Trying to think more, um, sustainably about the holidays this year? So, it seems, is everyone else. It's hardly an innovation that 2012 can claim to own -- in fact, it has become a holiday tradition in its own right.

It's what was on the mind of Grist Senior Editor Greg Hanscom, when, confronted with the prospect of another Black Friday post-turkey shopping spree, he penned an open letter to his family and friends. "Please get my kids nothing for Christmas," he begged. Posted here at Grist, Greg's plea for a saner approach to a less stuff-y holiday fired up many of our readers' imaginations, caught the eye of some of our friends in TV-land, and led us to declare it, officially, our Grist theme for December: For the holidays this year, make it anything but stuff. Shift the gift!

Of course we can't claim that any of this is truly new. Long before someone had the bright idea of transmuting "gift" into a verb, many of us were scratching our heads looking for ways to dematerialize the annual solstice celebrations. I'm sure we're eventually going to discover a cave-wall drawing recording the moment at which some hapless neolithic family, surveying the dwindling space in its communal burrow, let out the cry of "TOO MUCH STUFF!"

Still: Ideas have moments, and surely this is this year's merry meme. We are years into a grueling recession that has only improved around the edges. We are reeling from a storm that battered large chunks of the East Coast. We see with deepening clarity that our system hasn't yet embraced the changes needed to deflect the curve of climate change.

We won't let that stop us from enjoying the holidays. But the last thing we need is to do so by gathering piles of stuff that we don't really need and may not even want.

Celebration without accumulation! Or, as we intend to chant, with our human mics cranked up as loud as we know how, "Shift the gift!"

Hello Grist readers,

When it comes to suavely outmaneuvering the climate apocalypse, Grist aims to leave you stirred, not shaken.

Would you give just $5 to bolster Grist's defenses so we can stir more people into action?

If you do, we'll raise our martini glass to you. We know lots of you are out there making change because of something you spied on Grist. In fact, 70 percent of our readers say we give you license to kill bad habits thanks to our fearless news and advice -- and perhaps a good pun or two.

But it's going to take a whole lot more of us to fight the political and industrial foes who are bent on planetary destruction. And creating agents of change doesn't come cheap -- it takes some bullion. So please, toast us with a donation.

Grist readers, we have just one more week to hit the payload. Make a gift today to help us reach our goal of 2,500 donations by Dec. 11.

Thirstily,
Scott Rosenberg
Head of Editorial Secret Services

P.S. Did we mention that gifts of $50 or more will be matched by a generous, anonymous ally?

P.P.S. Rather not give online? You're also welcome to send a check: Grist, 710 Second Avenue, Suite 860, Seattle, WA 98104.

It's not every day that the author of a new book -- a sharp perspective on a topic that's central to your work -- approaches you and proposes that you make the entire thing available on your website. Usually, authors are more ... parsimonious with their work.

So when Alex Steffen brought his Carbon Zero to Grist several weeks ago with this offer, I wanted to make absolutely certain I'd heard him right.

I knew he'd already raised a little money on Kickstarter to write the book. And I knew he was publishing Carbon Zero under the share-and-modify-friendly Creative Commons license. Still, I had to ask.

"So, you're sure you want us to post the entire book? Really truly? You're not afraid it'll hurt sales? You won't change your mind?"

"Yeah," he nodded. "I'm most interested in getting these ideas out there."

(Of course, if you like what you read, Steffen absolutely will not mind if you do want to buy Carbon Zero in its fully designed e-book format, available very shortly.)

I first encountered Steffen the way you probably did -- through his work cofounding and editing the late, lamented blog called Worldchanging. He's known for thinking realistically -- but not too dejectedly -- about how we might get to a greener future, and in a way that embraces technology without fetishizing it.

When I read Carbon Zero, it more than lived up to that reputation. It's a brief but deep manual for imagining how our cities can become the solution to our climate woes. I think you'll find it makes for bracing, inspiring reading that should serve as perfect pick-me-up after Sandy's devastating East Coast visit. You may want to quarrel with some of Steffen's arguments, but I don't think you'll be disappointed by the scope of his ideas or the urgency of his perspective.

This week, we'll be posting all of Carbon Zero's six chapters (along with their occasional sidebars), a chapter each day till we're done. You can begin at the beginning right here.

We'll also bring Steffen over soon to talk more about the book and its ideas and answer your questions. As we post these fresh hunks of prose, the links on this contents page will light up -- and once we're done, they'll stay lit. Ideas, after all, are a renewable energy source.

350.org and Bill McKibben have been barnstorming the U.S. since the election with their Do the Math tour. I caught the show in Berkeley, my home town. It's a stirring, heartfelt, unpasteurized, unhomogenized effort to spark a new grassroots movement aimed at breaking the climate-action deadlock by putting pressure on the fossil-fuel industry.

