant role at the national level, but piecemeal regulations and patchwork of state efforts won’t create the sort of stable investment environment that the transition to a clean energy economy requires. Using government and especially Department of Defense procurement more strategically to increase demand for low-carbon solutions and accelerate deployment could serve as another lever too.

And now more than ever the federal government must pile onto clean tech innovation with large R&D investments. The nation badly needs a new push for energy system innovation that seeks countless efficiencies but also triples to quintuples today's anemic baseline level of federal energy innovation R&D. Expert consensus suggests that federal government should invest at least $15 billion a year in federal energy R&D. Cap-and-trade was never going to solve the nation’s and the world’s energy challenges alone. The federal government still needs to ramp up support for investment and research in new, breakthrough technologies that can radically reduce the carbon-intensiveness of the economy and make clean energy cost-competitive.

However, it bears saying right now that the demise of cap-and-trade only underscores the urgency of locating the significant, dedicated revenue streams needed for clean energy investments, research, deployment, and transition costs if the U.S. is not to miss out on the clean energy economy entirely.

Some will most regret the loss of the best chance we may have had for several years to raise the price of carbon emissions and so stimulate new and cleaner behavior across the economy. However, at least equal to that disappointment is the loss of a top candidate for generating the needed innovation revenue—tens of billions of necessary investment money. And the longer term costs to national prosperity of this dithering on climate, energy, and innovation matters—while other countries rack up first-mover advantages in technology after technology—are likely as grave as yet unknown.

Don't you Know, Talking About a Revolution Sounds. . . .

This from Bill McKibben today, via TomDispatch:

McKibben asks us to "Try to fit these facts together:"

* According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.

* A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.

* Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.

* And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t do less than they could have -- they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.

Well, the point is obvious. So, then what? McKibben continues:

"I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I’ve spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy."

I highly recommend McKibben's piece today It's a launching point for action. It raises questions for me. Will getting mad get 60 votes in the Senate? Who will respond to McKibben's facts or his anger? Or mine? How torqued up do we need to get? How busy? It's time to think seriously about how social change works in America, not in the abstract, but in the world as it really is. This is not Rachel Carson's America (and Bill McKibben is not Rachel Carson). The media landscape that amplified the groundswell of concern over pesticides and swamped the efforts of the chemical industry to discredit Carson and silence her message is no longer in place. Public trust in the integrity of journalism is at an all time low. More Americans get there "news" from Fox cable and neo-con radio, which get their programing scripted through conservative opposition research. Where does plain speech and passion get you in this landscape?

In sum, do we even have a path to affect change through consciousness raising in time? Time is the key element. I'm skeptical. If we do, fine. But if we movement build, as seems to be McKibben's ralling cry now, what is the probability of success? Is climate like past environmental fights? Is it like past progressive fights? Does it lie within the American Experience, or is it a-historical, outside any generation's experiences? Do we necessarily have to have the public on board before the federal government acts? American history isn't an unbroken narrative of Constitutional decorum. We've had command economic moments in American history. We've had Executives defy the Courts and the Congress, and the courts and the congress deferred/caved when Executive said that national security was at stake.

You can almost here Ricardo Montalban, "Time is a luxury you don't have, Bill."

Lighter Elements

1) Structuralists Get No Love

When the economy goes South, so does concern for climate change. A University of California Study notes that Google Searches for terms like “climate change” rise and fall with the business cycle. And, “When the Economy Falters, the Pews Fill,” so says another economist with spreadsheets to make his case. All this new data to recapitulate Dr. Abraham Maslow's “Theory of Human Motivation,” published 1943. Oh, and old men Marx and Weber must have been on to something too.

2) Priorities in Pictures

So when unexpected danger approaches at breakneck speed, do you run or grab for your camera bag?

3) The Bard of Wascilla

Former governor, future president, Sarah Palin, made up a word this week in a tweet to her followers, "refudiate." Refudiate, which is obviously a blend of the root words refuse and ate. Ms. Palin first deleted her word about 30 mins. after first posting it. Later she did a shout out to Shakespeare and said that really it was just homage to his greatness that compelled her to do her part in keeping English a "living language." She's into linguistic organic cultivation. I can dig that. But, as Peter Sagal quipped, Sarah Palin does have one thing in common with Williams S. Just like Shakespeare, half of of America can't understand what the other half of America sees in her.

City of Austin Utility Services

In mid-September of 2009, Sharon and I were within 48 hours of finalizing a contract with Celestial Power of Austin to install solar panels on our home. I was eager to get this done. I'd spent two months researching and get the financing together. Then Celestial told us that the City of Austin was retroactively downgrading their residential solar rebate incentive because the city had already run through it's program funds. Anyone who had not already gotten their application in as of Sept. 1 would have to re-apply and would be subject to new rebate figures. Needless to say, the lowered rebate knocked us out of the game.

