Green initiatives are ubiquitous these days, implemented with zeal at companies like Dupont, IBM, Walmart, and Walt Disney. The programs being rolled out — lighting retrofits, zero-waste factories, and carpool incentives — save money and provide a green glow. Most large companies are working to reduce energy use and waste, and many have integrated sustainability into strategic planning. What’s not to like?

Well, for starters, these actions don’t meaningfully address the primary barrier to sustainability, climate change. According to the International Energy Agency, without action, global temperatures will likely increase 6 degrees C by 2100, “which would have devastating consequences for the planet.” This means more super droughts, floods, storms, fires, crop failures, sea-level rise, and other major disruptions. “Sustainability” simply isn’t possible in the face of such a problem, as Superstorm Sandy demonstrated.

So despite perceptions that “sustainable business” is up and running, the environment reminds us we’re failing to deal with the problem at anywhere near sufficient scale. Because climate change requires a systemic solution, which only governments can provide, firms serious about addressing it have a critical role well beyond greening their own operations. They must spur government action. But few are.

“Green business” as currently practiced focuses on limited operational efficiencies — cutting carbon footprint and waste reduction — and declares victory. But these measures fail to even dent the climate problem. And the proof is easy: Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Last month, we hit 400 parts per million atmospheric CO2 for the first time in 3 million years. Worse, though, such small-ball initiatives are a distraction: We fiddle around the edges thinking we’re making a real difference (and getting accolades), while the planet inexorably warms.

The reality is that even if one company eliminates its carbon footprint entirely — as Microsoft admirably pledged to do — global warming roars on. That’s because the problem is too vast for any single business: Solving climate change means we must switch to mostly carbon-free energy sources by 2050 or find a way to affordably capture carbon dioxide emissions, both monumental tasks.

Even several very large companies cannot, on their own, get us there. In fact, historically, no big environmental problem — from air and water pollution to acid rain or ozone depletion — has ever been solved by businesses volunteering to do the right thing. We ought not presume that voluntary measures will solve this one.

But nobody seems to have noticed. Most green scorecards, corporate strategies, media, and shareholder analyses of businesses focus almost entirely on operational greening activities and policies, but not on whether companies can continue on their current course in a climate-changed world. In other words, such analyses don’t actually measure sustainability.

So what does a meaningful corporate sustainability program look like in the era of climate change?

First, corporate leaders need to directly lobby state and national politicians to introduce sweeping, aggressive bipartisan climate legislation such as a carbon fee-and-dividend program. Strong policy in G8 nations is all the more important because it removes excuses for inaction by China, India, and other countries with rapidly growing carbon footprints.

Second, CEOs should insist that trade groups prioritize climate policy activism and withdraw from associations that refuse to do so, like when Pacific Gas & Electric, Apple, and Nike left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its opposition to regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Third, businesses should market their climate activism so that customers and suppliers appreciate their leadership, understand what matters, and follow suit. Such marketing is also education on one of the key issues of our time.

Fourth, companies should partner with effective non-governmental organizations such as the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, the Natural Resources Defense Council, 350.org, Protect Our Winters, and Citizen’s Climate Lobby to support their work, become educated on climate science and policy solutions, and understand effective lobbying.

Fifth, managers should demand that suppliers assess their climate impact and set public targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But companies that are multiplying their influence in supply chains — like Dell and Walmart — must not miss the larger and more important opportunity to change the rules of the game through activism.

Even in the United States, a climate laggard, some companies are already responding to climate change in the appropriate way.

Nike, for example, moved beyond operational greening by helping to create BICEP (Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy), which brings its members to Washington, D.C., to lobby for aggressive energy and climate legislation.

Starbucks has also taken out full-page ads in major newspapers to raise public awareness about the importance of climate action and has lobbied the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration to explain the threat climate poses to coffee.

These companies are the exception. Unfortunately, even businesses that are sustainability leaders — like clothing manufacturer Patagonia, a business we admire — don’t recognize the primacy of climate change. Instead, it includes climate in a basket of equally weighted issues, like protecting oceans, forests, or fisheries. But that’s misguided: Climate vastly trumps (and often includes) those other environmental concerns.

Businesses that claim to be green but aren’t loudly making their voices heard on the need for government action on climate change are missing the point. They are not just dodging the key challenge of sustainability; they are distracting us from what really matters.