I highly recommend catching the presentation in person if you can. But if you can't, Sunday's event in Washington, D.C., is being live-streamed. Things begin at 1 p.m. Eastern time, and you can watch along right here:

Beginning today I'm excited to introduce a new thing here at Grist: monthly themes!

As you may surmise, this is something that will happen every month. And every month has its own theme.

You can't hum our themes. (At least I think.) But you'll be able to see them play out each month in different aspects of our coverage, our posts, our tweets and Facebook postings, our chats, and everything else we do.

Our theme for November is: What's next for the climate? Now that we know who'll be sitting in the White House and running Congress come 2013, and now that we've seen a devastating storm pummel our most populous city, it's time to take stock.

We'll have our own Grist team as well as smart observers and movement leaders weigh in on what's going to happen -- and what should be happening -- as the Earth's warming becomes an ever more tangible presence in our lives.

Think of it as our post-election hangover survival guide. In fact, that's one of the pieces we've got in the works. Here's a smattering of the other stuff we've got on tap:

• Bill McKibben and other environmental leaders lay out their visions for the next year's conversation around climate.

• U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) explains his carbon-tax bill.

• Alex Steffen will debut Carbon Zero, his vision for how the city of the future can solve today's climate dilemmas.

• Author Steven Johnson talks with us about his new Future Perfect and what the "peer progressive" movement has to offer the climate.

• What sort of effect will the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations have on clean energy, green jobs, and the environment?

You can find all of our theme-related pieces here.

We'll do our best to pull together the strands of this theme and those to follow -- and, this being Grist, to keep them funny wherever we can. As we do all this, we want to hear from you, of course. In comments below, or in email, by telepathy -- whatever works for you! -- tell us how you think we should approach this month's theme, and what other themes you think we should be tackling in coming months.

Barack Obama is still president. The Democrats still control the Senate. The Tea Party Republicans still control the House.

Meanwhile, the planet is still warming. And we still don't have a plan to do anything about it.

So did anything at all happen during this election? Was it all just a mad dream of dueling polls, pugnacious debates, and SuperPAC-funded attack ads? Did red and blue just fight a draw, leaving a deadlocked status quo to stew in its bitter juices?

No: The political landscape looks the same but the tectonic plates have moved beneath the surface. Here are four big reasons why.

Obamacare lives: The president's reelection served as an effective second ratification of his healthcare plan (third, if you count the Supreme Court ruling). That's a huge deal. A President Romney might not have been able to get full repeal through a Democratic Senate, but he'd have wielded a lot of executive power to wreck Obamacare.

Democrats enter "fiscal cliff" negotiations with a strong hand: If Republicans in Congress don't find a way to compromise with President Obama, the new year will automatically bring a radically progressive agenda into law: taxes will go up as the Bush tax cuts expire, and heavy cuts to military spending will kick in. It's a risky road -- all that austerity might also tip the nation back into recession. But it gives the president a very strong hand to play both before and after Jan. 1.

The Supreme Court is safe(r) for four more years: With one more Supreme Court appointment, a Republican president could tip the court decisively for a generation in the direction of the originalist fundamentalism embraced by the court's right wing. Among many other things -- including reproductive rights -- we could kiss many of the nation's most significant environmental regulations goodbye.

The climate has a fighting chance: Obama disappointed climate hawks in his first term. His "all of the above" energy strategy promises no sharpening of policy or change of heart. But at least his party is willing to speak about the issue without dismissing science.

In the wake of Sandy's coastal devastation, there's at least a chance of reopening the national conversation about global warming. It would be great for that conversation to be led by a president who's a real climate crusader.

Obama hasn't been one, so far. But at least we're not getting a denier in the White House.

This shit's real.

That's what Sandy told America this week. And that's what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told us, more decorously, with his high-profile eleventh-hour endorsement of President Obama.

It has long looked like the 2012 election season would go down in history as the Election That Didn't Talk About The Climate. This week, the planet stepped in and said, in no uncertain terms, that attention must be paid. Climate change isn't a graph or a number; it's a storm and a flood. It's not in Greenland or Vanuatu; it's in New York and New Jersey.

Neither candidate has exactly been itching to address this subject. Obama has been mostly climate-mum since 2009. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has walked back from his carbon-cutting Massachusetts policies and embraced the current GOP orthodoxy, which is to mock anyone -- including the president -- who suggests taking the issue of the planet's warming seriously.

Yet here comes Bloomberg -- a former Democrat turned Republican turned independent who many thought might run for president himself on a third-party ticket -- throwing his support behind Obama, citing climate as the proximate reason for his hop off the fence:

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action. ... One [candidate] sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet; one does not. I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics.

The importance of Bloomberg's move is twofold. First, as the headline on his endorsement reads, the mayor is voting "for a president to lead on climate change." In other words, he's not just saying, "Four more years." He's casting his vote less for the man than for climate-change leadership -- something that Obama, however disappointing he has been to climate-hawk supporters, is more likely to deliver than his opponent.

