On Friday, Matt Yglesias made the point that only socialist state control seems capable of creating a robust nuclear power industry. After all, the only countries building nuke plants these days are the ones where governments are making the decisions. David Frum replied with a series of wildly overbroad assertions ranging from false to highly misleading, with no evidence or links to support them. (Nuclear power has an impressive effect on conservative error-to-word ratios.) Matt replied in turn, and in doing so echoed a familiar misunderstanding:

That said, obviously you need a certain amount electricity that can be relied upon irrespective of how windy it is or whether the sun is shining. So I’d happily see the nuclear share of the pie grow at the expense of coal and oil as the provider of that baseload electricity.

This notion has really grabbed the public imagination. It's become conventional wisdom that the grid can only incorporate a limited amount of renewable energy; ergo, we need coal and nuclear power plants for "baseload" electricity. Clean energy skeptics wave the word "baseload" around like a talisman.

There's far less to the claim than meets the eye, though. As Amory Lovins points out, it's a category error: baseload is a characteristic of aggregated demand, not of any particular kind of supply. He distills the counter-argument:

Baseload: The electricity system doesn’t rely on any plant’s ability to run continuously; rather, all plants together supply the grid, and the grid serves all loads. That’s necessary because no kind of power plant can run all the time, as Stewart says they must do to meet steady loads. I repeat: there is not and has never been a need for any particular plant or kind of plant to run all the time, and none can. All power plants fail, varying only in their failures’ size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Solar cells’ and windpower’s variation with night and weather is no different from the intermittence of coal and nuclear plants, except that it affects less capacity at once, more briefly, far more predictably, and is no harder and probably easier and cheaper to manage. In short, the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant. Variability (predictable failure) and intermittence (unpredictable failure) must be managed by diversifying type and location, forecasting, and integrating with other resources. Utilities do this every day, balancing diverse resources to meet fluctuating demand and offset outages. Even with a largely (or probably a wholly) renewable grid, this is not a significant problem or cost, either in theory or in practice—as illustrated by areas that are already 30-40% wind-powered.

Right now our power system might be characterized as Security Through Oversupply. We've built enough power plants to create the maximum level of power we might ever need at a given point in time; but since "peak load" times are relatively brief, most of the time dozens and dozens of large power plants are cycled down, sitting idle. As population and per-capita power use rise, the size of peak load is rising as well. The STO response is to build more plants.

The alternative will be Resilience Through Diversity: just-in-time, just-enough power from multiple, redundant, diverse sources spread over large geographical areas, managed by a reliable, intelligent power grid incorporating distributed storage. Peak load will be shaved by load spreading and efficiency; failures will be localized and self-healing rather than cascading and catastrophic; intelligence will replace brute power.

Utilities face, imminently, some very large investment decisions. Should they invest in nuclear and "clean coal" power because they will "have to" have some baseload power on the grid in 10-15 years when the plants are completed? No. For the next decade it will be a huge challenge just to get to the level of renewables integrated in Spanish and Italian grids today (30-40 percent). In the ensuing time, an enormous amount of money and engineering will go into grid resilience and intelligence. It is far too early to predict what level of renewables will be "impossible," but whatever that level turns out to be, it is certainly far distant.

This is the green pitch to utilities: Rather than spending the next decade or two building nuke and CCS plants, with all the attendant management hassles, public opposition, lawsuits, and cost overruns, why not spend it reducing demand, creating a more resilient grid, and diversifying the generation portfolio? The former is just a more expensive version of what exists now. The latter is a revolution, a platform for innovation that will make the internet look like, um, the electricity industry.

A pitch isn't enough, though. For a fusty industry like utilities, revolution is to be resisted, not celebrated. The key is not just asking utilities to use full cost accounting, but to start building such accounting into markets via regulation, legislation, and large-scale investment. Once the financial and legal incentives are correctly aligned, even utilities -- slow and regulator-dependent as they are -- will respond. Until then, until they really start trying, we shouldn't trust them about what parts of the old system are "necessary" in the new.

(For a longer and more detailed response to the "baseload" shibboleth, see Lovins' "Four Nuclear Myths" [PDF].)

