In a justly famous Rolling Stone piece, Bill McKibben popularized the notion of "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math." We have a "carbon budget," between now and 2050, of roughly 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide. If we emit more than that we are likely to exceed the 2 degree C target agreed to in the Copenhagen Accord. (As Thomas Lovejoy notes in clear-eyed and essential piece in The New York Times yesterday, "2 degrees seems nightmarish as it is.")

According to the Carbon Tracker Initiative, the amount of CO2 represented by the world's proven fossil fuel reserves is 2,795 gigatons. Here's the problem, in math terms:

2,795 > 565

If we want a reasonable hope of hitting our 2 degree target, we have to leave about 80 percent of the known fossil fuels in the ground.

That is indeed terrifying math, but it may become slightly less so as it becomes more specific and concrete. (It is always helpful to break a large task into component parts.) Toward that end, today saw some fascinating new work from the research consultancy Ecofys. Commissioned by Greenpeace, it attempts to rank the most dangerous fossil-fuel projects currently being planned.

The metric is simple: how many additional tons of CO2 the project will emit by 2020. (See the report for more on methodology.) Here's how they rank:

1. China's Western provinces / Coal mining expansion / 1,400
2. Australia / Coal export expansion / 760
3. Arctic / Drilling for oil and gas / 520
4. Indonesia / Coal export expansion / 460
5. United States / Coal export expansion / 420
6. Canada / Tar sands oil / 420
7. Iraq / Oil drilling / 420
8. Gulf of Mexico / Deepwater oil drilling / 350
9. Brazil / Deepwater oil drilling (pre-salt) / 330
10. Kazakhstan / Oil drilling / 290
11. United States / Shale gas / 280
12. Africa / Gas drilling / 260
13. Caspian Sea / Gas drilling / 240
14. Venezuela / Tar sands oil / 190

There's a lot to mull over in this list. Here are a few things that jump out:

The Department of Defense has bases in the U.S. and forward operating bases in theaters of war like Afghanistan. In both cases, providing reliable electricity, a strategic and tactical necessity for an increasingly wired military, is a challenge. One way the military is meeting that challenge is developing microgrids, which are way cooler than they sound.

The two types of DOD bases face the same challenge, but for different reasons. In Afghanistan, the diesel generators that provide electricity at bases are the top consumer of fuel on the battlefield. And it's not just any fuel, it's high-grade jet fuel, trucked into the country in caravans that cross treacherous, hostile territory and are frequently attacked. The "fully burdened cost" of that fuel -- the cost of the fuel plus the costs of transporting and protecting it -- can reach into the hundreds of dollars per gallon, especially at the smaller forward bases.

One way to reduce that fuel use is to generate more power on site, through distributed generation technologies like solar or waste-to-power plants. Another is to use that power more efficiently. And another is to network the base's power sources and loads together into a microgrid that can be managed intelligently. For the bigger bases, it means they can be self-sustaining and not rely on primitive grids. For the smaller units up on the front lines, there are "mobile tactical microgrids," which are small, modular systems that are easy to set up and disassemble, allowing a balance of connectivity and mobility.

Anyway, that's the battlefield microgrid stuff, and it's really cool. But I want to focus on the state-side "stationary" bases. As it happens, they are also plugged into a primitive grid -- namely, the aging, shaky U.S. power grid. The military doesn't trust it. It's one thing if you're at home and the lights flicker. It's another if you're piloting a drone strike by remote control and the lights flicker. So DOD is looking into microgrids for domestic bases too.

This is the final installment of a three-part response to Theda Skocpol’s report on the failure to pass a climate bill. Here’s part one and part two.

When pondering the failure of a big legislative initiative like cap-and-trade -- and oh, there's been so much pondering! -- there are two basic perspectives one can take.

First, you can think about how a campaign could be improved so that next time the initiative can clear the bar. That's mostly what my recent post-cap-and-trade piece (and the Theda Skocpol report [PDF] it discussed) focused on. Build a bigger movement, make the legislation simpler, get more help from the president, whatever. That kind of stuff.

Alternatively, you can focus on how to lower the bar -- how to make it easier to pass big, important legislation in general.

That kind of focus has been rare among climate hawks. Activists and analysts are too inclined to simply accept the political landscape as it stands. But the fact is, it has become absurdly, anti-democratically difficult to get anything big done in U.S. politics. Or to put it more bluntly: U.S. politics is broken.

One of the big drivers of energy efficiency in the U.S. over the last decade has been the growth of efficiency programs at electric and gas utilities, funded by utility customers. Total spending on such programs went from $2 billion in 2006 to $4.8 billion in 2010. Given the dire need to reduce the energy intensity of the U.S. economy, what can we expect from those programs over the next decade or so?