Two things have happened since the obscure holiday of St. Crispin’s day, Oct. 25, this year. First, Hurricane Sandy emphatically reset the American conversation on climate change. A recent cover of Bloomberg Businessweek was ”It’s Global Warming, Stupid!” Second, the presidential candidate who understands climate science and wants to take action has been elected. In his victory speech Obama said: “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

In history, St. Crispin’s day happens to have marked two legendary battles where armies overcame overwhelming odds. The U.S. and Australia’s improbable victory, outgunned and outnumbered, at Leyte Gulf during World War II, was one. And in 1415 at Agincourt, Henry V and his men used longbows to defeat the numerically superior French forces. It’s worth noting that the catastrophic Charge of the Light Brigade also happened on St. Crispin’s day, reminding us that great boldness often carries great consequences.

Perhaps this year, St. Crispin’s day marked another improbable victory against all odds: The date when Americans finally started talking about realistic paths to climate solutions.

Where do we go from here? There are at least three viable options today, and here they are:

The Light Brigade: a frontal assault on climate

It has become abundantly clear that adaptation, the climate solution recommended by Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, is a joke and a myth. “Adaptation” looks like lower Manhattan under four feet of water. The upside of that harsh truth is that government officials like Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Obama, and maybe even Chris Christie, are beginning to realize what conservative Yale economist William Nordhaus has been saying for years: It’s going to cost more not to deal with climate change than to fix it.

With that in mind, and knowing that Obama does see climate as a huge problem, it’s possible he could pursue actual legislation to reel in carbon emissions.

The right path wouldn’t be tepid support for a wildly complex, fraud-incubating cap-and-trade program. Rather, it would be a creative, bipartisan policy fix [PDF] supported by the left and by Grover Norquist Tea Partying Republicans.

The approach, proposed by a group called Citizen’s Climate Lobby and suggested in similar form by climatologist James Hansen, is a fee on carbon at the wellhead or mine, refunded back to the consumer. “Fee and dividend” looks like your heating, electric, and car fill-up costs going up by, say, $50 each month (though the cost could rise), but a check for the same amount arriving at your mailbox every quarter. The idea: create a revenue-neutral market incentive for our economy to decarbonize, without adding a new tax. The right likes this approach because it’s not a tax and because it creates a market incentive to fix climate. The left likes it because a carbon fee is the sine qua non of fixing climate change. Will this alone slow the rise of the oceans? Of course not. But it’s the first step, it signals intent and creates policy certainty, and China will take notice. A simpler approach — a straight tax on carbon – is now gaining traction as part of a deal to fix the fiscal cliff.

Leyte Gulf: fixing climate through tax reform

Even though the above policy fix makes wonks drool, it would be pretty bold for Obama to go after climate directly, given the insane partisanship in the country, and the outsized bickering around this issue. That’s why it’s a kind of Light Brigade approach. So perhaps he needs to tackle it obliquely, the same way Americans won the Battle of Leyte Gulf, forced into using smaller, nimble ships to fight more powerful opposition forces. A policy version of this tactic might be to attack climate from the sides, through tax reform, which both John Boehner and Obama see as necessary.

Most economists agree our tax system is broken. It’s a Rube Goldberg device that does nothing well and a lot of things badly. Annual compliance costs alone are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the economies of many nations.

Left, right, and center agree with William E. Simon, the former Treasury secretary, who said that “the nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose.”

So let’s do something everyone agrees we need to do, and in the process, start taxing bads instead of goods: pollution instead of income. Again, a carbon tax won’t solve all our problems, but it’s the sine qua non of climate fixes, and a market signal and a message to China and India that the U.S. is now moving on climate, and they can follow or be left in the dust.

Agincourt: campaign finance reform

Perhaps tax reform is just too big a lift. Why not go after El Jefe of all problems — one both right and left have aspired to fix — the problem of money in politics? As with Henry V at Agincourt, we’d need both luck and strategic brilliance to pull this off. But if we did, as Shakespeare’s King Henry said: “From this day to the ending of the world, we in it shall be remembered!”

Currently, politicians can’t simply make the right decision; they have to make the decision that will allow the dollars to keep flowing in. This is madness. It means soul crushing 24/7 fundraising, and limited time to actually govern. What if, after the dust settles from this election, both parties asked the question: “Were we happy spending a billion dollars each to achieve nothing?” We’ve certainly proved the mutual assured destruction of unlimited campaign spending. Publicly financed elections create a better world, allowing our elected officials the time and freedom to actually govern, to make the right decision, not the one that protects fundraising, and allows citizens and businesses to spend their money on things they really care about, like schools and churches, food banks and medicine and children. If you fix money in politics, you start to fix climate, and health care, and energy subsidies, and key problems with our democracy. Money in politics is the great structural failure of our republic.

