Ryan L. Cooper, the able young web editor over at Washington Monthly, is the guy who remixed my TEDx talk to such nifty effect. Now he's finished a new climate video of his own, which he produced and narrated.

Ryan will be the first to tell you that he's not a video production guru. He's an amateur, figuring stuff out on the fly. He just feels like he needs to be doing something, so he's doing something. Would that there were more like him.

Here's the video:

Feel free to critique, but don't be a dick.

Presidential science advisor John Holdren is fond of saying that there are only three possible responses to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We'll prevent what we can, adjust to what we can't prevent, and suffer through what we can't adjust to. All that remains is to determine the proportions.

Lots of people are averse to large-scale suffering. But lots of people are also averse to substantial mitigation measures. This leaves them placing a great deal of faith in adaptation. Just based on conversations I've had over the years, I think there are lots of people who are vaguely aware of climate change, convinced that something is really happening, but who have a kind of free-floating confidence in human beings' ability to adjust to circumstances. Adjusting is what we do -- humans live in just about every kind of microclimate the planet offers, after all. If climate zones shift or move around, we'll get used to it. Why break the bank trying to prevent something that we can just learn to live with?

Now, on the merits, this is crazy. Our best understanding is that preventing (mitigating) a degree of global temperature rise is much, much cheaper than adapting to it. Compared to adaptation, mitigation is a huge bargain, whether you're measuring by money, time, disruption, ecosystem integrity, whatever.

But still, people have an extremely deep-seated faith in adaptation. What's odd is that, as much as we talk about it, as much as we trust in it, we don't have a very good understanding of its dynamics or its limits. It remains, in popular discussions of climate policy, a kind of unexamined deus ex machina.

A new commentary in Nature Climate Change attempts to move the ball forward a little by offering an analytical framework for thinking about adaption. The key insight is that human adaptation is an intrinsically social process, so the most salient limits on adaptation may be social rather than biophysical or economic. However, the authors note ...

I know you've all been following the developments around the European Union's carbon-trading system and are concerned that ... hm? What's that? You say you have a life?

OK, fine, some background then.

In 2005, the EU launched the world's first (and still biggest) carbon trading system, the Emissions Trading System (ETS), which now covers over 30 countries and some 11,000 industrial facilities and power plants. The ETS has been a source of hope for supporters of carbon policy, who aren't exactly wallowing in hope these days.

Problem is, haggling among EU countries and industries, some of them considerably bigger emitters than others, meant that the ETS launched by issuing way too many pollution permits for free. Then the recession hit and the EU economy went in the tank, where it remains, which has driven the cost of carbon down to almost nothing -- under $10 a ton, not enough to drive much investment in clean alternatives. That's why coal's having a bit of a renaissance in Europe.

I just got back from the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in NYC. It was a mixed bag, like all conferences -- not sure I understand the rationale behind inviting so many fossil-fuel shills to an event like this (Canadian oil minister Joe Oliver? really?) -- but the ratio of new-and-interesting to Christ-how-many-times-have-I-heard-this was substantially above average. Congrats to the crew at BNEF, whose work, I hardly need to point out, you should be following.

One of the highlights of the event, as I expected, was BNEF head honcho Michael Liebreich's keynote address on trends in clean energy investment. It was centered around the conference's theme of a "new ROI," i.e., resilience, optionality, and intelligence. (I wrote a piece on that theme a little while back.)

If you have a few minutes and are interested in the present and future of clean energy, I recommend watching it:

I've been going to climate and energy conferences for a long time, and I'll be honest, it's been a while since I've heard anything new. Or, uh, interesting.

But I heard just such a thing yesterday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit that I'm attending in NYC. (I'm on a panel today at noon Eastern, FYI.)

It came from David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, one of America's biggest energy companies, which owns several power subsidiaries and a couple of utilities. Under Crane's leadership, NRG has moved aggressively into clean energy -- including distributed solar, as I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Crane is, unlike many utility types, a big believer in distributed energy. He said yesterday that the whole approach of covering vast swathes of desert in solar panels and piping the energy hundreds of miles through high-voltage transmission lines "was stupid in 2008 and it's stupid today." Rather, the key advantage of solar is that it can cover houses and buildings and car parks and other urban structures, enabling them to generate their own power.

What this means, Crane said, is that solar and wind, which have seen themselves as natural allies, are about to "part ways." Wind needs transmission and solar doesn't.

The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.

While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I've always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics -- it makes them sound Serious -- but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB asked Trucost to tally up the total "unpriced natural capital" consumed by the world's top industrial sectors. ("Natural capital" refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; "unpriced" means that businesses don't pay to consume them.)

It's a huge task; obviously, doing it required a specific methodology that built in a series of assumptions. (Plenty of details in the report.) But it serves as an important signpost pointing the way to the truth about externalities.

