When we do these semiannual fundraising appeals here at Grist we sometimes look over at our peers in public broadcasting with envy.

When they don’t meet their goals, they extend their deadlines. They just keep going. They’re machines! We’ll just keep torturing you, they say, until you give.

We’re nicer than that. We’ve never extended our deadline. We live by the deadline here. But we don’t want to die by it.

So the deadline for this appeal is fast approaching. And, to be honest, the involuntary poetry slam that Grist has become over the last 10 days? It’s just exhausting. But you can do something about it! Give now, and put an end to our misery.

Here’s what I mean:

My first week at Grist a few months ago, this gull decided to make a home on my windowsill for the better part of a day.

It stared at me. I stared at it. It made noises at me. I tried not to make noises back.

I thought of that bird when I watched our first appeal video — the one with the Muppet-style raven harassing Grist’s founder while mouthing droll Poe parodies.

And then it hit me — the curse!

If I post here tomorrow
Things just couldn’t be the same
‘Cause Grist’s so plagued with this nonsense
And this verse you cannot change!

Yes, it has come to this: Our lyrical disease has reached an advanced stage, and Lynyrd Skynyrd has infected my brainstem.

In the next stage, I fear, it’s gonna be “Surfin’ Bird,” and we just don’t want to go there.

So take pity on us wretches. Give to Grist now — and it’ll all be over soon.

Grist hath $25,000 on the line.
Help us reach our goal in time!

To give, or not to give, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler for the earth to suffer
The slings and arrows of oil and gas fortune
Or to take arms against a sea that’s rising,
And by donating stem it: to spill, to leak
No more. And by a gift, to say you care
how Grist ties climate news to daily life,
– that we report with wit, not with despair.

To read, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that stream of words, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this toxic roil,
Must give us hope. Let me bare my bodkin:
Pray, if we hath lit a flame ‘neath thy butt,
Help Grist now with all the farthings thou canst!
Thus conscience does make donors of us all.
‘Tis a contribution devoutly to be wished.

Parting is such sweet sorrow,

Scott Rosenberg
Executive Editor

Postscript:
In a previous life, I earned my keep
Reviewing plays. Long and rich were the hours
I spent list’ning to or writing about
The works of Shakespeare. I wasn’t that keen
To parody him in doggerel verse,
At first. But this curse is a cruel mistress.
Also, Grist must pay its bills. So why fret?
We’ll stop this once you fill our purse. Not yet!

P.P.S. Giving online make you a wreck? You’re also welcome to send a check: Grist, 710 Second Avenue, Suite 860, Seattle, WA 98104.

P.P.P.S. If we reach our goal by May 15, Grist will receive $25,000 from a generous donor.

Why all the iambic pentameter?
Grist is working under a strange parameter.

From Renee Dufault and David Wallinga:

Since our scientific paper “A macroepigenetic approach to identify factors responsible for the autism epidemic in the United States” was published a few weeks ago in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Epigenetics, it has attracted a lot of discussion. We generally welcome that, especially when the discussion includes us, but much of it hasn’t. So, we’re eager to lay out for the public what our study does and doesn’t say.

Contrary to what’s been implied, our current paper does not allege consumption of HFCS causes autism. Rather, our model shows the science of how it may be one important risk factor of many that contributes to a cumulative or “total load” of risks. When we say “total load” we are referring to the accumulation of several risk factors, including nutrition, exposures to toxic chemicals, physical and emotional stressors, and more.

In a nutshell, our work explored a new science-informed model for how dietary factors (including consumption of high-fructose corn syrup) can interact with mineral deficiencies and metabolic processes in our bodies that govern how we handle exposure to environmental toxins. And given the CDC’s rising estimates for children identified with autism and related disorders, as well as growing numbers of children receiving autism services in schools, we wanted to explore how these intersecting processes may be at play in explaining autism in at least some children.