People on the inside of the sausage factory tell me this is crazy talk, and that campaign finance reform can never happen, because the people who benefit most from the money — the lobbyists — are in charge. Perhaps even tax reform and climate legislation are themselves similarly impossible propositions.

But after this awful election, and after Sandy, many of us — citizens, parents, and patriots — have had enough. We are mobilized for a fistfight, or worse. At Agincourt, a similar point of no return, King Henry V recognized the human willingness to shed blood in a battle worthy of the fighting. Climate is one such battle. If we tackle this problem in earnest, the rewards far exceed the pain. If we do this, as Shakespeare wrote:

… gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Just this year, I supported state legislation on a key climate issue—capturing methane from coal mines—and was opposed by an NGO I’m on the board of, and another one I’ve supported for years. In fact, I was fighting all my colleagues and friends in the environmental world—except for those who agreed with me. http://issuu.com/theaspentimes/docs/atw7-5

Just last week I hiked with my friend Pete McBride, a green too, http://www.petemcbride.com/coloradoriver/ who didn’t quite agree with me on a local hydroelectric project. And last week, the business I work for partnered with a coal mine to protect climate.  To quote Steve Austin: “I can’t hold her, she’s breaking up! She’s breaking up!” Or as Vince Lombardi pointedly asked: “What the hell is going on out here?!!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbNidYYGjic

What’s going on out here is that Boulder and Colorado Springs recently looked like bad movie sets: they’ve been on fire.  http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/27/507119/hell-and-high-water-strikes-media-miss-the-forest-for-the-burning-trees/ Sea level rise is accelerating. Temperature records are getting destroyed. Greenland’s ice sheet is destabilizing. The jackass in the local paper who keeps writing that we haven’t warmed since 1998 has finally shut his pie hole. People are eying the dry brush in their yards with a combination of paranoia and terror. Climate change might as well be called GAME change: it’s disruptive innovation all on its own. And it’s a monster. The International Energy Agency, those staid, dusty scriveners, recently said the planet is on a perfect trajectory for 11 degrees F warming by 2100. Doesn’t matter what you believe: that kind of warming won’t be “good for us” (as at least one simpleton at National Review has argued http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295098/carbon-emissions-are-good-robert-zubrin) or is simply “an engineering problem” as ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson idiotically claimed the other day. When your house is underwater or blown away, or if a country’s crops fail, or if Malaria kills your five year old girl, it’s not an “engineering problem.”

It’s that stark nature of the problem that has us eating each other alive. Look at me—I’m losing all decorum in this essay!  In Aspen, CO, old school enviros who helped create the wilderness movement are fighting pitched battles against other environmentalists who support a 1 MW microhydro plant that would generate 8% of the city’s power. “Protect the stream!” They yell. Climate activists, including the mayor, are fighting back, arguing that you lose the river anyway if you don’t solve climate. Somebody’s got to lead because everywhere is somebody’s backyard. http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20110301/COLUMN/110309999And if Aspen—as a center of wealth and influence that can afford to try stuff and share those stories—can’t lead, then it might as well throw in the towel and default to just doing conspicuous consumption. Solving climate is going to hurt. We’re going to break things. And we’re starting with our relationships, friendships, and old alliances. There is a kernel of hope in this, and it’s that whenever an issue become so large it starts to cost you friendships, that means it’s front and center in the public conversation. Civil Rights. Gay Marriage. Remember that taxation without representation split Ben Franklin from his son. And once a topic gets into the public blood, it’s on its way to resolution.

Alliances will be the first to go, fracked forever or sometimes replaced by weird new bedfellows, like the kind of date you might pick up at the Star Wars bar. This month, as I mentioned, my business inked a deal to capture methane vented from a coal mine—one of the largest point sources greenhouse gases in Colorado—to make electricity. The power produced is triple carbon negative because methane is 23 times more potent than CO₂ as a greenhouse gas and this project destroys it. Our partner is a coal mine that carries membership in the Colorado Mining Association, which is  a state climate denial machine that on its website cites a Fox report  called “Global Warming: The Great Delusion.” Uncomfortable? Hells yes. But desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s a whole new world.