It's funny you should ask! As it happens, the ninja wonks over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) just released a report on this very subject [PDF]. They set out to estimate total spending and total savings on utility efficiency programs out to 2025, assuming no policy change (that's important). For each state they did a low, medium, and high scenario, to account for uncertainties regarding policy implementation, rate caps, and various broader market drivers like natural gas prices and the pace of economic recovery.

Here's what they found:

As you can see, in the medium case total spending roughly doubles from 2010 levels, to $9.5 billion in 2025. As spending grows, energy savings grow alongside. In 2010, efficiency trimmed about 0.5 percent of annual U.S. retail electrical sales. In the medium case, that number will rise to 0.76 percent by 2025. By way of comparison, the EIA projects about 0.58 percent growth in retail electricity sales by 2025. So growth in utility energy efficiency programs could offset some or all of that new energy demand.

This is the second part of a three-part response to Theda Skocpol's report on the failure to pass a climate bill. Here's part one and part three.

As I wrote yesterday, political scientist Theda Skocpol's magisterial new assessment of the cap-and-trade fight [PDF] gets the diagnosis basically right: The radicalization of the Republican Party doomed the inside-game, partner-with-business strategy. Everything else followed from that.

When Skocpol pivots from diagnosis to prescription, however, things go a little hinky.

Much of her piece involves a comparison of the cap-and-trade bill with the healthcare reform bill ("Obamacare"), which moved forward at roughly the same time. One failed and one succeeded. Why?

Skocpol ascribes a great deal of significance to Health Care for America Now, a networked organization linking up grassroots groups in all 50 states. HCAN kept the inside D.C. negotiators working on health care connected to the grassroots. It advocated for the "left edge of the possible" -- as Skocpol put it in an interview with Brad Plumer today, it "allowed people to push for the health care bill without feeling like they were selling out" -- but above all, it kept pressure on legislators to move forward in the face of setbacks and fear.

By contrast, she says, mainline enviros played an almost purely inside game. The USCAP agreement bound them to policy specifics and there was no outside group to push the bounds of the agreement to the left. Of course, there were left-leaning enviro groups that rejected USCAP altogether and advocated for a carbon tax or cap-and-dividend or whatever (the left edge of the impossible). But that's not what HCAN did. It accepted the broad framework of Obamacare (rather than futilely calling for, say, single-payer) while pushing on its left edge (e.g., the public option). It marshaled grassroots pressure while ensuring that the grassroots and the insiders were pushing in the same basic direction.

Enviros will protest that they had ClimateWorks and Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection -- and Skocpol acknowledges those groups. Nonetheless, she says that big green philanthropy "did not go to anything analogous to the HCAN undertaking in health reform." The money went to capacity building for big environmental groups and to "public education" campaigns, not to grassroots organizing. This bit from Skocpol stings:

In a post earlier today, I mentioned a mistake that many enviros made in the run up to the great cap-and-trade wars of 2009-10: they saw national polls showing support for clean energy and clean air and took those polls as evidence of political strength.

But as I noted in the post, political strength does not arise from broad, shallow support. It comes out of passionate, activated, well-funded constituencies that target specific legislators. That's what moves votes in Congress.

Fortuitously, a great example of that error just showed up in my inbox. The indefatigable Anthony Leiserowitz and his team at Yale have completed their latest public survey on climate and energy. Here are a few of their conclusions:

• Concern about the effects of climate change is high across political groups, with majorities of Democrats and Independents expressing concern about global warming and its potential harm for themselves and future generations.

• Across party lines, there is support for taking action to reduce global warming, with pluralities of all groups favoring medium-scale efforts. Even among Republicans, a sizeable majority support making some effort to address global warming.

• Policies to promote renewable energy are favored by the majority of voters across party lines. Majorities support eliminating federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, but oppose ending subsidies to the renewable energy industry. Instead, solid majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans support funding more research into renewable energy sources.

This is all interesting stuff, as usual. (If you're not following Leiserowitz's work, you really should.) But the report is titled: "The Political Benefits to Taking a Pro-Climate Stand in 2013."

Wait, how did that happen? How did we go from broad support to "political benefits"? To get to the latter, you need to show politicians a substantial group of voters in their districts who would vote against them, or stop funding them, or hold public protests against them, on the basis of their failure to address climate change -- or, conversely, who would celebrate them, vote for them, or give them money if they did address it.

Because I can certainly point them to a group of voters who will be absolutely furious -- and vocal about it -- if they do try to address climate change. Tea Party voters may not constitute a majority, but they are loud and active and funded by some extremely wealthy people.

Where is the loud, active, well-funded faction on the other side? Until that exists, all talk of "political benefits" will be empty at best, or misleading at worst.

The great cap-and-trade battles of 2009-10 were, for me, the culmination of an obsession that began in earnest around 2006, when Democrats re-took the House. You may recall the heady days of the 2007 Democratic primaries, when all three of the serious candidates for president -- Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards -- had competing cap-and-trade plans, as did the eventual GOP nominee, John McCain. Back then it seemed extremely important to hash out the fine policy details. It was virtually all I thought about, for years on end.