Autism is a sensitive topic for many. We recognize that. It’s also very complicated. Based on studies of twins, however, we now know that environmental factors, in combination with genetics, are likely to contribute to the development of autism. We certainly need more study in this area, and as researchers we hope that our paper, along with the work of many other well-regarded scientists, will help develop a more precise understanding of the way multiple factors can combine and contribute to autism.

We need to explore these new models because traditional scientific approaches that focus on only one variable at a time have not, and likely cannot, provide parents the answers they seek. That’s because in the real world, we are exposed to a complex equation of factors that can ultimately influence our health. As Harvard pediatric neurologist Martha Herbert, M.D. puts it, there is an important difference between “cause” and “risk.” It isn’t even appropriate to talk about a “cause” of autism. Instead, it is more fitting to talk about multiple, interactive risks in our broader environment that may accumulate and contribute to autism. In any child these environmental factors have the potential to modify the genetic susceptibility she or he is born with.

That’s why our paper proposes a macroepigenetic model as one scientific approach that allows us as researchers to consider multiple factors, including nutrition and environmental exposure to toxins, and how they can impact our health. Because this is a new approach, we’ve prepared a brief Q & A that we hope will address many potential questions. We also welcome well-researched reviews of the paper, and encourage that the authors of these submit their writing to Clinical Epigenetics so that they can undergo a rigorous peer-review prior to publication.

From Emily Willingham:

The authors don’t seem to have addressed any of the fundamental flaws in reasoning and evidence in their paper that I brought up:

1. There likely isn’t an “autism epidemic.”

2. The idea that HFCS even contributes mercury to the diet is disputable, at best, based on analyses following their self-cited earlier study. They are self-citing about “mercury residues” and fail to note the relevance of changes in the HFCS production process.

3. They don’t address the fact that they’ve conflated mercury and methylmercury (and fructose and HFCS); the mercury that presumably would be ingested with HFCS — if it’s in there at all — would be the former, yet it’s the latter that can be neurologically harmful when ingested.

4. They don’t address the observation that Italy doesn’t actually track autism rates with any kind of consistency, so their comparison with Italy is also irrelevant. And they don’t mention the other comparisons I provided with countries that do track rates and relative to their HFCS consumption.

5. They don’t address the total lack of any mutual or tandem trend one way or the other between the HFCS consumption rates they cite and autism rates.

6. While they struggle to describe the difference between “cause” and “risk,” what they actually do in their paper is to try to lay out a causative mechanism for autism involving HFCS.

Photo by Bryan Gosline.

Grist’s post last week about a paper that aimed to draw a connection between autism and high fructose corn syrup raised an almost immediate furor.

Some furors are healthy. As an editor I’m always happy when work that I publish gets people to consider new ideas and information that challenges their assumptions.

But some furors are more like, “Guys, you messed up.” I’m afraid that from where I sit this was one of the latter kind.

Our article, by Tom Laskawy, who writes for us regularly on food issues and policy, presented news of a peer-reviewed paper that attempted to draw a connection between autism rates and consumption of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Tom’s readers know that he’s not fond of HFCS — he joked about that in his opening paragraph. That’s generally been Grist’s view, too, for all sorts of reasons that are socially, scientifically, and environmentally sound.

But in drawing attention to the HFCS study without adequately evaluating it, we steered right into some very treacherous waters, and we should have known better. In the public discussion of the causes of autism, there is a decade-long record of bad science being promoted by opportunistic or gullible media coverage. (Seth Mnookin’s book The Panic Virus tells the whole sorry tale.) Given that background, anyone who comes along today offering dramatic new evidence or theories about autism has an extra-high bar of scientific care to meet. And anyone covering such claims ought to meet a reasonable standard of journalistic caution. We did not.

Our article did arrive with a considerable number of hedges and qualifiers. We said the study “purports to have found a very real link between HFCS consumption and autism.” Laskawy wrote, “Now, this is just one paper. And a full understanding of it requires far more expertise in biology and genetics than I possess.”

Our story wasn’t factually incorrect in its reporting of the contents of the HFCS/autism paper — there are no simple “we regret the error” corrections to run here. But the paper the whole piece was based on was itself fraught with issues and problems that we failed to address, and that readers and colleagues almost immediately began telling us about.