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For years, scientists have pondered the mysterious but persistent connection between ecological wisdom and the follicular phenomenon that is the mustache. Is it the ‘stache that produces the wisdom? Or does the wisdom push its bearer toward the ‘stache? Early research focused on Amory Lovins, the efficiency guru who pioneered the green ‘stache in the ‘70s; while those studies proved inconclusive, recent years have brought an avalanche of evidence: green biz wiz Joel Makower, newly converted “geogreen” Tom Friedman, deft dealmaker Henry Waxman ... the list goes on. Global ‘staching skeptic? Check it out.

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The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

First Things First: The trouble with electricity is that you can't seal the unused portion when you're done using it and put it on a shelf. The New York Timesa piece from industrial-belt poster-city Allentown, Penn.  International Battery is developing a cereal-box-size battery that could help remake the energy economy by making electricity able to be stored with ease and scale as never before. The company and more than 120 others are vying for $2 billion in grants the Department of Energy will dole out to seed a U.S. industry for electric-car batteries. explores one potential industry in the "green jobs" archipelago trying to change that, filing

Another strategy to save electricity for later, beyond batteries, is to not generate it until later. The U.S. might reduce its 2020 energy use by 23 percent with a comprehensive--and well-executed--program to burn less and harness more from what we do burn. That's the conclusion of a major McKinsey report that analyzes and models integrated energy efficiency planning among local, state, and federal governments, and public and private entities. Forty percent of the savings would fall in the industrial sector, with 35 percent in homes, and the balance in the commercial sector. The net savings from identified actions comes to $600 million in the next decade in the McKinsey scenarios.

Energy efficiency is frequently referred to as "low-hanging fruit," or the "fifth fuel" for electricity, after coal, natural gas, nuclear, and the various renewables. Amory Lovins, the energy strategist and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is no stranger to energy efficiency. His 1976 Foreign Affairs essay, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken" [pdf] called for "a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy." The essay was immediately recognized as a maddening disruption (some people liked it and some hated it). This week Lovins and two co-writers call for a new manufacturing paradigm, akin to the shift during World War II, in which Detroit dropped car-making and went into the tank business. Lovins et al write in their recently acquired roles, shared with all American taxpayers, as co-owners of General Motors.

Here's an idea, possibly the next step in the history of "cap-and-trade." To reduce greenhouse gases from transportation, the federal government sets a maximum number of miles Americans can drive every year, a cap that declines over time. Drivers who exceed their cap any year must buy mile credits from less traveled compatriots. Okay, it's a bad idea, and one unconsidered by federal agencies, NGOs, and industry groups who built scenarios for halving U.S. transportation emissions by 2050. The report, Moving Cooler, was put out by the Urban Land Institute, and overseen by a group assembled from government, business, and NGOs.Reduced speed limits, land-use change, and tweaking travel behavior might bring a 24 percent drop. The changes that would bring those reductions toward 50 percent include "pay-as-you-go" auto insurance and per-mile driving fees.

The Feel Good Hit of the Summer: The U.S. and China held an upbeat summit in Washington, which resulted in a signed memorandum that lays out how the world's two largest carbon dioxide emitters can work together more closely on climate change and clean energy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the talks reinforced the centrality of climate change to the two nations' relationship. President Barack Obama opened the two-day event, noting that "neither of us profits from a growing dependence on foreign oil, nor can we spare our people from the ravages of climate change unless we cooperate." This builds on previous memoranda of understanding, including the recent agreement to invest together in research into carbon capture and storage (CCS), or trapping CO2 from a coal-plant chimney and pumping it underground for the eons.

The House climate bill would dangle billions of dollars in incentives before coal-burning power plant operators, encouraging them to seek and deploy CCS technology. The government would reward carbon pioneers by making the first 6 gigawatts of stored emissions eligible for allowances worth up to $90 a ton, more than three times the price tag the EPA has projected for a high-end carbon price.

The Guardian teases out the conflict in this tale from Spremberg, Germany, where Swedish energy giant Vattenfall has built a $100 carbon capture and storage facility. Residents nearby the Schwarze Pumpe project are skeptical, apparently, of living atop a reservoir of carbon dioxide. "It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don't have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project," a Vattenfall official said. The European Union would like to build as many as a dozen such plants by 2015.