How weird would it have been if, in the 1960s, the press had reported from Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery like this: “Selma, Al. March 7 (AP) — Protests Swell in the South! Hundreds marched out of Selma on Highway 80 today. Many protesters were left bloodied, coughing, and severely injured when State Troopers used tear gas and Billy clubs on the crowds. Man, people were pissed off. They really were demonstrating!”

Of course, what’s weird about that reporting is that the article doesn’t say why the people were angry. To not report that would have simply been bad journalism. More pointedly, it would have been stupid. But look at some of the recent press on the heat wave and extreme weather crushing the U.S.:

From the AP: ” WASHINGTON– Millions across the mid-Atlantic region sweltered Saturday in the aftermath of violent storms that pummeled the eastern U.S. with high winds and downed trees…killing at least 13 people and leaving 3 million without power during a heat wave.”

From the NY Times: –Hill City, Kansas. “For five days last week, a brutal heat wave here crested at 115 degrees. Crops wilted. Streets emptied. Farmers fainted in the fields. Air-conditioners gave up. Children even temporarily abandoned the municipal swimming pool. Hill City was, for a spell, in the ranks of the hottest spots in the country.”

From the superstorms to the heat, from the flooding to the early hurricanes nary a mention of the kicker behind all this stuff–climate change. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/27/507119/hell-and-high-water-strikes-media-miss-the-forest-for-the-burning-trees/ Even though James Hansen in 1988 testified that we’d see more intense floods, droughts, and storms as a result of global warming–as well as heat–and even though the science over the past 25 years has confirmed that, few in the press seem to think that’s relevant. Even with the outskirts of major cities in Colorado on fire and a Governor who acknowledges climate change as a problem, the mainstream press fails to make the connection here either. There are exceptions, by they are very, very rare. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/30/509246/nbc-meteorologist-on-record-heat-wave-if-we-didnt-have-global-warming-we-wouldnt-see-this/

The sick and unfortunate result is that you find people saying (or more typically, thinking) things like what my friend, a retired foundation director active on climate solutions, wrote to me recently: “I’m hoping for a big fire season solely for purpose of policy changes related to climate.” Like Cassandra, we’re waiting for someone to finally say: “Ah, I get it, you were right!” Only to find that the next big catastrophe comes true and people go back to not believing. Words like Katrina, Waldo Canyon, Irene, and Duluth should have the same chilling ring as the litany “Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham” do today. But they don’t.

Friday’s high of 103 in Memphis broke the record for the date. As MLK said in his speech from the Mountaintop: “Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world.” But like MLK, while the promised land of media and public recognition of the dire nature of climate change will happen one day, many of today’s reporters may not get there with us.

Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

With magazines like Scientific American publishing articles titled “Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible,” and 15,000-plus temperature records set this spring in the U.S., it’s no wonder the CFO of the business I work for said to me recently, “I have this crippling anxiety about climate change … what are our children going to have to deal with?”

At Keystone, in Colorado, ski season is still going on, but a nearby fire meant the lodge was being used as an evacuation center a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Washington Post expressed bafflement about U.S. inaction in the face of obvious climate threats highlighted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

This all leaves most of us in the movement to solve climate change with a borderline-debilitating creeping terror that haunts our daily activities, and inclines many of us to want to rock in the corner holding our knees, eating Chinese food out of the box.

But that’s neither productive nor healthy, and Kung Pao stains carpet.

Instead, we need to find signs of hope. And surprisingly, there are a few.

The first very hopeful development comes from science. One of the glaring problems climate realists understand is that it’s going to be very hard to cut CO2 emissions to the levels required globally by 2050 to keep warming to sub-catastrophic levels of about 2 degrees C. It’s just too hard to restructure the global energy infrastructure in that time frame. But Drew Shindell and colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies suggest in the journal Science that that may not be necessary. They argue that we can target non-CO2 greenhouse gases — in particular black carbon (soot), methane, and ozone — to cut warming in the short term and buy us time to deal with CO2. Shindell, et al. outline a variety of actions that could prevent 0.5 degrees C of warming by 2050. Better yet, these actions all have major health benefits, preventing “0.7 to 4.7 million annual premature deaths from outdoor air pollution and [increasing] annual crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons due to ozone reductions in 2030 and beyond.” This is bipartisan news, because when people are healthy and crops survive, economies do better. You might even want to undertake these measures purely to protect human health and commerce.