They argued that if we’re going to insist on applying rigorous and careful standards to our discussion and coverage of climate science, we’d better do the same in other areas, like food science and health. I agree with them.

So here’s what we’re doing in response:

(1) We’ve rewritten the article’s original headline, “New study links autism to high-fructose corn syrup,” which left the impression that the study had nailed its case. It now reads, “Paper asks: Does high-fructose corn syrup contribute to a rise in autism?”

(2) We’re posting a thorough discussion of problems with the HFCS-and-autism paper by Emily Willingham, a science writer who has covered autism in depth and who was one of the many journalists to raise questions about our original story.

I’ve written at length in the past about the problematic tendency inside newsrooms to circle the wagons when criticized. At Grist, I now get the chance to walk my own talk.

This post is offered in that spirit. I’m sure we’ll make more mistakes; that’s inevitable, and it’s human. We can’t promise perfection, but we can aim always to set the record straight, in as wholehearted and transparent a way as we can.

Photo by Olivier Ffrench.

First off, thanks to all of you who emailed, tweeted, commented, or otherwise submitted your Earth Day haiku to us.

Now, to our dilemma: As we announced a little while ago, we’d hoped to pick a successor to our venerable “frog in boiling water” Official Grist Haiku — the one that concludes, “Dude, we are that frog” — in time for Earth Day.

We asked for your submissions. We picked some of the best, and we also seeded the entries with some of our own that we kicked around here.

We figured we’d hold a vote, see what the popular will told us, and then present a “people’s choice” and an editorial selection — or, ideally, they’d be the same.

But the vote, as of Earth Day, turned out to be a tie. And the more we sat with this set of nominees, we realized that, much as we enjoyed them, we didn’t feel that any was truly suited to knock our frog off its perch.

So we’re sticking with him for a little while longer. Meanwhile, we’ll go back to the drawing board and see what else we can do to build irresistible momentum in the (intensely competitive) “humorous green haiku” market.

Or, to summarize:

Grist Haiku contest
ends in dead heat. We’re stymied.
Frog, live on! (For now.)

SR: Did you follow this story at all as it happened?

Jay: yes, someone pinged me about the original
then I read Dave’s
that’s all I really know
just posted on Twitter about it

SR: OK, good. Did you see the editor’s note they posted?

Jay: yes

SR: OK. So here’s what I’m thinking:
Dave was sort of gentlemanly about it and said, “let’s move on”
But I looked at that editor’s note and thought, wait a minute

Jay: right

SR: They’re now saying, “we agree with the agencies and experts who are concerned about the role of carbon dioxide”
Which is pretty much the same as saying, “We disagree with these NASA retirees”
yet the story played it totally straight, and still does, only now, instead of a lame “What do you think?” it ends with “here’s what we think”

Jay: there’s a contradiction there, true
they removed the glaring part; they did not go back and ask: how did we get here?

SR: So I’m just wondering how you might view (a) the original NASA-retiree story as an exercise in “reverse verification” and then (b) the HuffPo fumble as a failure in responding to that kind of disinformation effort

Jay: right, gotcha
well, let’s start with “what reverse verification” is
verification is taking something that might be true, and trying to nail it down with facts
in reverse verification you take something that’s been nailed down and try to introduce doubt about it
was Obama born in the United States? is the clearest example
the phenomenon of “verification in reverse” poses a special problem for journalists
On the one hand, they are supposed to report what people are saying. They are supposed to bring us the news of controversies, protests, disagreements. “Conflict makes news,” and all that.
On the other hand, verification is their business
If they cannot support that, they cannot support themselves or their users
They are socially useless, in fact, if they cannot stand up for verification

SR: right. the trust is the main thing that they’re standing on compared with the broader “Anyone can play” media world