In the end it all crashed and burned. There have been many partial (in both senses of the word) accounts of how that happened, and why, but it's been the subject of remarkably little serious, scholarly attention. So I'm glad the Rockefeller Family Fund commissioned Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol to do a deep dive into the story [PDF] and extract what lessons she could.

Philip has a good rundown on her paper, but of course I can't resist adding my $0.02.

First off: Overall, it's good. I know there's no point in asking you to read a 140-page PDF, but if you're interested in the episode, you won't find a more clear-eyed account.

I couldn't help smiling when, after sifting through various post-mortems on the cap-and-trade battle, Skocpol concluded that "each player tended to blame others and conclude that whatever approach he/she/it favored all along would be the best one to double-down on moving forward."

So true. That's a perpetual danger in these kinds of retrospectives (a danger to which Skocpol is as vulnerable as anyone). The cap-and-trade battle is like the fabled elephant and the blind men. Everyone came to it from a different perspective, saw different things, and learned different lessons. The way it looked to a Waxman staffer is very different from how it looked to an oil executive or an enviro leader. Looking back, it's easy to project whatever you want to see onto it. Many people have.

It's also important to remember that if things had been just a little different -- if the filibuster were off the table, for example, or the recession hadn't hit when it did -- the bill would have passed and everyone would be writing about how savvy the USCAP strategy was and how brilliant enviro leaders are. Important historical turning points can hinge on contingencies. We have a strong propensity, after the fact, to shoehorn events into narratives that make the outcome seem inevitable, or at least predictable. We want things to make sense. But in the words of the philosophers: Shit happens.

All that said, while no one is immune to the pundit's fallacy, Skocpol mostly gets the important things right. Here are a couple of lessons from the paper that are worth reinforcing:

Shifting to sustainability will involve more than changing laws. Inevitably, it will involve changing behavior: the way people get around, where they live, what they eat, and so on. I was semi-obsessed with this topic for a while -- see here, here, and here, for example -- and I still think it gets far too little attention from climate wonks and activists.

At it happens, Stanford University has a whole Persuasive Tech Lab devoted to the subject of behavior change (and the ways technology changes behavior). The team there has put together a short, sweet slideshow on the "Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change." No matter what your job or purpose, on some level I bet it involves trying to get people to change their behavior. So almost everyone can learn from this. Check it out:

In particular, those involved with climate campaigning should heed Nos. 4 and 7. Information does not, in and of itself, prompt people to change their behavior. And people are much more likely to be motivated to do new things than to stop doing old things.

So how can climate hawks motivate people to adopt new behaviors?

As longtime readers know, every year I compile a two-CD mix of the year's best music. I've been doing it since 2000, which shows, among other things, that I'm 1,000 years old.

This year's mix is done and ready to go. If you're interested, go check it out. It was an excellent year for music, so this year's mix is an embarrassment of riches.

In honor of the mix, here's my favorite song of the year, off my favorite album of the year, from my favorite artist of the year: Cory Branan's "The Corner."

Let's just accept it: America's current political and economic systems are incapable of responding adequately to climate change. As things stand, reducing carbon emissions -- or more broadly, shifting to sustainability -- is a kind of add-on, a second-tier consideration, bolted onto systems and institutions that were built for other purposes.

Specifically, U.S. domestic and foreign policy have long been designed around the Cold War, ramping up trade abroad, expanding up and out and into the suburban hinterlands at home, out-growing and out-sprawling the Soviet Union. That was the north star for U.S. policy for decades.

With the end of the Cold War, that north star vanished, and the U.S. has been adrift ever since. No grand strategy has replaced the Cold War strategy, only a kind of autopilot effort to keep the status quo limping along through rising debt, housing and financial bubbles, tax cuts, and deficit spending. It seemed for a while after 9/11 that taming the Middle East (hubris intended) would align U.S. strategy, but those efforts have been a spectacular failure.

Reducing the carbon emissions of our Cold War industrial system can have only marginal effects; that system is built on cheap fossil fuels. It is built to emit carbon. Attaching a carbon tax to that beast is like draining blood from your horse in hopes that a new horse will result.

Adequately responding to climate change is only possible within a larger industrial, economic, civic, and political system that is designed around sustainability. Sustainability must be the point of the system. Within such a context, efforts to build a better life and achieve prosperity would serve sustainability rather than work against it. Sustainability would be the source of its vitality, not an add-on, slowing it down and making it more expensive like a scrubber on a coal plant.

So what would a new U.S. grand strategy built around sustainability look like? That's the question tackled by "A New U.S. Grand Strategy," a piece in Foreign Policy by Patrick Doherty, director of the Smart Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation.

It's a hugely ambitious and wide-ranging piece, far too much to even summarize adequately here. Bookmark it. Instapaper it. Pinterest it to your iCloud, or whatever kids do these days. But let's take a quick look.