The second development is the increasing bipartisan popularity of tax reform that aligns with climate protection. The far right doesn’t like the income tax and loves free markets. And the left wants to solve climate change and hates the fact that externalities aren’t valued by our economics. One way to address both concerns would be to replace part of the payroll tax with a carbon tax. There are several versions of this approach (including James Hansen’s suggestion to dividend the carbon fee back to citizens, which has been endorsed by Republicans for Environmental Protection — or ConservAmerica, as the group is now known), but all of them would be revenue neutral, in that a citizen’s wallet won’t change thickness; they will create market incentives to become more efficient for business and individuals; they will allow businesses to reduce their taxes through efficiency; they will create a free market for the first time by finally accounting for the costs of pollution; and the tax would help solve climate change. A carbon tax is, in a way, more libertarian than leftist; it’s a very conservative idea.

The third sign of hope comes from what I’ll call “stealth policy.” Even though the U.S. government hasn’t been able to pass climate legislation, it has the tools for de facto policy through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, and other mechanisms. Along these lines, President Obama has, with industry cooperation, set strict standards for vehicle efficiency that mean cars in America will get 55 miles per gallon by 2025, a huge increase. Last month, the EPA issued limits on carbon pollution from new power plants, and the agency is legally obligated — by the Clean Air Act and Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency — to regulate existing power-plant carbon dioxide emissions too. Electricity generation is the No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions, so this is big news. Without any new legislation, the U.S. can — and slowly is — reigning in major sources of carbon pollution.

The last sign of hope is really an omen. After a winter that didn’t appear in much of the U.S., this hot March broke some 7,000 heat records.

Climate hawks — activists like Al Gore or Bill McKibben — have always been baffled that Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan floods, and the recurrent Midwest floods haven’t woken people up to global warming, despite science connecting the flooding to warming and expectations that we’ll see more of the same.

But maybe it’s too hard to connect flooding, or storms, to the planet getting hotter. Maybe, to wake us up, what we really need is some heat.

That’s a big claim, but how else do you account for the statement that “the earth hasn’t warmed for well over 10 years now” when it is well known by anyone working on climate that 2010 was the hottest year on record?

Despite the fact that many of the authors of the article are funded by ExxonMobil through the George C. Marshall Institute, and despite the fact that none of them are leading scientists, they, and the editor of the opinion page, simply had to know that that statement was false. They may be unethical, but they are not stupid.

This is new stuff. The claim of “no recent warming” has been made deviously before by taking a snapshot of an upward-sloping zigzag line graph. (If you take a snapshot of an upward zigzag, it can even appear to be going down … ) But rarely before have we seen brazen, unobscured lying in such a prominent location. Usually the lie or misinformation is gussied up just a little bit. It suggests a desperation of sorts, as Joe Romm pointed out in his masterfully complete debunking. Romm also noted that it brings up some questions. Why would anyone — spaceman, oil industry shill, editor, university professor, or simple citizen — tarnish their name by signing onto an obvious untruth? How does that help their cause?

The problem is that willful lies have become the stock in trade of the extreme right. Another example, outside the climate arena, is the notion that if you cut taxes for the wealthy, and cut corporate taxes, the economy booms. Where are the economic or historical studies that say when you cut taxes for the wealthy, it creates jobs or stimulates the economy? Where are the economic or historical studies showing that cutting corporate taxes creates jobs? They don’t exist. And we have a 30-year test period showing that trickle-down economics didn’t work either. So how come people keep claiming it’s true?

Another claim in the article is that “a recent study by William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls … ” Well, let’s ask Nordhaus what he thinks of that. In Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog he stridently disagrees with that statement:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others) … I can only assume they [are] either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

A whole campaign, a whole half of the country, now believes blindly in multiple falsehoods. On climate, at least, some of the people you can blame for this are the spacemen and oil guys who signed the WSJ op-ed. But opportunities for blame abound. Should MIT sit idly by while a professor of theirs, Richard Lindzen, incorrectly says the planet hasn’t warmed in 12 years? Is that a teacher you want on your staff, a guy who’s missing something that basic, and lazy enough not to correct the record?

The most guilty party of all is a fellow named Paul Gigot. He’s the editor of the Wall Street Journal opinion page. And he should be held accountable for knowingly publishing statements both he and his authors understood to be false — in particuar, the lie that the earth has not warmed in the past 12 years. Galileo would have muttered: “But it has.” And because of that, Gigot should resign.

by Auden Schendler, reposted from the Atlantic

One version of the myth of King Midas holds that he was not greedy. Instead, he loved his daughter so much that he longed to leave her a stable future. When given the chance, he asked for the golden touch as a way to create an endowment. But when they embraced, she turned to gold as well. In trying to protect his beloved daughter, Midas destroyed her.

