One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.
When it comes to global warming, coal is the gorilla in the room.
Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 - twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners.
Is it in our national interest to overheat the planet? That's the question Obama faces in deciding whether to approve Keystone XL, a 2,000-mile-long pipeline that will bring 500,000 barrels of tar-sand oil from Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.
Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn't show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.
It's not all Obama's fault: His plans to rebuild America's energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.
The floods and fires and storms and droughts that Australia has suffered in the last few years have left no doubt in many Australians' minds about just how much is a stake in a super-heated world.
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.
Americans don't pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren't sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn't get anybody's pulse racing.
Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?
Coal boosters like to tout coal as cheap and plentiful - well, not anymore. At least not in China.
Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.
For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.
One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America's energy problems never give up.
Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.
Geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate to offset global warming - is a nightmare fix for climate change.
From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.
Not since the days of George W. Bush's 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline.
The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.
Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.