A Meaty Issue: The many issues touched by climate change cut close to something very close to the American heart: the American stomach. The Washington Post's "Food and Dining" section riles carnivores in this piece that recites the litany of obvious reasons why mass consumption of red meat fuels climate change. Ezra Klein cites a 3.5-year-old University of Chicago study that estimates a vegan diet prevents more emissions than trading in an inefficient car for a Toyota Prius [pdf].  The problem: "Telling people to give up burgers doesn't poll well."

Why We Have Satellite Monitoring: Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk is two months into a six-month stint on the International Space Station. On Sunday, he reported a personal observation that glaciers are melting. "Most of the time when I look out the window I'm in awe. But there are some effects of the human destruction of the Earth as well. "This is probably just a perception, but I just have the feeling that the glaciers are melting, the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time," Thrisk said. "That saddens me a little bit."

Many eyes in the climate sciences now turn north this time every year, to watch the Earth's Arctic ice cap dissolve into the sea. The National Snow and Ice Data Center writes updates on Arctic sea ice extent, usually the first week of the month. They've interrupted regular programming to note that this year sea ice is shrinking faster than in 2008, the second deepest melt, but still slower than in 2007, when the ice cap reached its lowest documented extent.

Congressional action on climate change has increased public attention to all aspects of debate, even in matters where most key scientists have high confidence in observations, such as whether climate change is happening, given temperature records of the past decade. This week came news that the global seas have set a heat record, warming to 0.59 degrees C above the 20th century average of 16.4 degrees C (about 62 degrees F). But it's the air temperature that has received much (or, depending on your perspective, too little) scrutiny in the press and blogs. For further clarification, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration included a sidebar clarifying the matter, "Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions?" The passage can be found on pages 23-24 of this report pdf.

The Second "Al G.": How's this for a headline, from Technology Review: "A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels." This week Joule Biotechnologies, a start-up in Cambridge, Mass., unveiled its process for harvesting 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre of souped-up algae. The lede reveals, "If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels." That's a big if. The company has raised "substantially less than $50 million," some of it from employees. The challenges are formidable. Algae populations can grow too fast and expire before their work is done. And the bioreactors themselves can be too expensive for their fuels to pay off (Unless gas prices spike and don't fall again). The company hopes to start building a commercial scale plant in 2011. This technology is most interesting and most welcome, but be cautious about messianic stories about start-ups looking for VC funding.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist.

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If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences, Amory Lovins thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses -- you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length. I've talked to experts who struggle to substantiate their answers. Lovins struggles to leave things out.

Amory Lovins.

Photo: © Judy Hill

No one has done more to change the world of energy, both its intellectual underpinnings and its real-world practice, than Lovins. Beginning with a seminal Foreign Affairs article in 1976 -- "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" which introduced the "soft path" to energy -- Lovins shifted the focus from bigger to smarter, from more to more-with-less. He's consulted with businesses, governments, and militaries on how to achieve organizational goals using less energy and less money. His books and articles are legion; the latest is Winning the Oil Endgame, a "roadmap to getting the U.S. completely, attractively, and profitably off oil."

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the "think and do tank" Lovins founded. The occasion will be celebrated in early August at an event attended by, among others, Bill Clinton and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

I gave Lovins a call to check in on some of today's greatest energy challenges, from biofuels to Iraq to a backwards-looking Congress.

After all you've done to shift the energy debate, why do supply-side questions still dominate the discussion in Congress?

Congress is a creature of constituencies, and the money and power of the constituencies are almost all on the supply side. There is not a powerful and organized constituency for efficient use, and there's a very strong political (but not economic) constituency against distributed power, particularly renewables. So I would not pay too much attention to what Congress is doing. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but ultimately economic fundamentals govern what will happen -- things that don't make sense, that don't make money, cannot attract investment capital.

We see this now in the electricity business. A sixth of the world's electricity and a third of the world's new electricity comes from micropower* -- that is, combined heat and power (also called cogeneration) and distributed renewables. Micropower provides anywhere from a sixth to over half of all electricity in most of the industrial countries. This is not a minor activity anymore; it's well over $100 billion a year in assets. And it's essentially all private risk capital.