Some climate change deniers have the same admirable motive as Midas. The actions required to solve climate, they fear, will preclude us from capturing the wealth that can benefit or save many children today. Even the left argues that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, despite the fact that continued growth probably dooms the planet to runaway warming.  Environmentalists fear that no action on climate condemns us to an even more costly fate that threatens every child, forever.

Finding a fix, then, seems close to impossible. What we learned in 2011 –a  banner year for human understanding of climate change and its impact on our lives — helps explain why.

In October, climate-change skeptic Dr. Richard Muller released the results of a two-year study at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project that was funded in part by the Koch brothers, leading climate deniers. Muller’s report, in his own words, found that “global warming is real.” In fact, Muller found warming to be “on the high end” of what others had found. The results were reported in the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page.

2011 also gave a taste of what climatologists have long predicted: that a warmer world will experience more severe weather events, both droughts and storms. PBS reported on “mind-boggling extreme weather” resulting from warming, what Dr. Jeff Masters, Director of Meteorology at the Weather Underground, Inc. calls “steroids for the atmosphere.” This summer, droughts in the Southwest matched those of the dust bowl and a tornado outbreak blew away the record 1974 season. USA Today reported how natural disasters were straining FEMA’s budget. In the last week of 2011, Vermont fixed the last of the roads destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Irene.

At the same time, still more peer-reviewed science came out showing that the anthropogenic warming signal is unmistakable. Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf’s paper in Environmental Research Letters stripped out the known non-human influences on climate (El Niño, volcanic aerosols and solar variability, among others) and found human-induced warming to be clear and consistent.

Meanwhile, a new paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society argued that society is at substantial risk of exceeding warming of 2°C, the threshold widely seen to be the difference between something to which we could possibly adapt and disaster.

Last, and least noted, has been the inability of climate deniers to produce peer-reviewed science showing that warming is not human caused. Their anecdotal claims are easily debunked: the sun is at a minimum, despite record global temperatures. Cosmic-ray activity hasn’t coincided with modern warming. Volcanoes emit far less CO₂ than humans. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that is exacerbated by CO₂ induced warming. The earth has warmed before, of course, but always with a well understood cause, just like we have today.

One might imagine the economic damage of 2011′s storms would get deniers thinking. Can we continue to rebuild roads and bridges, sump out towns and drench fires, or, might ought we do something about it? And since cutting CO₂ emissions will cool the planet, is that not a good place to start?

Well, no. In 2011, the result of the head-smacking obviousness of the science, as Naomi Klein pointed out in The Nation, is that opposition has become even more strident, in large part because deniers are no fools. Fully dealing with climate change, Klein observed, would require “that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.” The climate message didn’t fail, Klein argued: It simply got through too clearly.

At the same time that the right became more rigid, Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times reported on the radicalization of the environmental movement in response to lack of policy action. She quoted Roger Ballentine, a climate adviser to the Clinton White House:

“The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people are justifiably outraged. What we have now is an antagonized grassroots calling for a radicalized approach.” Such an approach did develop, most notably in the form of 12,000 protesters who surrounded the White House and blocked the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring the most carbon-intensive fuel–tar sands oil–into the US from Canada.

In 2011, scientific certainty didn’t clear up anything at all, it just energized the left and the right, in opposite directions, confirming historian Naomi Oreskes’s notion that climate-change denial has never been about the science, it was always about ideology.

So we start 2012 with an unprecedented understanding of climate science and the consequences of warming, and at the same time seemingly irreconcilable differences on what to do, a Gordian Knot of a problem; complex and intractable, ingeniously self-tightening.

Solutions will require the boldness, innovation, and rule breaking of Alexander the Great, who famously used a sword to cut that knot. But uniquely today, we’ll need the political right and left to hold the blade without killing each other first. Some feel the only path to this future is enough of a climate signal — Manhattan under water — to make action obvious. Others see bipartisan solutions percolating even today: eliminating the payroll tax and replacing it with a carbon fee, for example, or eliminating subsidies for big oil and using that money for clean energy development, meet goals both left and right.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to understand its cause. Who, for example, tied the legendary Gordian Knot, a good metaphor for the puzzle we face today? It turns out it was a man known by some to be kind and fair, but whose vision of affluence led to disaster. He was a king. And his name was Midas.