Jay: correct….. there is also a reluctance to wade into this dilemma, because it can have explosive consequences….
and so you have constituencies outside the press and critics like me who are focused on it, but journalists themselves wish the whole thing would go away
except in science journalism, largely because of climate change
and climate denialism

SR: so this issue actually pits groups of different journalists against one another:
you’ve got the science specialists who feel that this is a settled issue, and how can any rational person argue otherwise?
and the political beat people, who see it as part of the play-by-play partisan struggle

Jay: no, I would say science journalism is just a little closer to confronting it

SR: I get that, but I also see the situation where a science reporter today might say, “you need to report the truth of climate science” and a political reporter would say, “I just want to report the debate between the parties”

Jay: political journalists don’t want to go there, and for the most part they have not
because once they wade into those waters, they may get swept up into debates they do not want to have

SR: right. But some of them did begin that debate on their own turf with the Obama birth certificate/Obama’s a Muslim memes

Jay: yes, that’s true
and we have politifact.com, the Washington Post’s fact checker
those are significant developments
but: is political journalism ready for Chris Mooney? No.

SR: right. So to close this — do you see any approaches an editor or writer could take when confronted with a “NASA retiree” story? Seems to me you could start by just asking (and reporting) who organized the thing, which I don’t think the HuffPost story did

Jay: I think an editor or writer should start by asking the usual question:
what happened here
but then….
it’s also important to ask: is this denialism?
In other words, are we in the presence of “verification in reverse.”
And if we ARE…..
then that is itself the news, right
“49 NASA engineers and scientists veered toward climate change denialism yesterday when they released….”

Photo by Jonathan Hynkle.

Today the Huffington Post won a Pulitzer Prize. Congratulations, Huffington Post! Now you’re in the club. I’m sure the execs at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal who failed to take home any wins this year are teeth-gnashingly jealous.

But that’s not what this post is about. What it takes to win Pulitzers, most of the time, is big budgets, smart reporters, and weighty topics of national import. But most of the stories that shape our national debates, and thereby our future, are nothing like this sort of award bait. Most of those stories are more like “NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency,” a short piece in The Huffington Post last week.

This article recycled a press release announcing that a bunch of former NASA employees, including some astronauts and scientists but no climate experts, had taken issue with the agency over its work on global warming. Findings that “man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated,” the retirees charged. The article — written not by one of HuffPo’s famously uncompensated bloggers, but by its science editor, David Freeman — didn’t offer a single fact in rebuttal of the letter. But at the end, it asked: “What do you think? Is NASA pushing ‘unsettled science’ on global warming?”

It was a ludicrous postscript, one that abdicated the very purpose of science coverage. Journalists who specialize in science are our proxies to help us figure out what’s trustworthy in realms where we lack detailed expertise ourselves and don’t have time to acquire it. Asking for opinions online can be entertaining — but the climate debate isn’t the same thing as, say, weighing in on whether The Hunger Games movie did justice to the book.

Recognizing the boneheadedness of its move, and responding to searing criticism from folks like Grist’s David Roberts, HuffPo soon withdrew its query. It turned out that, in fact, the editors already had their own answer. They disagreed with the letter-signers! They do have a “reality meter” on this subject; it must’ve just been switched off during the preparation of the original post.

We’ve removed the question because HuffPost is not agnostic on the matter. Along with the overwhelming majority of the scientific community (including 98% of working climate scientists), we recognize that climate change is real and agree with the agencies and experts who are concerned about the role of carbon dioxide.

This was the right thing to do, and it placated the critics. “Let’s all move on,” Roberts wrote.

I’m afraid I’m not quite ready to do that — because this little dustup offers precious insight into a much more significant and widespread phenomenon in climate coverage. The NASA letter is a perfect case study in what press critic Jay Rosen has called “verification in reverse.”

