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:

A recent (subscriber-only) report from HSBC Global Research helps shed some light on what's at stake in the fight over climate policy. Short answer: a hell of a lot, especially if you're invested in fossil fuels.

The International Energy Agency says that, to have a 50 percent chance of limiting global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, we can only afford to burn about a third of known fossil-fuel reserves between now and 2050. That means leaving around $20 trillion worth of assets in the ground. That is global warming's "terrifying new math."

The analysts at HSBC tried to figure out what would happen to the value of European oil and gas companies if governments put in place policies to achieve this goal. Not surprisingly, the effects would be dire.

First HSBC assumes that, with policies to hit 2 degrees in place, any projects at a cost of more than $50/barrel for oil or $9/mmBtu for natural gas would be abandoned. That would whack fully 25 percent off the reserves of an oil-focused company like BP, though gas-focused companies like the BG Group would take a smaller hit (just 1 percent). State-owned giant Statoil would see its market cap fall by 17 percent.

But the secondary effects would be even worse. If demand for fossil fuels were cut by two-thirds, prices would plunge. That, HSBC estimates, would take 40 to 60 percent off the oil and gas sector's total market capitalization.

Again: Serious climate policy could reduce the value of large fossil fuel companies by half.

I'm morbidly fascinated by the way conventional wisdom lags behind evidence, like the notion that renewable energy is expensive and fossil fuels cheap. In fact, there is a tectonic shift underway. Renewable energy prices are declining as technology improves, economies of scale kick in, financing mechanisms mature, and public policy begins to take some (inadequate) account of the negative externalities of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the cost of coal-fired electricity is heading up. It's getting harder to finance coal plants in the face of competition from clean(er) energy, activist opposition, and the inevitability of some kind of carbon policy. Construction costs are rising. Transportation costs are rising. It's getting harder to reach the coal that's left in the ground. Etc.

The two lines -- falling renewable energy costs and rising coal costs -- are going to cross. It'll happen everywhere eventually. According to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) analysis, it's already happened down under: "Renewable energy now cheaper than new fossil fuels in Australia."

Many present-day industrial systems are dramatically overengineered, built to be prepared for maximum demand even though maximum demand is, by definition, rare.

This is easy to see when it comes to the private automobile. Take your average SUV. It has a range of hundreds of miles, the power to navigate hostile offroad territory, seating for seven people, and enough armor to survive direct collision from any angle, yet it spends 90 percent of the time parked and 9 percent ferrying one or two people back and forth to work. It's a marvel of modern engineering, a monster, a f*cking spaceship, and we use it to get groceries.

An SUV carries around the capacity to do the most extreme things ever asked of it, even if they are under 1 percent of use cases. The same goes for the road and highway system around it, which is built to handle peak traffic even though most roads and most parking spaces are empty most of the time. The whole system is wildly overbuilt.

The electricity system is too, though I'm not sure most people fully understand why. The reason is simply that there's no storage for electricity. Every electron worth of demand must be met by the simultaneous generation of an electron; similarly, every electron generated must be used immediately or it is lost. That imposes a certain logic on the system: There must always be enough power generation capacity available to handle the maximum possible demand (what's called "peak load"). The result is that most of our power plants, like most of our cars, spend most of their time parked, idled. They are there for those few minutes of the day when everyone gets home from work and turns on the TV.

This "real-time" nature of the grid is also what makes it vulnerable to blackouts. If power is not continuously fed to an area, the grid shuts down. (Super Bowl viewers were treated to a vivid demonstration of this vulnerability last week.) And sometimes, because most electricity grids are "dumb" and slow to react, the failures can cascade, leading to powerlessness for hundreds of thousands of customers.

Overbuilt and vulnerable is no way to go through life.

Jack Hidary explains this in his latest column and offers a telling comparison to a system that isn't so vulnerable to disruption:

The most worrisome energy trend in the world, by a wide margin, is rising coal consumption in China:

The figures are pretty stunning: Chinese coal demand has been rising at about 9 percent a year for the last 12 years. By comparison, coal demand in the rest of the world has been rising at about 1 percent annually. China now burns almost half the world's coal.

Cheap coal power has been a boon to China, an engine pulling millions and millions of people out of poverty. But it has also brought nightmarish local pollution problems -- which are not remaining local -- and it of course threatens to tip the climate into chaos, which will do more damage to the Chinese people, over the long term, than the last decade of growth has done good. It is, as China expert James Fallows says, an "environmental emergency" that threatens to stop China from ever catching up to the developed world.

Most projections [PDF] have coal use in China continuing to increase for decades to come. But there are reasons to think those projections overstate demand -- that China's appetite for coal may peak sooner than expected. For one thing, the Chinese government is signaling that the country's coal consumption will peak by 2015, at 4 billion tonnes.

