Obama threw the climatespotters a bone in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. Multiple bones, even.

For all you climatespotters: the number is 3.

— David Roberts (@drgrist) February 13, 2013

That is, the president said the words “climate change” three times during the address, and made a mention of “dangerous carbon pollution” to boot. That’s compared to just one mention of “climate” in his 2012 SOTU, and zilch in 2011, for those of you keeping score at home.

This year’s climate callouts weren’t a surprise — Obama paved the way with his inaugural address last month, and in recent days his advisers had been hinting strongly that climate change would get a substantial nod in the speech.

Even though he also lauded increased oil and gas drilling, the section on energy and climate was substantial enough to encourage some greens:

The President's call to put a price on carbon pollution and solve the climate crisis was bold and meaningful. We must act now. #sotu

— Al Gore (@algore) February 13, 2013

"[F]or the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change," Obama said. He noted that "the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense."

We've written a lot over the past month about the sharing economy -- how people are using apps and technology that make it easy to share cars, bikes, homes, couches, offices, tools, pets. More sharing = less resource use = all-around goodness.

And now the latest addition to the list of shareable items: kids. Yes, people are using websites and Facebook pages to find like-minded people with whom to share children. From The New York Times:

[A] new breed of online daters [is] looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them.

“While some people have chosen to be a single parent, many more people look at scheduling and the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn’t be good for them or the child,” said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. “If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option.”

The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.

Eve Ensler made it OK to say the word vagina out loud. Could she now inspire more of us to say climate change too?

Ensler, the artist and activist behind The Vagina Monologues, is currently making a big push to promote One Billion Rising, a global event planned for this coming Valentine's Day, aka V-Day. She's calling for people everywhere to "dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence against women." The campaign was inspired by a U.N. estimate that one in every three women will experience violence during her lifetime, meaning well over a billion of us.

And Ensler's activism extends beyond this critical issue. She has recently been drawing connections between the violence that men perpetrate against women and the violence that fossil-fuel companies perpetrate against the climate and all of us who depend on it. She talked to Grist recently about how these topics tie together and her hopes for her new campaign.

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Q. I was interested to read a piece you published in The Guardian last month comparing climate change and violence against women. You wrote, "Like climate change, only the patriarchs with power seem to be blind to the magnitude of the horrors," and you wrote about "the raping of the Earth through ecological destruction by the corporate powerful." Can you talk more about those common threads?

Back in 2011, the Obama administration postponed a decision on whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline until after the election. Now, this week, they've postponed it again until at least April.

But the White House can't kick the can down the road forever. Someday the decider must decide. What do you think Obama's decision will be?

• Climate blogger Joe Romm thinks the odds now favor rejection of the pipeline.

• TransCanada says in its internal communications (accidentally made external), "We continue to believe that Keystone XL will be approved."

• CNN: "most analysts still expect Obama to approve the pipeline. But the chances that he won't are increasing."

And you? What do you think?

Andy Kroll at Mother Jones writes about "the massive new liberal plan to remake American politics":

A month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. Brought together by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America (CWA), and the NAACP, the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration reformers, and a panoply of other progressive leaders discussed the challenges facing the left and what to do to beat back the deep-pocketed conservative movement.

At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front on these issues—potentially, a coalition of a kind rarely seen in liberal politics, where squabbling is common and a stay-in-your-lane attitude often prevails. ...

The liberal activists have dubbed this effort the Democracy Initiative. The campaign, Brune says, has since been attracting other members—and also interest from foundations looking to give money—because many groups on the left believe they can't accomplish their own goals without winning reforms on the Initiative's three issues.

As Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune puts it, "We're not going to have a clean-energy economy if the same companies that are polluting our rivers and oceans are also polluting our elections."

Much of President Obama's green team is moving on to greener pastures. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced last month that she'll be retiring soon, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu is expected to follow suit. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is said to be mulling over his future. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood appears to be undecided as well, and there's a chance that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack could leave.

Lesser-known but still critical positions are up in the air too. Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has announced her resignation. Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Heather Zichal, Obama's top climate and energy advisor, might also be leaving their posts.

Who could be tapped to fill the gaps?

EPA administrator

Outgoing Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) is rumored to be a frontrunner for the top EPA job. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more:

Yesterday we told you about the launch of Mosaic, a new Kickstarter-style service that makes it easy to invest in rooftop solar projects. Today comes news that it's already sold out shares in all of its public projects. Talk about pent-up demand!

From a company press release:

Mosaic, an online marketplace that connects investors to high-quality solar projects, sold out its first four projects in less than 24 hours with over 400 investors putting in between $25 and $30,000. In total, investors put in over $313,000 with an average investment of nearly $700. ...

To date, Mosaic has raised $1.1M from more than 700 investors to finance twelve rooftop solar power plants in California, Arizona and New Jersey. Mosaic’s latest projects were available to residents of California and New York as well as accredited investors from around the country. ...

Here's yet another way that tar-sands oil extraction sucks. From The New York Times:

The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study [PDF] released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [PDF], or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

As scientist David Schindler told British Columbia news site The Tyee, the study's findings should "deep-six once and for all the bullshit that all pollution from the tar sands is natural."

"You could call it the cleantech cliff," writes the San Jose Mercury News:

Global clean-technology venture investment plunged to $6.46 billion in 2012, down 33 percent from the $9.61 billion invested a year ago, according to San Francisco-based research and consulting firm Cleantech Group.

Why such a big drop-off?

The low price of natural gas has made it harder for renewable energy to compete on cost. Venture capitalists are shying away from capital-intensive deals after seeing companies like Santa Clara-based Misasolé sold at fire sale prices. And global economic uncertainty took a toll: Several privately backed cleantech companies, including Oakland's BrightSource Energy, were forced to shelve their IPO plans and raise additional funds from existing investors.

Green cars account for just a teeny, tiny fraction of U.S. auto sales -- 3.3 percent in 2012. But that teeny, tiny fraction is growing fast!

BusinessGreen reports:

Analyst firm Mintel estimated last month that sales of hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric cars in the US will exceed 535,000 units in 2013, a sizable increase on the 440,000 sold last year. Sales of hybrids and electric cars rose 73 per cent in 2012, making it the fastest growing segment in the US auto market.

A separate market analysis by Pike Research "estimates annual global sales of 3.8 million electric or plug-in hybrid cars by 2020," the International Herald Tribune reports. It also "estimates that sales of plug-in cars will grow by 40 percent annually. During that same period, general car sales will grow by 2 percent."

The plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt gets some of the credit for those rising numbers. "General Motors sold three times as many Chevrolet Volts in 2012 as it did in 2011, which was the car's first full year on the market," reports CNN -- "23,461 Volts in 2012 compared with just 7,671 in 2011." That's still below GM's sales targets, but, as Climate Progress points out, it makes GM "the first American auto manufacturer to sell more than one million vehicles with a 30-mpg fuel rating." No thanks to all the Volt-hating right-wingers out there.