Here’s Rosen, with whom I chatted about this issue on Friday (here’s a full transcript):

Verification is taking something that might be true, and trying to nail it down with facts. In reverse verification you take something that’s been nailed down and try to introduce doubt about it. “Was Obama born in the United States?” is the clearest example. The phenomenon of “verification in reverse” poses a special problem for journalists. On the one hand, they are supposed to report what people are saying. They are supposed to bring us the news of controversies, protests, disagreements. “Conflict makes news,” and all that. On the other hand, verification is their business. If they cannot support that, they cannot support themselves or their users. They are socially useless, in fact, if they cannot stand up for verification.

Rosen’s “verification in reverse” helps us understand the game that’s being played by climate-change denialists. They are manufacturing events that seem to play by the rules of reported journalism, yet are essentially fraudulent.

In this case, for instance, the letter from ex-NASA-ites undoubtedly exists. Yes, there apparently is (or was) a faction at NASA that’s unhappy with the NASA-funded research that has helped us understand and benchmark the human role in CO2-driven climate change. That’s all real.

But it’s not the story. Unless you’re willing to report in the same piece the scientific consensus that — in HuffPo’s words — “climate change is real,” caused by carbon dioxide, and propelled by human activity, then you’re not reporting responsibly. You are, in fact, just playing into the hands of the verification-in-reverse gang. You’re like the reporter who quotes a Tea Partier ranting that President Obama is a Muslim without also noting that, um, he’s not.

Here’s an illuminating parallel case: Let’s say a couple dozen former Immigration and Naturalization Service officials signed a letter saying they believe Obama was not born in the U.S. You’ve got to write the story up. You might research the penetration of “birther” propaganda among INS alumni; you might poke merciless fun at their gullibility or partisan venom; you might dig around to figure out who was behind the PR gambit. You almost certainly would not simply report their claim without comment — and then ask readers whether they agree.

Sadly, one of Huffington Post’s own contributors wrote the responsible piece on this story. But Shawn Lawrence Otto’s article came two days after Freeman’s piece. Even the sketchy Business Insider post on the same story, which basically reprinted the original press release, provided more context than Freeman’s, since the press release at least mentioned that the letter had been organized by “H. Leighton Steward, chairman of the non-profit Plants Need CO2.” (Steward turns out to be a retired energy exec; you can read all about him here, here, and here.)

HuffPo’s NASA coverage is a textbook illustration of the inadequacy of a “just the facts” approach in a reverse-verification conflict. Of course we need the facts — but they can only be a starting point. We need context and nuance. We need to be aware of what the game is and who’s playing. Most of all, we need writers we trust to know the facts, understand a story’s evolution, level with us about what they know and how they know it, and not get bamboozled by manipulative stunts. (I reached out to Freeman for a comment or response on some of these points, but he forwarded me to corporate communications, and they said, “No comment.”)

The Huffington Post has long had a troubled relationship with science. For years it lent credence to the most tenuous and tendentious claims of the anti-vaccination crowd (Seth Mnookin has the details). As the publication moved toward the mainstream, it launched a separate science section in a bid to become a more trusted source. But even winning a Pulitzer won’t make much difference as long as stories like Freeman’s NASA misfire get posted.

(Photo by Chris Coomber.)

It’s been way too long
since Grist’s last haiku contest.
We’re here to fix that.

Last time, we emerged
with Grist’s official haiku.
Here it is for you:

A frog in water
doesn’t feel it boil in time.
Dude, we are that frog.

A fine haiku! Sure,
some may impugn its science.
We love its koan-

like flash of insight.
It served us well for years. But
its work here is done.

This Earth Day, Grist plans
To christen a new poem.
Will you help us out?

The earth’s future could
hang on the syllables of
your five-seven-five.

Send us your haiku!
Email them to us right here.
Or just tweet them out.

(The hashtag “#gristku”
Will insure that we see them.)
Here’s inspiration

in a video
from haiku master Dylan
Tweney. Now go write!

Who knows? Your words, too,
might end up immortalized
On a Grist T-shirt.

Photo by jonhoward.

Some of you liked “We Lost,” our April Fools’ item on green leaders throwing in the towel, but some of you didn’t.