Auden Schendler is Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book “Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.” This piece was originally published at Atlantic.

I am a parent and a 41-year-old human denizen of planet earth, climate warrior, dormant mountaineer. So like others of my ilk, I spend a lot of time in mid-life/existential crisis. That state of mind is ameliorated to some extent by my charitable giving, often done at this time of year. To that end I’m offering Grist readers my annual philanthropic suggestions. I will preface the suggestions with a short description of the conditions of my life that lead, on any given day, to me enjoying my limited philanthropy so much. An average day in my life, which I imagine is similar to many people’s lives, explains why I find the act of giving palliative if not redemptive.

Last night, my 4-year-old Elias chugged a sippy cup of water before going to sleep. Woke up in a pool of urine at 1:30 A.M., freezing. (Elias did, not me.) My wife Ellen stripped his bed, I took off his PJs. He came into bed with us. I woke around three o’clock with a negative epiphany: “I will never be as fit as I was when I was a high school teacher coaching the telemark team, skiing two days a week and one whole day on weekends. And the reason I will never be that fit is structural: tele is an insane workout, and my knees can’t take it. And second, I wouldn’t have the time anyway.”

So I went to work feeling pretty tired, and was schlumping up the stairs from the finance dept where I was talking about obscure finance aspects of wind farm development and accelerated depreciation, thinking to myself how beaten down I felt and how I would never be as fit as when I was teaching high school, and I opened the door, which bounced off my “postman shoes” as people call them here, and rebounded into my temple. Which hurt like a mother@#$%^&, and I walked into the bathroom to see WTF was going on, and I had a gaping cut. Easily a one- or two-stitcher. So I look in our first aid kits at work which have 1) infection control kits (for performing surgery? Dealing with a bio attack?) And 2) band aids.  So I hop in the car, drive to Carl’s pharmacy, buy some steri strips. Fix my injury in the bathroom after waiting for a contractor from next door to get done taking a dump. And I’m back at it, 10:55 AM. Thinking: “I still got it baby.”

So you can see why helping some desperate causes helps me get through an average day. And here are some good ones, most of which I’m involved with in some way so, like all things human, consider this a compromised and subjective, awkward and self serving enterprise.

First, you should give to Grist. (See, I told you this would be self serving and compromised. Come on in! The water’s warm!) But seriously, daily, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people like me get critical information on key environmental issues quickly and with humor. That’s a blessing but also a driver of change. 

And if you care about good journalism and free press, which is a key to protecting our crumbling democracy against corporate dollars, you should support the newspaper from which Grist came, High Country News. (www.hcn.org.) That’s where Chip Giller, Grist co-founder, (with Lisa Hymas) got his start.

And if you still care about good reporting, you should support Climate Progress, (www.climateprogress.org) a Grist partner and an incredible climate science resource, led by the combative and brilliant Joe Romm who I’ve been friends with for years and who I admire as much for his no-prisoners stance as for the fact that he is a gracious and mature adult: one thing he does as much as anything is praise and recognize the good work of others, when they do good things or win awards. That: recognizing the success of others (even in your field) as your own success, is the mark of maturity, even possibly transcendence.

If you care about climate change, you should support Protect Our Winters (www.protectourwinters.org) which I’m on the board of and which is mobilizing the power, celebrity, and leverage of the $66B winter sports industry on climate action. Their budget is tiny, but their impact is huge, and their constituents are rabid and fit, with the endurance necessary for the fight ahead.

I don’t feel too conflicted about recommending groups that I sit on the board of because I chose to sit on the board FIRST because I think the organizations are great. So another one I’d recommend is Colorado Conservation Voters, if you live in CO, http://www.coloradoconservationvoters.org/, which effectively mobilizes voters to protect democracy and the environment, also on a shoestring. Nationally the LCV does the same thing.

If you want to do more on climate, there are some relatively big NGOs that continue to impress me by how they tap corporate power in creative ways to drive disproportionate change. They are NRDC and CERES (www.nrdc.org and http://www.ceres.org.) both of which groups often call me out of the blue to say: “Hey, here’s an idea.”

If you care about equity and poverty and effective international aid that uses local resources and talent, then you should give to Partners in Health, where most of my money goes, http://www.pih.org. If you haven’t read Tracy Kidder’s book about founder Paul Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” you are missing a plain fun read.

