In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.
Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.
Nobody disputes that cheap natural gas would be a good thing for the economy. The question is, is this a sustainable new development that can be counted on for decades to come, or simply a 'bubble' brought on by a land grab and drilling frenzy?
The natural gas industry has worked long and hard to smear Josh Fox, the director of 'Gasland,' and has failed.
In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event.
Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.
If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for "dangerous" climate change.
Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.
In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.
Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America's de facto energy policy.
If you think Wall Street firms have it good, you haven't looked closely at Big Oil.
So if you want to know how Exxon Mobil can make $10 billion profit in 90 days, just look around. The whole world was built for them.
Climate change is a global issue - from the point of view of the Earth's climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.
The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth's climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea.
Once we start deliberately messing with the climate systems, we could inadvertently shift rainfall patterns (climate models have shown that rainfall in the Amazon might be particularly vulnerable), causing collapse of ecosystems, drought, famine, and more.
In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.
Some studies suggest that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free by the end of the century.
What is likely to vanish - or be transformed beyond recognition - are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources.
Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution - warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain - are even more deadly here.