Our experience with solar, and Celestial Power's as well, was the national story with renewables, writ small. The cheapest electric generation source is and has been coal. Coal is also heavily subsidized by the federal government. Without these subsidies, large wind generation would be less expensive per K/w hour. But, the subsidies remain. And, in the absence of price stability brought about by a Renewable Energy Standard, small green energy businesses have been at the mercy of these state and federal boom and bust cycles for green power, depending on the political winds. It's been murderous to small companies like Celestial, though they're in it for the long haul and the future isn't coals (though it almost certainly isn't going to be fixed flat panel solar's either. The technology is evolving fast).

For the home owner, the upfront capital costs of wind or solar are often prohibitive. For instance, Dad and I looked last month at a wind turbine for his home in rural Central Texas. He could order just the turbine off the internet for about 8.5k and have it delivered to his door, but it takes the expertise and equipment to get the thing up on a tall poll and that is a little less than double the price. At current electric rates, that's not viable. In our case, here in Austin's burbs, wind is out. Solar, however, is not. Celestial offered us three systems ranked in price and efficiency. I wanted the most efficient system, also the most expensive, because it would pay back the quickest in energy savings (we did a spread sheet that showed a payoff period of seven to eight years), and, once paid, would run our meter backwards when the system was at peak. [On another day, I might post the figures]. The Austin Energy rebate was origianlly going to knock roughly 60 percent of the up-font costs. The was a 30 percent federal tax credit, part of the 2009 recovery/stimulus bill, that also brought down the costs, though we would get this back at tax time. Roughly, we were going to get a $35,000 solar rooftop array for 1/3 of the cost.

So, when that project went pooof, I set more modest goals for home efficiency. In the fall of 2009 I replaced all the incandescent lighting in the house that I could with CFLs (The exception is the bank of vanity lighting in the master bathroom which I knew Sharon did not want to replace with the softer more pleasing-to-the-eyes glow of the CFL. Even though you can now get bright white CFLs, not the gas station bathroom vapor lighting which really was an impediment, for some those little coils just aren't aesthetically pleasing in certain old fixtures.) I put the big screen tv, the VCR, the DVD player, and Wii system on a power strip which we turn off when not in use to cut down on the vampire power consumption. We had Green Collar Operations, another Austin native company, test our home for energy efficiency. It passed with flying colors, but they did weatherize our three doors downstairs as well as blow in another 8 inches of insulation into the attic. Here again, there were three energy rebate programs that kicked in (two local and one federal). Green Collar did all the paperwork. Again we were out of pocket something like $350 on a total bill roughly three times our outlay (I'll update the figures when I track down the paperwork, my filing system is shoebox these days). There have been other little changes also that I won't continue to itemize. All this is story and preface to the graphs above.

Has any of this made a difference? With most of the summer months behind us, it looks like the changes are paying off.

The last word, courtesy of Tom Friedman, goes to Jeremy Grantham, investor and $100 billion hedge fund manager, who, in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Hedge fund managers like operating in a reality based world. So also the Pentagon. In 2007, the military broke with the Bush administration on climate, issuing a report that climate change threatened military readiness and strategic U. S. security issues. This year, the Pentagon's primary planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, "notes that climate change affects the Department of Defense “in two broad ways”: first, global warming impacts and disasters will “act as an accelerant of instability or conflict,” and second, military installations and forces around the globe will have to adapt to rising seas, increased extreme weather, and other effects of global warming."

Folks, climate is not some green feel good thing when these actors are involved. I could add the CIA and the nation's other intelligence gathering services, the nation's insurance companies, and the Saudi Government if I spend the research time. Addendum: The Department of Defense has committed to cutting emissions from its non-combat facilities by 34 percent by 2020. It's also the largest purchaser of green power in the U. S.

From Op-Ed columnist Tom Friedman:

"We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign — even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25friedman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

From today's New York Times:

"But there's evidence for less optimism: 47 senators signaled discomfort with a federal policy reducing greenhouse gases. Six of them are Democrats, a margin of mutiny that, if transferred to a vote on climate legislation, would likely spell disaster.

They include: Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana; Mary Landrieu of Louisiana; Ben Nelson of Nebraska; Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia; and Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both of Arkansas. All come from states that lean heavily on fossil fuels.

The final tally, combined with heightening campaign partisanship, seems to have convinced some cap and trade supporters that the climb is too steep this year."

Craven self interest trumps a future world worth living in.

Ch. . Ch. . Ch. . Ch. . Changes,

I've decided it's hard to blog. Take today, which is a lot like most every other day. I took the kids to swim. For an hour I throw the eight-year-old boy up out of the water while I'm keeping close tabs on the 20 mo old. By the evening when I have free time after the kids are in bed, say 10ish, I'm usually disinclined to think about writing 'cause I'm beat. If this is what 40 feels like. . . .

I need to headline every entry with an easy to see subject header. My interests, now, tend to be future oriented. Kids factor into that, but it's always been my nature. So, I won't be blogging about my ancestors, which is my Dad's hobby. But I will be thinking lots about how technology and nature and values are developing in ways that are re-making the world and re-making us.

In college, I was trained by some very good historians. Historians are averse to saying that changes are "radica." Usually, they are not. When talking about change, do you mean change of degree, or change in kind. Is change of a qualitative nature? What is the baseline for measuring change?

