I've been writing a lot about the activist campaign to block the Keystone XL pipeline. Much of that writing has been devoted to pushing back against the squadron of Very Serious People who want to pooh-pooh the campaign as mistargeted, misguided, and futile.

But whether you like the campaign or not, it's too late for second-guessing at this point. The fight is underway; it's already freighted with symbolism. Within the next few months, the Keystone decision will be made, for good or ill. Then the question arises: What's next for the climate movement?

This is an opportunity to take a step back and think carefully about the effort to address climate change and the role activism plays in it. I'll probably do several posts on this -- it's a rich subject -- and I hope others will join in the discussion too.

I want to kick things off by discussing one important distinction that has lurked beneath a lot of the conflict over Keystone:

Supply vs. demand

One of the recurring critiques of the Keystone campaign goes like this:

Keystone is getting all the attention, but the brewing battle over coal exports in the Pacific Northwest is, from a pure carbon standpoint, far more significant. Right now one of the main problems for climate hawks is that all the decisions about new coal trains and coal export terminals are being made locally, one at a time, as rail and coal companies bribe this town and that town with promises of economic development. There's no global assessment being done and no real plan in place.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has refused thus far to do a comprehensive assessment, which is absurd -- something to rally behind after the Keystone thing is resolved, perhaps. But most of the real authority lies in the hands of state lawmakers. So climate hawks have been watching new Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) like, um, hawks.

Kitzhaber, who has called for a federal review of coal ports before, had some interesting things to say yesterday at a summit of the American Wind Energy Association. Here's a short clip:

Yesterday I wrote a response to Andy Revkin's recent New York Times post on Keystone. As vexing as I often find him (and him me!), Revkin is curious about how the world works, open to feedback and new information, and proceeding from a place of humanitarian concern on climate change. It's fun and fruitful to engage with him.

And then there's his colleague, Joe Nocera.

Nocera's latest New York Times column in favor of Keystone -- his third -- is mostly about how he didn't meet with climate scientist James Hansen, because Hansen was off getting arrested. In it, Nocera selectively quotes from a bit of private email that makes Hansen appear critical of Bill McKibben, which can only be described as a spectacular dick move. But Nocera makes no mention of the supporting material Hansen sent him. Nor does he engage Hansen's arguments. He just says Keystone opposition is "boneheaded."

Nocera has been inveighing on behalf of Keystone XL for a while now. Here's his argument:

Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to remain the world's dominant energy source for the foreseeable future, and we are far better off getting our oil from Canada than, say, Venezuela. And the climate change effects of tar sands oil are, all in all, pretty small.

That's really it -- you can go back to the previous two columns and you won't find much more.

The basic idea is that, as long as there's demand for fossil fuels, there's going to be supply, so we might as well get the good oil from Canada (even though it's dirtier) than the bad oil from Venezuela. Neither Nocera nor the dozens of other Very Serious People who repeat this argument explain why Venezuelan oil is worse for us than Canadian oil, despite its lower carbon footprint. Perhaps it has Chavez cooties in it? Fans of basic economics will recall that oil is a fungible commodity sold on a world market; if Venezuela does something extra-socialist that raises the price of oil, we'll be paying more, even if the oil we're burning comes from Alberta. The whole construct of "independence" from "foreign oil" (oddly, we don't count Canada as foreign any more) is goofy. But like Joe Scarborough with the deficit, Nocera knows it's a problem because, well, everybody knows it's a problem.

I know Andy Revkin of The New York Times writes posts like this in part to bait people like me. But like Popeye, I yam what I yam. So consider me baited. Self-proclaimed moderates like to lecture anti-Keystone XL activists that they are "distracting" and "counterproductive," without spelling out what the hell that means, yet they seem bewildered when that makes the activists in question angry.

Let's review. This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.

As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded "my way or the highway environmentalism," y'all, but don't worry, he's got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.

This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.

So let's not yell. Instead let's take a calm look at the Reasonable Revkin take on Keystone activism, representative as it is of a certain VSP consensus. In his post, he says it could be "counterproductive" to focus an activist campaign on the pipeline. I want to dwell on that word for a second, because it's crucial to his case.