“April Fail,” the comments read. “Stupidest idea ever. This is too big to joke about.” “This scared the shit outta me until I realized the date. Don’t do this to us.” Over on Twitter, @BobbyHertz complained, “Awful April Fools’ Joke, bad taste … trivializes the fight for Climate Justice.” Some readers reported tears.

Though we certainly didn’t set out to make anyone cry, we’ll never apologize for our attempts at humor here at Grist. We know some will work better than others, and one person’s laugh is another one’s gaffe. Chacon a son Grist.

We’ll also never cordon off any topic as “too big to joke about.” The bigger the issue, the fatter the target. Laughter keeps activists going. It keeps us here at Grist going. It has actual medical benefits, people!

There are April Fools’ gags that walk the line between truth and gag so gingerly, it’s hard to tell which they are. (Like this other one we ran, on artisanal “pink slime.”) “We Lost” wasn’t one like that. It was pretty obviously fake. Anyone who knows Bill McKibben and the rest of the luminaries in this story knows this: They’re determined people. If they were prone to giving up in the face of setbacks, they’d have thrown in the towel eons ago.

Sometimes I think we take that determination for granted. And that has its problems. On one hand, it’s a blessing that the people who have been leading the fight for saner energy policies and a more sustainable food system are dedicated and resourceful and unlikely to abandon the field. Hurrah for that. On the other hand, our confidence in their commitment can give us an easy out from making deeper commitments of our own. Their leadership lets us delegate our activism.

So of course I’m glad that this story wasn’t true, and we didn’t make a big effort to pretend it was. The point here wasn’t to fool you but to get you thinking about a counterfactual scenario. What would we do if these banner-bearers weren’t around: Rend our garments? Or try to fill their shoes?

She brings both those qualities to Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us, her new book about the choices we face in continuing to power our world without wrecking it. It’s a fast, filling read that will arm you with a deeper understanding of the precariousness of our electricity grid, the distinction between efficiency and conservation, and the pros and cons of each of the energy sources we imagine as our savior. Koerth-Baker plants herself firmly in the climate-activist camp, but she knows how to talk across the political divide, and, refreshingly, her perspective is rooted in the heartland and draws examples from places like Kansas and Minnesota more than California and New York.

We’ve got an excerpt of Before the Lights Go Out for you, which looks at the relative importance of individual choice and policymaking in reforming our energy system. I collared Koerth-Baker via email to answer some questions the book raised for me about the climate debate, the possibility of dialogue, and the tenuousness of hope.

Q. You begin with the story of the Kansan who declares “climate change is a lie” yet who drives a hybrid and has swapped out all his incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents. Many of us have spent a lot of time trying to argue with climate deniers. Do you think we should just give that up? Is it really possible to take care of our climate crisis without persuading people that it exists?

A. No. I don’t think we should give up talking about climate change and trying to help more people understand and accept it. This is important science. Based on everything we know, it represents a very real threat to our way of life, and in fact, to our lives.

That said, I think we are thinking about this the wrong way in some respects. We can’t wait until we’ve convinced everyone that climate change is happening before we start taking energy action, and we don’t have to. What I think that story with the man from Kansas illustrates is that there is common ground that we can find and work with. It doesn’t mean we stop talking about climate change, but it does mean that we start approaching people who aren’t listening when we talk about climate and, instead, find the things we can agree on when it comes to energy. You can do both at the same time, and I think we should.

I also think that we — and, by that, I mean the segment of the media that pays a lot of attention to energy and climate issues — spend too much time attacking, debunking, and arguing with people who aren’t going listen because they have other agendas driving their decision making. Instead, I think we would do better to focus more of our efforts on creating bridges to communities and individuals who are more on the fence about this stuff.

There are plenty of people who say they don’t believe in climate change now, but who are aware of changes happening and if we help them to better understand the science, there’s more of a chance of them accepting this reality. I think that constructive approach is more likely to work than if we keep putting all our energy into yelling down (or complaining to the choir about) people like James Inhofe.