There was a bit of buzz last week when the august scientific journal Nature endorsed the Keystone XL pipeline (ironically, in the course of pleading with Obama to do something about climate change). Despite the hubbub, it was not the first time the journal had done so. Back in September 2011, it boosted Keystone ... in the context of pleading with Obama do to something about climate change. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Neither editorial makes a fully fleshed-out case for Keystone, but together they advance three common arguments, all of which I find unconvincing.

1. The tar sands will get dug up anyway.

This is the most familiar argument on behalf of Keystone, though "we can't prevent this horrible thing so let's embrace it" is a peculiar form of endorsement.

I don't get it. The world is not a spreadsheet. It contains friction, physical and temporal limitations, politics and competing interests. Nothing is inevitable.

If activists can block Keystone, yeah, there are other possible routes to get the tar-sands oil out. So ... activists will fight those, too. Tar-sands producers want to ship the stuff west? Well, there's the small matter of a wall of First Nations opposition (and in Canada, unlike the U.S., indigenous tribes have real political power). They want to ship the tar sands east? Well, there's a coalition of enviro groups fighting that too, pulling together some impressively large rallies. They want to ship the tar sands by train, to avoid all these pipeline protests? Well, that's more expensive and more dangerous and there isn't nearly enough rail capacity right now to handle it.

Two stories flagged by our Gristmill bloggers yesterday got me thinking. There's this one, about San Francisco's "managed retreat" from rising sea levels, and this one, about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) planning to allow some coastal communities to "return to nature."

Both mean the same thing: Shit is getting real. Coastal cities are facing decisions about how to plan for higher seas and more frequent floods, about which lands to abandon and which to "up armor" with levies and seawalls. These are present-day decisions, not something for the distant future. Whether or not the particular plans in SF and NYC go through -- they are expensive, and will face much local resistance -- they are only the beginning. And it's not just the coasts. Decisions of a similar spirit will face places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which exist only by virtue of a steady supply of outside water. What will happen in 10, 20, 30 years, when there are more droughts and less rain? What can be sustained and what must be abandoned?

As I've said before, long-term adaptive planning is going to be a ubiquitous necessity in the coming century. There will be many more "managed retreats" -- at least, if we're lucky they'll be managed.

So, when these decisions are made, who benefits? Who gets protected when the weather comes? Who gets made whole after the weather has done its damage? If a community needs to be abandoned to nature, how is it compensated and where are its people put?

Every year, I am drawn inexorably to the ads that play during the Super Bowl. Every year, when I am exposed to the stew of crude misogyny, cornpone nostalgia, martial sentiment, and the overweening assumption that all of life's meaningful moments are tied to commercial products, I despair for humanity. But there's always one or two that are interesting.

This year the most interesting ad, however, didn't run during the Super Bowl because CBS canned it. Here it is:

As you can probably guess, CBS reportedly scrapped it because it directly criticizes Coke and Pepsi, which were also among the game's many sponsors. (SodaStream ended up airing a milder, less confrontational ad during the SuperBowl.)

What's interesting to me is that SodaStream is pushing for expansion in the U.S. (most of its sales are in Europe) with an explicitly environmental message. It's not about taste, or variety, or quality; it's about reducing the use of plastic. In a statement, SodaStream International was downright belligerent about it:

Driverless cars are coming to a street near you, and soon. “I think that genuine self-driving cars will be available within a decade and that they'll be big game changers,” writes Kevin Drum, who’s been on a driverless-car kick lately. Or take it from Dan Gage, spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers: “That fully autonomous car of the future is not that far away.” Or just watch this:

Google has been testing driverless cars extensively. Nevada and California have passed legislation permitting them on the streets. Other states will soon follow suit. This is a near-future thing, not a sci-fi dream.

I happen to share Drum's enthusiasm for driverless cars, and want to use it to make a larger point about social change.

Widgets and systems

Let’s think about the distinction between widgets (pieces of technology) and systems (the cultural, economic, and infrastructural systems in which technologies are embedded).

A clever new study [PDF] from the World Future Council attempts to do something I haven't seen before: quantify the cost of not using renewables.

The idea is pretty simple. When we use finite fossil fuels to generate energy, rather than the inexhaustible, renewable alternatives, we make those fossil fuels unavailable for non-energetic uses (think petrochemicals) in the future. In other words, when we burn fossil fuels for energy, we are needlessly destroying valuable industrial capital stock.

You can read the paper for more on methodology and assumptions. The paper uses current market values for fossil fuels rather than attempting to predict future prices, so the estimates are likely conservative.

Here's the conclusion:

Protecting the use of increasingly valuable fossil raw materials for the future is possible by substituting these materials with renewables. Every day that this is delayed and fossil raw materials are consumed as one-time energy creates a future usage loss of between 8.8 and 9.3 billion US Dollars. Not just the current cost of various renewable energies, but also the costs of not using them need to be taken into account. [my emphasis]

Got that? Every day we use fossil fuels for energy, we steal $9 billion from future people who will need those fossil fuels for non-substitutable industrial uses.