If you don’t give much money away, then you should go to http://www.1lifecampaign.org/index.html, which in two minutes outlines Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, and will help you understand why you need to give more money away.

And if all that doesn’t seem like its of much interest to you or you’ve just had a pipe explode in the house that busted the budget, then at least know I’m there with you experiencing similar daily grievances. You don’t have, by any chance, have some Advil I can borrow?

Come Friday, I’m usually pretty torched after a typical week of being attacked as a hypocrite for working on climate change in the ski industry. So, often, I’ll join our company CFO for a cocktail. Our favorite is a Manhattan, which I mix up with some Gentleman Jack if possible, because I like owner Brown-Forman’s work on climate change. And, in theory, I escape. Or so I thought.

But it turns out that global warming may affect weather patterns crucial to the bourbon aging process, according to a terror-inducing study conducted for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Hey, now. Come on. Things are getting a little personal now.

For years, we’ve been hearing that climate change will lead to increased drought, fire, superstorms, floods, threats to oceans and fisheries, and disruptions to food and water supplies. But that’s just standard apocalypse. Now climate change is messing with cocktail hour, and that’s not cool.

Maybe alcohol will be the final straw that galvanizes people into action. Just this week alone, two articles brought up the booze-climate connection, both written — not surprisingly, given the climate-activist worldview — by friends who have been known to enjoy the occasional highball. On Huffington Post, snowboarder Jeremy Jones talks about his climate nonprofit Protect Our Winters’ new collaboration with Alamos vineyards. (Alamos depends on Andes snowmelt to irrigate their grapes.) And Jenn Orgolini from New Belgium Brewery pointed out in the Coloradoan that drought and flooding threaten the brewery’s (and many Broncos fans’) very lifeblood: hops and barley.

When many of us got into the field of solving climate change years ago, conventional wisdom was that a few industries would be extremely concerned about climate out front. Those included insurance (Swiss Re and other reinsurance giants have had climate divisions for years, correctly anticipating a spike in weather-related disasters), banking, agriculture, and skiing. But now a whole host of other industries are worried, many of which cut to the heart of who we are, of our history and tradition and ritual.

Take tea, for example, a key part of life in many parts of the world. It’s under the gun from climate as well.

Coffee too. A few weeks ago, Jim Hanna at Starbucks talked about climate impacts on coffee and his remarks got covered everywhere, from Newsweek to The Washington Post to Fox News. This surprised Jim a little bit, but of course his comments went viral: To drink coffee is to be a human being. (I’m such a coffee addict that I used to carry a glass press pot into the wilderness for three-week trips when I worked for Outward Bound.)

You can Google almost any business and find concerns about climate change associated with it. No surprise. But we humans are funny. Some things are too big for us to understand, let alone think we can fix (climate, democracy). Some things get our attention because they are small and personal and in our faces. Things like children. And whiskey.

But actually if you read Muller’s piece, you realize he’s debunking something that even most of the deniers now take as fact–the idea that the earth is warming. Most everyone now agrees it’s warming. The question, the deniers say, is the cause of the warming. And that allows them to launch into wrong and debunked talk of volcanoes (wrong, humans emit way more CO2 than volcanoes ) the sun (wrong, our hottest temps have occurred during recent solar minimum) or predicted cooling in the 70s. (Wrong, most studies predicted warming.) Muller’s oped ends saying: we didn’t look into how much of the warming is caused by humans.

But that’s the only question the deniers are asking these days, and it’s brilliant that the Kochs funded a study that showed what everyone, pundits and scientists alike, already agreed on but at the same time pointedly ignores the only issue the right still uses for its destructive politics. Deviously, the act of doing the study ingeniously and subtly questions causality; it even highlights the question. But at the same time, they appear to be conceding something in their great nobility and respect for science. But it’s like giving your typewriter to charity–you’re not being generous, you just didn’t need it anymore.

So now what? At best, the Kochs will fund Muller for two more years to show that, in concurrence with all other peer reviewed science, the bulk of warming is anthropogenic. But they’d likely never do that because they know the answer to that one too, and it’s not an answer their business model can sustain.

In short, by doing a study on whether the earth is warming, and by running Muller’s oped, the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the anti-science community keeps the door open for years of continued “debate,” while appearing to be “science based” and honorable. But they are not honorable, and the continuance of the “debate’ is craven, immoral, corrupt, cynical, unchristian, un-any religion, and wrong.