Q. You write early on, “This isn’t a book about quick fixes,” argue there’s “no killer app” for renewable energy, and suggest that any sane path forward is going to involve a complex mix of new policies, technologies and systems. (I kept thinking of Clay Shirky’s line about the future of the media business: “Nothing will work, but everything might.”) How do we get there from here, when “here” is where so many Americans still think politicians can lower the price of gas — or that lower gas prices are a good thing?

A. That is a difficult question. And I don’t think there is a clear answer. But in the course of doing this research, I have come to the conclusion that part of the answer must involve some method of putting a price on carbon — precisely because that carbon is valuable.

We’ve become dependent on fossil fuels for a reason — not because of any evil plot, but because these fuels are just that much more powerful than anything that came before them. The power of coal, the portability of liquid gasoline: There is amazing value there. At the same time, we’re also talking about fuels we have limited supplies of. And those fuels, when we use them, also cost us money in the form of health-care costs and climate change adaptation costs.

Right now, the price we pay for those fuels doesn’t really account for either the amazing benefits or the awful limitations. It’s an artificial price, based on simple, direct supply and demand. It doesn’t take the long term into account. It doesn’t take economy-wide effects into account.

If we valued fossil fuels at what they are really worth to us, then a lot of the other stuff would fall into place. That mixture of technologies and policies would happen faster, and more naturally, because it would be based on a natural incentive.

It’s reasonable for people to not want to spend half their paycheck on a fuel that is absolutely necessary to their life. But paradoxically, if we had a price on carbon, and the cost of those fuels went up, then businesses and governments and individuals would find ways to get people the services they needed at a lower cost. Right now, there’s not enough of an incentive for that.

Q. You make the point (in this excerpt from the book, for instance) that energy is a big “shared system” that isn’t going to change based on individual choices but needs to be reformed at the level of policy. That makes a lot of sense to me, but it’s also pretty depressing, since I can control my own choices but I’m pessimistic about the policies we’re likely to get from Washington. How do you keep despair at bay?

A. It is a bit depressing. Realizing the scale of problem we’re dealing with, and the complexity of the solution we have to create, really did make me a lot more pessimistic than I was when I started researching this book. Even if you have the political willpower, you’re still talking about a huge undertaking, bigger and more complicated than anything we’ve tried before.

Changing the way we use energy is often compared to the Apollo Project, but it’s actually broader than that. A price on carbon would make it easier, but it’s still complicated. And you still have to think about the far future even as you’re making changes to make the present better.

The good news is that there is a role for individual choices, just not the one we’ve imagined. Your individual choices don’t matter … unless there is some mechanism linking them to other people’s individual choices. This is why programs that tell you whether you’re using more or less energy than your neighbors are good. They link choices together and help people to start making changes (and larger changes) en masse. And that’s why a price on carbon helps, too. Because it naturally encourages people to make changes all together, and those changes are simple-to-understand … you’d just find ways to do things cheaper, and that would be the right decision.

Individual choices are also part of their own system — a cultural system. I noticed this when I was researching what the U.S. military, and particularly the Navy and Air Force, has done about energy. They’re on the forefront of this stuff. And it’s not just about alternative fuels. There are some massive changes happening in how military culture thinks about energy use, and it’s leading to large-scale efficiency and conservation.

On the surface, this looks like a very top-down thing. It looks like something dictated from the generals. But it’s more complicated than that. If you look at the history, what you see is an interaction between bottom-up and top-down enabling one another. Individuals made a case for energy change as a practical thing, which would fit the mission and solve some serious problems. The people at the top made a few changes, and those changes ended up changing not just what the people at the bottom did, but also how they thought about energy. As more soldiers and sailors and airmen became energy conscious, they’ve pushed for more changes, and that (combined with proven results) has led to more top-down action, and more bottom-up cultural shifts.

The key, though, is that the original bottom-up agents of change didn’t start out thinking about what they could do at home by themselves. And they didn’t approach the problem by taking sides or asking other people to take sides. Instead, they started out by looking at how large-scale changes would benefit everyone, and they worked to get some of those implemented.