Second, Bloomberg is one of the last inhabitants of U.S. politics' mythical Land of the Centrists. As such, his insistence on the primacy of climate in picking a candidate carries less partisan spin and is harder for the Beltway punditocracy to discount. Denialists on the right aren't going to be swayed, of course, but they're going to have a much harder time dismissing Bloomberg than, say, Al Gore.

I don't want to overstate the importance of the moment. This endorsement, though unexpected, was consistent with Bloomberg's longstanding positions; he has been putting his voice and his cash into the climate fight for a long time. It doesn't guarantee that Sandy will be remembered as a transformative moment of the public dialogue over climate change akin to, say, Walter Cronkite's criticism of the Vietnam War effort.

But for those of us who've been waiting a long time for someone to shout "fire" in our overcrowded political theater, it's a bracingly notable event. Now the challenge is to keep this conversation rolling.

Consciousness isn't a finite resource, but if people don't act on it, it can and will ebb away. It was only a handful of years ago that An Inconvenient Truth spread its do-something-about-the-climate gospel; that momentum petered out and is a distant memory today.

Sandy hit more of us harder, where we live. Those who experienced it are much more likely to understand that climate change is neither a hoax nor a movie but a fact and a crisis. Bloomberg's endorsement added a line of bright highlighter yellow to this picture. It was politics, sure, but also, in its way, art.

We're heading into the final two days of our Kickstarter campaign to fund "I, Party Cup," our documentary biography of a celebrated throwaway American icon. And we really need your help!

Our filmmaker, John Pavlus of Small Mammal Productions, is ready to start work. He's champing at the bit. A hundred people have already pledged to support the project. The party's all set to go. All we're waiting for is ... you.

Remember that on Kickstarter, we don't get a cent from you, or anyone else, unless we reach our goal. So if we're going to make it to the finish line, we're going to need you to pitch in.

Because this is the internet, silly, we got comments when we announced this project. I'd like to address one of them here:

I hate red plastic cups! They destroy the Earth! Why are you celebrating them?

"I, Party Cup" isn't intended to glorify or fetishize a dumb piece of plastic that too often pads out the trash. But this thing is a part of our world, for better and worse. We can just denounce it and watch as the landfills keep growing. Or we can try to understand the decisions that shaped a tiny, ubiquitous part of our world -- an element that we would otherwise take entirely for granted.

As Pavlus explains it in his trailer for the project, it's all about curiosity. And, I'd add, also about having a little fun along the way.

No, but really, you're supposed to be all about sustainability at Grist, and here you are raising money for a film about a plastic cup?

Sure, we're playing against type here. But also: Who of us is pure? We all participate in a disposable world. The Red Party Cup is a part of our lives. Let us understand it better even as we try to use it less.

If you back our Kickstarter project, there's a bunch of rewards on tap -- you can see the whole list here.

The other thing to know is that every dollar you commit to support this documentary will be matched in the form of a gift to Grist from a generous, anonymous donor. So every contribution to the project also supports the independent green news and advice Grist serves up year-round. It's a twofer!

Let's put on a show!

All right, actually, a video. Online. About disposable red party cups.

That's right: Grist is partnering with filmmaker John Pavlus to produce I, Party Cup -- a documentary that asks: Who made this people's chalice such a ubiquitous part of our disposable world? Why'd they do it? And what can that tell us about the small decisions and little things that shape our world in big ways?

So: We need your help. We're funding this project on Kickstarter -- the innovative platform that's become, in a few brief seasons, a buzzing hive connecting creative artists and people who want to support their work.

Why should you support a film about a cup? I could just tell you. But listen to John, he'll do it better:

This is an experiment for us at Grist. We've cut our nonprofit teeth on our ability to mobilize contributions from supporters like you. But we're new to this crowdfunding thing and this is our first time on Kickstarter.

So give us a hand. Read more about the project. Review the dizzyingly delightful array of rewards we've lined up for our supporters. Become a backer yourself. Then tell your friends.

And wait, there's more: Every dollar you decide to contribute to support this project will be matched in the form of another dollar donated by an anonymous benefactor to support Grist's independent green news and advice.

Many thanks from all of us. Cry havoc, and let loose the Red Party Cups!

New York Times columnist David Brooks may be a (sorta kinda) conservative. But by all accounts, he also has the ear of President Obama. And in his column today, Brooks -- trying to imagine some big initiatives that the president might push as he prepares to accept his party's nomination for a second term -- offers Obama a bold idea: put climate change at the top of his policy agenda.

President Obama has occasionally said he’d like to do something about climate change if he gets a second term. Given the country’s immediate economic and fiscal problems, this seems obtuse to me. But if this is really where Obama’s passion lies, he should go for it.