Tonight, the subject is otherworldly, literally. One of the most awesome things about being alive at this juncture in history, and I do mean awesome in its fulsome sense, is that you and I can be sure that the universe is full of worlds beyond our own solar system. As of this posting, the official roster of NASA-JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) exoplanets is 453. But, the discoveries are happening so fast now that another site lists 464 planets.

The rate of planet detection will dramatically accelerate in the coming months thanks to the Kepler mission. The observatory was launched last year and uses photometry, a new detection method. Super sensitive light-gathering instrumentation focuses on a star and looks for the minuscule dimming that occurs in starlight when a planet in orbit transits in front of its star. The Kepler team recently released data on the mission's first 43 days. In that time it had observed 156,000 stars. The result was about 400 "objects of interests" that will get increased scrutiny in coming days. It is estimated that about half of this number will turn out to be confirmed planets. At this rate, by the time the mission ends, Kepler could add thousands of worlds to the list.

The big picture is that planetary star systems like our own are typical and they are abundant. The next question that's just in the offing -- do any of these worlds harbor life? Such a discovery would be a change of kind. The confirmation of simple organic life on an extrasolar planet would have staggering scientific and philosophical implications.

The planets heretofore discovered are poor candidates for life as we understand it. They are almost all supermassive gas giant worlds with orbits that bake or freeze them. The smaller, rocky worlds like Earth and Mars with stable orbits in the star's habitable zone have, before Kepler, been beyond the means of detection. Kepler will change that, once the data is analyzed. It will find planets whose size and orbits commend them to future missions.

The Europeans Space Agency is preparing that mission. More on ESA's Darwin mission in a future post.

We've Seen this Movie Before
If you like following the punditocracy, and really, who doesn't, you run the risk of believing that they know something. How many times was health care legislation all but dead? The climate-energy bill is following a similar script. (What creature will the process birth this time, assuming there is a delivering?) Reid announced that the Senate was going to move forward with a bill that must be comprehensive, that is, not just be an energy-only bill. So what momentous events happened to, ostensibly, embolden Senators to carbon reduction? Naturally, they caucused together.

They did what?
David Roberts at Grist writes:

On Thursday, the Senate Democratic caucus held a meeting and everyone emerged giddy as schoolchildren. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) called it "one of the most motivating, energized, and even inspirational caucuses that I've been a part of." Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called it "absolutely thrilling." Said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), "It was really very, very powerful. It was inspirational, quite frankly."

Another observer this week said that they must have had one of those trust-building sessions where there were motivational speaks and people caught their mates as they stood on chairs and fell backwards.

From here to . . . .
Who knows where this goes. And what again of the White House? Is this proof that "we will find the votes for a bill?" The President is meeting with the G8 and a leaked document fails to follow up on previous G8 promises to phase out subsidies to fossil fuel producers that, worldwide, receive $550 billion. There's little the President or the G8 could do that would be more helpful to move the ball forward than to end these subsidies, yet the language in the draft talks about voluntary cuts as individual members see fit. Throw another Maldives on the barby mate.

White House Course Correction on Climate?

"Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth." --Øystein Dahle, former Vice President of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea.

Among those concerned about climate change, the President, from what I can discern, is not very popular. He's not meeting expectations. He is not speaking the ecological truth. In his public pronouncements, especially in his much awaited and much criticized speech on energy, Mr. Obama is accused of lacking leadership and vision. Both The Atlantic and The New York Times took aim at the President's leadership, or lack thereof, on the energy climate bill now sausaging its way through the Senate. Writes the Times: "Mr. Obama must stress, explicitly and emphatically, that a conventional energy bill will not do -- and that attaching real costs to older, dirtier fuels now dumped free of charge into the atmosphere is the surest way to persuade American industry to develop cleaner fuels." Failure to price Carbon, says the Atlantic, "is a recipe for toasting the planet." Indeed, climate change is an existential threat. If we don't rapidly transition out of a carbon intensive energy economy we all but guarantee a path toward the collapse of the biosphere that supports us.

One of the questions before us in the U.S. this hot summer is, as Sting says, "Is there a political solution to our troubled evolution?" Politics failed at the global level in Copenhagen last year. Will it do so at the national level this year? Is President Obama proving inadequate to the singular challenge of his presidency, indeed, to the greatest challenge of his generation? (Or, of any generation. Climate change is believed to have destroyed discreet civilizations, but never Civilization itself. That's ahistoric. There really is no comparison)

The question on my mind today is what is the role of the White House this year on climate?
The president has officially said that he will "find the votes" to get a comprehensive climate and energy bill through the Senate. But, today's addition of Climate Wire reports that there is no longer the momentum in the Senate for a price on carbon. This echoes reporting elsewhere. The fall back position, if that is indeed what it is, is to price carbon from a single sector, electric generation. David Roberts of Grist has a really good synopsis of why this could be seen as a desirable half-a-loaf position, if it were to be done right.

But, is that enough? And, should the President be publicly talking about climate change? Of climate, says Roberts, it has, from the White House's point of view, become that which must not be named. Should the White House be speaking "openly, frequently, and forcefully about the challenge of global warming," as one critic put it, or should the politics of the moment dictate another course? If so, what is that course?