Here's how those costs break down:

The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).

So how much is that costing us? Trucost's headline results are fairly stunning.

There is a titanic gulf between what we say ought to be done about climate change and what we are doing. This ineluctable fact has loomed behind national and international policymaking for decades, but it is getting harder and harder to ignore.

Here's what we say ought to be done: Article 2 of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which 194 countries are party (including the United States), commits to "stabilization of [greenhouse gas] concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." In 2009, the international community got more specific. The Copenhagen Accord, with which over 140 countries have engaged (including the United States), representing more than 87 percent of global emissions, says that the countries of the world should "hold the increase in global temperature below 2°C, and take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity."

What would it mean to hold the increase in global temperature below 2°C? Unfortunately, models do not offer definitive answers to such questions. All they produce are likelihoods. An emissions pathway that yields a high (90 percent-plus) probability of holding temperatures to 2°C is almost certainly beyond our grasp at this point. Achieving even a 50/50 chance at holding to 2°C would require heroic measures -- peaking global emissions before 2020 and reducing them rapidly every year thereafter.

To do so "on the basis of equity" means allowing developing nations (Non-Annex 1 countries, in U.N. lingo) a somewhat longer window in which to peak and begin reducing emissions. After all, developed (Annex 1) nations had the luxury of cheap fossil fuels as they developed and are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions.

So let's take a look at those emission pathways. In the graphic below, the graph on the left shows the pathway that would offer a 60 percent chance of holding temps to 2°C. The one in the middle shows at 50 percent chance. The one on the right shows a 50 percent chance, but with "more equity," i.e., more time for non-Annex 1 nations to hit the peak. Observe:

This week I've been writing about U.S. utilities and their struggle with distributed solar power. Now, along comes a story that might as well have been custom designed to illustrate the point.

The city of San Antonio is served by CPS Energy, which provides it with both electricity and natural gas. CPS is different from the utilities involved in the Edison Electric Institute, the ones who put out the report I wrote about on Wednesday. Those are investor-owned, for-profit utilities; CPS is a municipal utility, which means it is owned by the city -- theoretically, owned by its ratepayers.

Nonetheless, CPS faces the same basic problem with distributed solar as its investor-owned brethren.

Residential and commercial customers in San Antonio who install rooftop solar are compensated via a net-metering program. What this means is, every kilowatt-hour of power they produce cancels a kilowatt-hour they consume. Their bill is the remainder.

It's important to understand what this means. Customers pay retail rates for electricity; if their solar power cancels out the power they would buy from the utility on a one-to-one basis, it means that they are being paid retail rates for the electricity they produce.

Electricity is like magic. It is omnipresent, available in your wall whenever you want it, odorless, invisible, immaterial, yet seemingly endless and capable of miracles. It runs all the devices and systems most beloved of kids these days, including that internet thing. More and more of our lives are being electrified, including, soon, perhaps, transportation.

And yet most Americans have no clue how it all works -- where it comes from, how it gets to that wall, how much they pay for it, why it costs that much ... any of it.

It doesn't help that the structure of the electricity sector in the U.S. is almost comically baroque, complex in any region and inconsistent from region to region. To confront its mysteries is to enter a fog of acronyms and jargon as soporific as it is impenetrable.

I've learned about it in dribs and drabs over the years, but I've often wished for a simple introduction to the basics. Lo! Thanks to Tweeter Adam Goldstein, I came across this one from long-time utility analyst John Chowdhury. It takes a while to get through it, but it's a clear, soup-to-nuts overview of the U.S. electricity system:

Yesterday I wrote that solar PV and other distributed-energy technologies pose a radical threat to U.S. power utilities and the centralized business model they've operated under for the last century. This is, I hasten to add, according to the utilities themselves.

So what should be done about it?

It's complicated. On one hand, more distributed renewable energy is a good thing. It reduces carbon emissions, increases resilience, stimulates the growth of new industries with new jobs, and gives Americans a taste of energy democracy.

On the other hand, it just won't do to have utilities view the spread of rooftop solar PV as an existential threat. Whatever you think of them, utilities still have tons of political power. If they want to slow the spread of distributed energy, they can. A lot.

So let's look at their complaint. But one key thing to keep in mind as we do is that the utilities' primary objective, the impetus behind the recent report from their trade group, Edison Electric Institute, is to protect their business model and their profits. That's what business groups do.

Which is fine. EEI's concern is what it should be: how the industry and regulators can act quickly in the short term to protect utilities, to give them room to develop a long-term strategy for grappling with the rapid spread of distributed energy. However, it's not clear why protecting utility shareholders ought to outrank other social goals. EEI's recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt.