When it comes to energy policy, Amory Lovins has proven again and again that he's a pretty smart guy. At the moment, nothing seems more insightful than one of Amory’s comments in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.

Asked what energy policies the next president should champion, Lovins was skeptical. He believes energy policy will continue to be made not at the national level, but by communities and states. "With modest exceptions," Lovins said, "our federal energy policy is really a large trough arranged by the hogs for their convenience."

Right now, the hogs are eating very, very well. With voters struggling from record prices for gasoline and all of the products made from petroleum and with no end in sight, the oil companies are pushing for more leases to drill for more oil on more public lands. President Bush, Big Oil’s special friend in the White House, is pushing for more drilling, too, as are a number of people in Congress. At the moment, most Democrats on the Hill seem to be holding fast against this strategy – but there’s an election coming up.

The fallacious idea is that we can drill our way out of the petroleum problem if only the tree-huggers get out of the way. That argument already has been debunked in several places.

Even T. Boone Pickens, who has decided he’s made enough money in oil, is purchasing television air time to say that drilling isn’t the answer (Youtube).

But two points are worth repeating.

As rumored, New York-based private equity giant Blackstone Group is pouring $1.5 billion into an offshore wind farm in Germany that will power half a million homes and avert 1.6 million tons of CO2 emissions.

It’s being billed as one of the largest wind projects in the North Sea and should spawn a heap of German "green collar" jobs. Says the Blackstone Group:

It is planned to source all technical expertise and substantially all materials from within Germany.

Why would Blackstone choose Germany for its mammoth project? In the company's own words:

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.

Al Gore, July 17, 2008

The whole speech is reprinted below. It's worth a read. It's a huge relief from the drill, drill, drill campaign that's been touted over the last month as the answer to America's energy problem. Repeat something often enough, and people start to believe it. Now we've got another campaign to contend with, courtesy of Al Gore: the Clean Tech Moonshot.

And it's based on convincing grand unified theory of what is ailing the nation and the globe:

....our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of .... the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

And so Gore has issued a call, ending his speech by speaking of the moonshot:

On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon....

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.

The call for a Clean Tech Moonshot is nothing new. It has been an idea in the solutions space for a long time, echoed far and wide, in the clean energy section of this web site, too.

Once upon a time, the Soviet Union was threatening to be the first country to put a man on the moon. The president galvanized the nation to meet the challenge, and Americans got there first. The end.

The story of clean energy could follow a similar script. Global warming is a far larger and realer threat than a Soviet lunar landing ever was, but a similar sense of national mission is missing, even though developing reliable and abundant sources of clean energy is the next lunar landing, the next great leap for both America and humankind.

This and other echoes of the moonshot frame couldn't even get Congress to hand over a crumb off the federal table -- extension of the production tax credit for renewable energy. But Gore has attached an ambitious target and the full weight of his influence in order to make this moonshot suddenly real.

In his speech, he's got answers for "those who say 10 years is not enough time" and "for those who say the challenge is not politically viable." The nitpickers and the naysayers will have a field day no matter what.

So its probably worth it for every person who plans to form an opinion -- or mouth one -- to read Gore's words in the original in its entirety. If you want to watch it, head on over to youtube. But this speech is worth the active exercise of brain function and engagement of the individual human heart, and it takes 1/5th the time to read it than to watch it.

Here's the full, astonishing quote out of the mouth of Rick Wagoner, the chief of General Motors:

I’m determined and highly confident that G.M. will be a survivor.

That ought to send shivers up every stockholder's spine. A survivor, merely? My how the mighty are falling because of a short-sighted approach to energy and climate realities.

Exelon launched a public relations blitz today with a slick corporate report, a full page ad in the NY Times (and who knows where else), and an announcement carried far and wide by a largely credulous business press. The story?

Exelon to Slash Greenhouse Gases by 2020.

That was the way Forbes.com ran the story off the AP wire, and the 50 stories on Google news play the same refrain. You'd think Exelon had licked the climate crisis single-handedly.

In actual fact the company is making some modest emissions reductions far short of what science requires "in a bid to shape the debate on carbon dioxide rules and to get a jump on compliance," as Matthew Wald of the Times put it.

It's hard to criticize a utility whose CEO, John Rowe, comes out and says:

The science is overwhelming - climate change is happening now and human activity is the primary cause.

But someone's gotta do it, because from the standpoint of the global warming challenge, what's in the much-touted plan is bupkis.

Wow. From the AP:

Russian scientists are evacuating a research station built on an Arctic ice floe because global warming has melted the ice to a fraction of its original size, a spokesman said.

The 21-person polar research crew has lived on The North Pole-35 station since September 2007. Their expected departure date was late August 2008.

But.

The evacuation of the drifting station has been pushed up to this week, said Sergei Balyasnikov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg...

because of global warming.

Here's the stunning melt, by the numbers:

While you’re reading about the US economy’s tumble into recession, think about this: The US coal industry -- which powers half of America and is currently riding a sizable export boom -- has been hemorrhaging home-grown jobs for decades.

From a new report by the Worldwatch Institute:

In the United States, coal output rose by almost one third during the past two decades, yet employment has been cut in half.

The US coal industry employs about 80,000 individuals -- and dropping.

Meanwhile, renewable energy, which provides just six percent of US electricity needs, employed 200,000 people directly in ’06, and another 246,000 indirectly. And that's just a sliver of the sector’s potential.

One point is clear: the potential regulations of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy.

Stephen Johnson, EPA Adminstrator, July 11, 2008

That's what the man whose job it is to protect the environment said today when he released a 1000 page document on regulating global warming emissions. You'd think a man in his position would relish the thought of unprecedented expansion of EPA authority.

Not Bush's Johnson.

AFP has put this ironic headline out on its newswires: G8 Buries Climate Pledges - in Time Capsule. Turns out that the Windsor Hotel Toya where the G8 leaders just met is sinking $1.4 million in the greenwash gimmick to lure tourists to the remote northern resort.

They're building a park to house a monument of a melting chunk of ice and the time capsule, which is slated to be opened in 100 years.

America is a land of opportunity. But when it comes to climate change and national security, it has been a land of lost chances.

The nation’s top scientists have warned presidents at least as far back as Lyndon Johnson that climate change is an issue that should not be ignored. We have known at least since the 1970s that we lack energy security and, by extension, economic security.

Past presidents have spoken eloquently on the need for energy independence and climate action. They apparently were “firing for affect” because we remain more insecure than ever. In fact, we live in a fundamentally indefensible society, deep in denial with little control over our own vital energy supplies, laced with fragile energy supply and communications lines and living in a “target rich” environment for terrorists.