Last week, reporter John Broder of The New York Times wrote an account of his road trip from Washington, D.C., to Milford, Conn., in Tesla's new all-electric Model S sedan, using the two Superchargers that the company has set up along the route. Broder says he got less range than advertised, lost a bunch of range overnight inexplicably, and ran out of power on his last leg. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, published a response to the story, effectively accusing Broder of journalistic malpractice.

Broder responded to Musk, and then responded again. Rebecca Greenfield at the Atlantic Wire also responded, charging that Musk hadn't established his case against Broder. TechCrunch weighed in. Twice. Also GigaOm. Also Boing Boing. Even Gawker piped up. And of course our own Philip Bump.

This seems like an awful lot of attention devoted to the precise performance characteristics of this particular vehicle on this particular trip. The Tesla S has been extensively and mostly positively reviewed in lots of other outlets (including the NYT itself). It's pretty well-established what it can and can't do. What really seems to be behind this, yet again, is a proxy argument over electric cars in general.

Kevin Bullis has the wisest comment on this dust-up, which is that it's dumb for an electric car to compete in the "drive a really long way without stopping much" category, precisely the place where gas cars currently retain an advantage. Broder made a bunch of mistakes, in retrospect. He could have done the drive without trouble if he'd planned better, been more careful, and gotten better advice from Tesla personnel. But American drivers are not accustomed to low speeds or careful planning in their long-distance driving and it will take time for those habits to change. It would make more sense to highlight the car's performance in applications where it shines, like commuting, which constitutes the vast bulk of Americans' actual travel.

Last night's State of the Union was considerably better than I expected, in substance and in tone, mainly because my expectations for these things are extremely low. It was a policy laundry list, but not just a list -- Obama had his dander up. By the end, after the chants of "they deserve a vote," it was downright rousing.

(By the way, that bit on gun safety legislation? That's what it looks like when Obama is personally, viscerally invested in an issue.)

The most surprising thing in the speech, at least to us cap-and-trade obsessives, was this line:

I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago.

Never in a million years did I think Obama would reference cap-and-trade, much less endorse it. I would have (er, did) bet money against it. But I'm happy to be wrong. It makes no difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but it tickles me to no end.

Anyway, on climate and energy, what we heard was an evolution of the same basic policy Obama has been pushing for years: reduce fossil fuel consumption and increase fossil fuel production.

Whatever you think of that dual policy -- a politically savvy compromise, an untenable hypocrisy, a little of both -- what we heard last night was simply a sharper, more ambitious version of it. It will be Obama's climate and energy legacy, for better or worse.

On the "use less fossil fuels" front, there were three bold and interesting proposals (which has to be some kind of record for a SOTU):

1. Use executive power.

He said:

... if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

As regular readers know, I believe many people wildly overestimate the president's power in general and the power of presidential rhetoric in particular. Ezra Klein had a great piece on this in The New Yorker a while back, in which he made two points. One was that there's very little evidence that presidential backing leads to passage of legislation or major shifts in public opinion. And the other is that the president's rhetorical support is as likely to polarize an issue as it is to bring people together around it.

This last point was on my mind today when I read about The Washington Post's new poll. It's a fascinating look at which issues are sensitive to Obama's involvement. They asked people about various issues, and then asked about those same issues accompanied by Obama's support.

When it comes to a ban on assault weapons or ending the war in Afghanistan, Obama's support increases public support. When it comes to a "path to citizenship" for undocumented workers, Obama's support decreases public support -- which is another way of saying that it polarizes the issue, sending Republicans away from it. And when it comes to climate change, Obama's support has ... virtually no effect at all.

What are we to make of this? The WaPo story doesn't really speculate. So I shall fill the speculation gap.

As we've noted several times here at Grist, conservatives are going after state renewable energy standards (RES's) across the country. They've prevented a few new ones from passing, but I don't think they've succeeded in persuading any state to roll back an RES already in effect. Yet.

Now they're going after the RES in Kansas. Passed in 2009, it instructs utilities to get 10 percent of their power generation capacity from renewables from 2011 to 2015, 15 percent from 2016 to 2019, and 20 percent by 2020.

