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Imagine, for a minute, that you're the president of the United States and you have to deliver a barn burner of a speech about...electrical meters. It certainly helps if you can mention the $3.4 billion dollars in Stimulus Funding headed to the creation of a Smart Grid (and Whoo! Thank goodness for a snazzy term like Smart Grid, without which the president would be stuck with phrases like "real time electrical pricing" and "demand response"). We're lucky President Obama is willing to throw his oratory skills at a subject as pragmatically important and rhetorically blah as the Smart Grid. But the twin energy speeches Obama has given in the past week reveal the crushing lack of a "vision thing" in the administration's energy and climate proposals.

In last week's speech at MIT, Obama relieved many by finally coming out fighting on the topic of energy and climate change. His speech was one truism after another: The system of energy that powers our economy also undermines our security and endangers our planet." Sharing opportunities around the world means that we also share crisis.The world is in a peaceful competition for new sources of energy. For younger people, this is the challenge of a generation--a clash between innovative futurism and pessimism. Lisa Simpson, the cartoon goddess of wonky types, couldn't have written a better, smarter analysis of our energy issues herself.

Unfortunately, the speech was all analysis and no vision. Green jobs, new technology, "room for debate on how we do it," and, "no silver bullet," blah blah. The speech revealed the truism that the Stimulus is the bedrock of the administration's reform of energy policy--doling out $80 billion across the landscape is the most powerful tool they have--and the one that's least likely to be set upon by naysayers. 

Later in the speech Obama took forceful aim at the people who will oppose changing energy and climate regulation. He said we're all "complicit" in "the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal with this energy issue that we're facing. And implicit in this argument is the sense that somehow we've lost something important--that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, that we can solve problems, that we can act collectively, that somehow that is something of the past."

All true. And yet. And yet. Where IS Obama's vision? In his Smart Grid speech, he compared the electrical grid to the U.S. highway system before Eisenhower. But the reform of energy and emissions is a bigger project than the Interstate Highway System, bigger than the TVA, and will create more domestic enemies than the Space Program. (Space was a famous last frontier--no one was there. In energy, lots of big players have been here for a century, paying off their infrastructure investments, like pipelines, refineries, power plants, many times over.) It's bigger than all of these combined with the Anti-Trust movement of the early 1900's. But we don't have a story for it yet. 

The key to Americans meeting all of the challenges of the past has been our willingness to believe in a Great Narrative to justify risk and sacrifice. We all know that Obama can tell a heck of a narrative, but it will mean he has to take a stand, and risk making mistakes, which he hates to do. Starting today, he needs to stop talking about the comfortable stuff like Smart Grids, and start talking big...and risky.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Ian Muttoo

As the debate over Waxman Markey Climate Legislation heats up, something big and scary from experts at 13 government science agencies has appeared: The Authoritative Assessment of National, Regional Impacts of Global Climate Change.

As the name implies, this is an enormous, authoritative report, but it's certainly not the first. What is remarkable about the report is how it reflects a growing trend towards personalizing the impact of climate change. Hence slide five in this powerpoint showing that pollen levels will double by 2075. Message: You (or your kids) will sneeze! Another alarming slide shows that the climate of Illinois could become more like that of East Texas. And the South? Hot.

I'm sure that some will accuse the report of politicizing the science, but I don't think that's the case. Instead, I think climate scientists have decided to abandon the dry statistics (which were driven by political considerations) and talk about what they actually see in the future. One of the problems with climate change science is that much of the discussion has been confined to probabilities and scenarios, and translation of what this actually means has largely occurred among the climate cognoscenti. (I wrote last month about high level discussions of the potential necessity of eating jellyfish. We really aren't getting that on the evening news.) This report brings makes some of these conversations more accessible. But after a decade of confusing reports--and even disasters like Katrina-- will the economy-logged public demand action now?

Side note: I find this historical graph of how weather has dramatically increased grid outages since 1992 to be almost more shocking than the future trends. The Obama administration is putting together a cyber-warfare agency in part to protect the grid from attack. But who needs terrorists when you've got squirrels and the weather to do the job for you? Add in the Gulf Coast's oil infrastructure's vulnerability to hurricanes (and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is located there too) and you have... uh... the perfect storm.

We've come to expect that the "solutions" to Climate Change will be high tech--floating windmills, underwater generators, and nano solar in the Jules Verne/James Bond tradition--or at least high concept (carbon credit trading). But this week Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner Steve Chu is in Europe extolling the benefits of ... white roofs. The concept is simple but the numbers he cites are massive: Making roofs and pavement more reflective could offset 44 billion tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking all of the world's cars off the road for 11 years. (While these numbers appear huge, there's no mention of the time frame, so they're not comparable to other numbers.)

Even so, these numbers are an interesting reflection of how much we've re-engineered the planet and climate already, and how we might start to mitigate that. Chu seems to want us to understand this as a category-jumper, working on climate in a different way than changing energy sources or sequestering carbon, and so he describes increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of buildings and pavements as "geo-engineering."

I guess it's predictable that some media are already making fun of Chu. Perhaps the idea is too simple and sensible, or just too eggheaded. (In California a related proposal to require that car roofs be more reflective as part of the state's climate policy became controversial. There's something about the brainy dumbness of the idea that doesn't float politically.) Over at google's geo-engineering forum, though, they're worried that the reception for Chu's idea is an indication of the ridicule the public may heap upon heavier geo-engineering against climate change--things like stratospheric aerosols and cloud whitening. A few years ago, discussing geo-engineering in polite company was pretty much off limits because it muddied up the discussion about when to take action on climate change. But as action has been delayed, and fear has grown, the concept has moved steadily towards the far outskirts of the center. Chu's use of the term geo-engineering in this relatively benign context is an indication of where the discussion is headed.