So in 2005, micropower added 11 times as much capacity and four times as much output as nuclear worldwide, and not a single new nuclear project on the planet is funded by private risk capital. What does this tell you? I think it tells you that nuclear, and indeed other central power stations, have associated costs and financial risks that make them unattractive to private investors. Even when our government approved new subsidies on top of the old ones in August 2005 -- roughly equal to the entire capital costs of the next-gen nuclear plants -- Standard & Poor's reaction in two reports was that it wouldn't materially improve the builders' credit ratings, because the risks private capital markets are concerned about are still there.

So I think even such a massive intervention will give you about the same effect as defibrillating a corpse -- it will jump but it will not revive.

Does the same critique apply to liquid coal?

Yes. I was delighted when both the Chinese State Council and the U.S. Senate about a week apart canceled [liquid coal] programs.

But I'm sure you're aware that the political push behind liquid coal is still very much pushing.

Of course, including some people who should know better. It has fundamental problems in economics, carbon, and water, and bearing in mind that we can get the country completely off oil at an average cost of $15 a barrel, something in the $50s to $70s range doesn't look viable. Those who invest in it, publicly or privately, will lose their shirts, and deservedly so.

I think a good way to smoke out corporate socialists in free-marketeers' clothing is to ask whether they agree that all ways to save or produce energy should be allowed to compete fairly at honest prices, regardless of which kind they are, what technology they use, where they are, how big they are, or who owns them. I can tell you who won't be in favor of it: the incumbent monopolists, monopsonists, and oligarchs who don't like competition and new market entrants. But whether they like it or not, competition happens. It's particularly keen on the demand side.

Will Big Coal fall on its face?

It's already clearly happening in the global marketplace -- although the U.S. lags a bit, having rather outmoded energy institutions and rules. Worldwide, less than half of new electrical services are coming from new central power plants. Over half are coming from micropower and negawatts, and that gap is rapidly widening. The revolution already happened -- sorry if you missed it.

How might your notion of "brittle power" apply, not to developed countries but to countries that are developing in conditions in which resilience is at a premium? Iraq is the obvious example.

Some of us have made three attempts at [bringing decentralized power to Iraq] and there's a fourth now under discussion. The first three attempts, the third of which was backed by the Iraqi power minister, were vetoed by the U.S. political authorities on the grounds that they'd already given big contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, et. al to rebuild the old centralized system, which of course the bad guys are knocking down faster than it can be put back up.

How could Iraq have played out differently?

If you build an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable electricity system, major failures -- whether by accident or malice -- become impossible by design rather than inevitable by design, an attractive nuisance for terrorists and insurgents. There's a pretty good correlation between neighborhoods with better electrical supply and those that are inhospitable to insurgents. This is well known in military circles. There's still probably just time to do this in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, about a third of our army's wartime fuel use is for generator sets, and nearly all of that electricity is used to air-condition tents in the desert, known as "space cooling by cooling outer space." We recently had a two-star Marine general commanding in western Iraq begging for efficiency and renewables to untether him from fuel convoys, so he could carry out his more important missions. This is a very teachable moment for the military. The costs, risks, and distractions of fuel convoys and power supplies in theater have focused a great deal of senior military attention on the need for not dragging around this fat fuel-logistics tail -- therefore for making military equipment and operations several-fold more energy efficient.

I've been suggesting that approach for many years. Besides its direct benefits for the military mission, it will drive technological refinements that then help transform the civilian car, truck, and plane industries. That has huge leverage, because the civilian economy uses 60-odd times more oil than the Pentagon does, even though the Pentagon is the world's biggest single buyer of oil (and of renewable energy). Military energy efficiency is technologically a key to leading the country off oil, so nobody needs to fight over oil and we can have "negamissions" in the Gulf. Mission unnecessary. The military leadership really likes that idea.

Do you think that individual changes in behavior can or will have substantial effect on the energy situation?

Yes, of course. People will vote with their wallets as well as their ballots, in a way that will affect the political system and even more the private sector, which is quite good at selling what you want and not selling what you don't buy. The interplay between business and civil society is even more important than between business and government, and that is where I want to continue to focus most of my effort. I admire those who try to reform public policy, but I don't spend much time doing that myself. In a tripolar world of business, civil society, and government, why would you want to focus on the least effective of that triad?

Reports out recently cast doubt on the environmental advantages of biofuels. Have you ever reconsidered your support for them?

You're treating biofuels as generic and I don't think that's appropriate. There are much smarter and much dumber approaches to biofuels, and biofuels do not need to have the problems you refer to.

But even cellulosic ethanol has come under criticism lately.

Not from anyone knowledgeable that I'm aware of. Unless of course you need such large quantities of it, because you have such inefficient vehicles, that you start getting in land-use trouble.

We suggest that U.S. mobility fuels could be provided without displacing any food crops. You could do it just with switchgrass and the like on conservation reserve land. Being a perennial, which can even be grown in polyculture, switchgrass and its relatives would hold the soil better because they're much deeper rooted than the shallow-rooted annuals with which that erosion-prone land is often planted. And of course the perennials don't need any cultivation or other inputs.

Just a few weeks ago my colleagues and I led the redesign of a cellulosic ethanol plant -- we were able to cut out very large fractions of its energy and capital need by designing it differently. There are other process innovations we're aware of that would achieve similar results. I would not write off biofuels at all.

Now, your broader point: Should it not be part of an integrated spectrum of efforts? Yes, of course. We can triple the efficiency of our cars and light trucks without compromised performance and with better safety, and we could also, if we want to get really conservative, stop subsidizing and mandating sprawl so we'd have less of it.

The automotive revolution alone has a number of steps you could do in whatever order you'd like. In round numbers, if you take a really good hybrid and drive it properly, -- not the way Consumer Reports says to -- you roughly double its efficiency. If you make it ultra-light and ultra-low-drag, you roughly redouble its efficiency. Now you're using a quarter the oil per mile you were before. If you then run it on, say, properly grown cellulosic E85, you quadruple its oil efficiency per mile again -- you're using a 16th the oil per mile that you started with. If you make it a good plug-in hybrid and have a good economic model to pay for the batteries -- some of those are starting to emerge -- then you at least double efficiency again. Now you're down to about 3 percent the oil per mile you started with. And of course there are also renewable-electricity battery-electric cars. There are some sensible and profitable ways to do hydrogen, to displace the last bit of oil or biofuel, and there are other options like algal oils that are becoming very interesting. It's a rather rich menu, and you don't need all of it to get largely or completely off oil and make money on the deal.

Do you think private transportation will remain dominant for the foreseeable future or will there eventually be a shift to public transportation -- high-speed rail, etc.?

We can do a lot better in that regard, with policy and technical innovation, and there are many countries that already do. But with the settlement patterns we have in the United States, it's difficult to make a large shift in a short time in that regard. It's much easier to make the cars, trucks, and planes three times more efficient, and that has respective paybacks of two years, one year, and four or five years with present technology.

In your work, to what extent do you think about quality of life, or happiness, as opposed to providing the material goods we now consume more efficiently?

A lot. It isn't our main analytic focus, but of course every thoughtful citizen has to ask about the purposes of the economic process. As Donella Meadows reminded us, it is silly and futile to try to meet nonmaterial needs by material means. If we're not careful in what we do, and how we decide, and in who decides, we can end up with outer wealth and inner poverty.

Thanks again, and congratulations on 25 years.

*[Correction, 30 July 2007: This article originally stated that a fifth of the world's electricity and a quarter of the world's new electricity comes from micropower. In fact, it is a sixth and a third, respectively.]

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What's not to love about energy efficiency? It's the paradigmatic win-win scenario -- save money, protect the climate and broader environment, and reduce reliance on unsavory sources of energy, all in one fell swoop.

As efficiency guru Amory Lovins puts it [PDF], "Using energy more efficiently offers an economic bonanza -- not because of the benefits of stopping global warming, but because saving fossil fuel is a lot cheaper than buying it."

But until recently, energy efficiency has had about as much sex appeal as, well, Amory Lovins. While Congress has tacked a smattering of appliance efficiency standards onto omnibus energy bills over the years, it has passed no legislation that would ramp up efficiency across a wide swath of the U.S. economy.

That's why efficiency advocates are cheering the Energy Efficiency Promotion Act, introduced last week in the Senate by national-security strongman Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and bipartisan power duo Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the Senate Energy Committee's chair and ranking member, respectively. The bill, which will get its first hearing today, sets a goal of cutting gasoline use in the U.S. 20 percent over the next decade and 45 percent by 2030; compare that to the 17 percent growth in gasoline consumption the U.S. has seen in the last decade, according to the Energy Information Administration. The legislation would also boost efficiency in everything from vehicles and consumer appliances to buildings and industrial equipment.

"This is not only the broadest energy-efficiency bill that has been introduced in many years, it actually has a good chance of passing," said Lowell Ungar, a senior policy analyst for the D.C.-based Alliance to Save Energy, which advised the bill's sponsors during the drafting process. "It would be a big step forward."

The bill -- an expanded version of one that Bingaman introduced in the last Congress -- would establish or improve efficiency standards for such mundane but energy-slurping items as light fixtures, residential boilers, dehumidifiers, washing machines, dishwashers, and electric motors used in manufacturing. Suppress that yawn! These appliance standards alone would save enough electricity to power 4.8 million typical U.S. households for a year, enough natural gas to heat about 250,000 households a year, 560 million gallons of water per day, and more than $12 billion annually in consumer costs.

The bill would also serve up government loan guarantees to automakers that manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles, help insulate the homes of low-income families, and require the federal government to increase its renewable-energy use by 10 percent of total consumption by 2010.

So what wouldn't it do? Alas, quite a bit, says Bill Prindle, acting executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which also helped to shape parts of the bill. "There is plenty to applaud in this legislation, but it doesn't grapple with the two biggest issues -- saving oil and setting industry-wide savings targets for electricity," he said. While it does establish goals for reducing gasoline use, it doesn't include a mandatory or enforceable mechanism for doing so -- for instance, stronger auto fuel-economy standards.

Prindle also would have liked the bill to require utilities to up the efficiency of their facilities and implement programs to reduce demand among their customers under what wonks call an "energy-efficiency resource standard," or EERS. He describes an EERS as a complement to the just-as-compellingly-named renewable portfolio standard, or RPS, which requires utilities to generate a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources. Already, more than half a dozen states have eco-geeked out by implementing both an EERS and an RPS, said Prindle, encouraging utilities to save money by eliminating waste and then drive those savings into building up their renewable capacity.

New York became the latest state to wholeheartedly embrace efficiency last week when Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) unveiled an aggressive energy plan that aims to cut electricity use in the state 15 percent by 2015 while ramping up clean-energy development. Said Spitzer, "It costs one-third as much to save a given amount of energy through efficiency as it does to produce the same amount of energy by building a new power plant. Energy efficiency makes economic sense."

But while states charge forward with EERSs, Bingaman and crew are holding back. Said Bill Wicker, majority spokesperson for the Senate Energy Committee, the EERS concept "is one that we're familiar with and one that's getting more and more attention, but it wasn't quite ready for prime time." Wicker explained the exclusion of auto fuel-economy standards from the bill by saying they're outside the jurisdiction of Bingaman's committee.

Other legislation now pending in Congress would tackle these omitted issues: EERSs are included in broader climate-change bills from Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), while provisions to raise CAFE standards 4 percent annually are included in bills from Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho), Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and others.

The Bingaman/Domenici/Lugar bill, with its broad but not overly ambitious scope, has a good chance of passing, its supporters say. It's a relatively noncontroversial bill that addresses the climate problem without saying that it's addressing the climate problem.

"You need several Republicans on board in order to be successful on a bill like this," said Wicker, "and in this case, the breadth and strength of the support from Dems and Republicans bodes very well."

Since Dubyah himself proposed a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use over the next decade in his last State of the Union address, maybe he would even sign it. To quote Lovins again [PDF], "preventable energy waste costs Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and the global economy more than $1 trillion a year, destabilizing the climate while producing no value." That should make it an enemy Bush, Congress, and the whole country could agree to fight.

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