The RES was passed as part of a compromise bill meant to settle the intense controversy over the planned expansion of the enormous Holcomb coal-fired power plant. (That's the one Kathleen Sebelius was battling as governor, before Obama plucked her away to make her secretary of health and human services.) Thing is, the legislature's go-ahead for the coal plant expansion didn't really stick -- it has since been mired in legal challenges, dead in the water.

Republicans, piqued they aren't getting their coal plant, want to delay the renewable-energy targets or scrap the RES entirely. This story about it from Tim Carpenter at the Topeka Capital-Journal contains some delightful flashes of deadpan humor. Consider this bit:

Rep. Dennis Hedke, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Policy, said lack of progress on the coal plant prompted lawmakers to consider dumping the RPS or delaying targets two or four years. Some House and Senate members want to extract the state from meddling in oil, gas, nuclear, wind and solar businesses, he said.

"We want to do everything we can to allow market forces to dictate any infrastructure build out. We don't want to mandate. We are an all-of-the-above state," said Hedke, a geophysicist consultant for the oil and gas industry.

That last clause! A flick of wrist that throws the preceding paragraphs off balance. Well played.

Late last month, I wrote a post about an intriguing new solar technology that promised to radically reduce the delivered price of solar electricity. At the top of my post, I included that standard disclaimer, warning people not to get too excited until the product proved itself in the marketplace.

Of course, that disclaimer did not stop the inevitable: Cranky people from all over the internet descended on the comments to explain why the technology is absurd and could never possibly work. This is a familiar cycle to anyone who writes about cleantech.

Robert Styler, the chief marketing officer at V3Solar, contacted me to ask if I would elevate his response to some of the criticisms so that people would be sure to see it. So I'm doing that.

Just to be clear: I have no particular expertise on solar technology. I'm in no position to adjudicate these conflicts. But I do think they're worth hashing out in public. So here are some criticisms from champion skeptic MrSteve007 and some responses from Mr. Styler.

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Robert Styler:

We don't reveal everything about our tech on the internet and that creates some false assumptions. Hopefully this will clear up some of the more common mistakes. In response to the questions by MrSteve007:

1. No matter what angle the sun is shining, 50% of the solar cells are always shaded at one time (except at high noon, at the equator). That dramatically increases cost and inversely lowers efficiency.

Steve, you are looking at this as static rather than dynamic. The inner cone is rapidly spinning in and out of highly concentrated bands of light -- also, the ambient light on the backside of the cone will be captured. PV is a light-sensitive semiconductor. Every other semiconductor works under periodicity, on/off, 1/0, binary code. For the last 30 years, PV has either been ON during the day, or OFF during the night. Moore's law states that the computing power of semiconductors doubles every two years. Why have we not seen a similar dramatic increase in PV?

By creating high-intensity flashes of light, we make the PV respond differently than it does in a static environment, just baking in the sun (see Q-switching and the Avalanche Photodiode effect). Again, we only go into specifics under NDA [non-disclosure agreement] with stakeholders and investors. We all know what we know, but few are open-minded enough to know what we don't know -- and that's the first step of innovation.

Obama is expected to throw climate hawks a bone (or I guess a small rodent) in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night:

"You're going to like what you hear," White House aides have told green groups, according to an official at one environmental organization who expects the president to publicly commit to moving forward with EPA climate regulations.

"In past speeches, there was a lot of, 'I call on Congress,'" the official added. "And what I'm expecting to see more of this time is, 'This is what my administration is going to do.'"

If this OOEO (official at one environmental organization) is right, it will be cause for good cheer. But the question remains, even if Barack Obama is pure of heart and dedicated to climate progress, what can he do?

He'll get no help from Congress. Serious climate legislation is off the table as long as Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is in charge of the House but not in charge of his Tea Party faction. So what can be done without Congress?

The definitive answer on this comes from the World Resources Institute, which recently updated its classic report, "Using Existing Federal Laws and State Action to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions." (You know you've heard of it.) To summarize: A lot can be done! But mostly in the short term. After 2020, you need legislation.

WRI analyzed three scenarios, combinations of federal (executive) action and state policy. They are referred to as lackluster, middle-of-the-road, and go-getter. Here's how they shake out: