"Our democracy has been hacked," Al Gore told a packed house at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, Monday night. "It's not working the way it should."

It was an odd image to choose in front of this crowd, which is more likely to think "hacker" means heroic tinkerer than digital thief. Indeed, by the end of the evening, Gore's partner on stage -- Napster cofounder and Facebook billionaire Sean Parker -- was sounding a rallying cry for "hackers, engineers and progressive thinkers" to take back the U.S.A. from moneyed interests that are subverting democracy.

So let's just say this was not an event with a finely tuned message.

Gore hadn't taken the stage at SXSW to rally the crowd for a climate-change fix. His climate pitch came as an almost comically understated aside: "By the way, I need your help to solve the climate crisis. That's another story, but I wanted to get that in there."

Instead, Gore had come to urge the festival's assembled entrepreneurs and geeks to help retool the financial structure of politics, so that elected officials didn't have to spend all their time "begging on their knees" for dollars from rich contributors in order to pay for TV ads.

Please, someone: make it stop!

There was a brief window of hope a couple of days ago that Mitt Romney's victories in Tuesday's "Super" set of primaries would be potent enough to sweep the field of his rivals and allow him, finally, to don that front-runner mantle he has been lunging for all season. But as the dust clears from tonight's mixed bag of primary results -- including a late-night squeaker of an Ohio win for Romney -- it's apparent that his campaign still has a long run ahead of it.

That's reason for green-minded people to add their own laments to the wails of Romney's ardent supporters. No, there's little reason to believe Romney's a closet climate hawk. But his latest failure to close the deal with his own party does mean that we're going to spend another few months arguing about God and contraceptives instead of talking about how to fix the big fails in our future.

On some level, of course, progressives and environmentalists can't help taking some satisfaction in the Republican Party's internecine bloodletting. The joke always used to be that Democratic primaries were circular firing squads, whereas the disciplined GOP obeyed Maximum Leader Reagan's "eleventh commandment" not to attack one another.

Forgive them, Ronald, for this year, they have sinned a whole lot.

But schadenfreude only gets you so far. While the Republican race hogs the headlines and eats up the news cycles, it's not as though the real problems facing our next president, whoever it is, are politely pausing in their tracks.

The national debates we need to hold won't wait. How do we accomplish the shift away from fossil fuels that we've known we're going to have to make at least since the 1970s? How do we build an economy that isn't stuck in the boom-bust cycle of an unsustainable perpetual-growth machine? How do we agree on a set of basic services worth supporting with our taxes, and how do we make sure those taxes are shared more fairly?

The Republican candidates won't discuss these issues on their own as long as they're still competing for the favor of their party's radicals. It's high time this silly season of deficit-inflating tax cuts, Iran-nuke scare-mongering and $2.50-a-gallon gasoline-price pandering draws to its close.

Each week that Romney fails to clinch his nomination is another week of wasted rhetoric and delayed reckoning. Despite their lack of enthusiasm for their front-runner, Republicans know deep down that he's the only candidate they've got with even a remote shot at unseating President Obama. There isn't going to be a late-entrant upset. There isn't going to be a brokered convention. Sarah Palin is not going to descend from the proscenium on the back of a polar bear and rescue her adoring flock.

So come on, red America: Can't we get on with it already?

What are profits and how do you tally them?

The entire history of accounting exists to answer that question. Fortunately, we don't have to.

But the piece we ran last week on Apple's profits -- "Why your iThings don't have to be weCruel" -- started a vigorous discussion on the subject among readers.

Our contributor Gar Lipow wanted to make the case that the production of Apple's popular gadgets isn't inherently unsustainable and doesn't have to exploit overseas labor. Several commenters objected to Lipow's statement that "The single greatest cost component of both the iPhone and the iPad is neither labor nor materials, but profits." They noticed that the pie charts we published broke down material costs and labor costs for the iPad and iPhone by country but slapped the label "Apple profits" over what seemed to be the entire sum of Apple's revenue for these products -- without taking into account its overhead, design costs, personnel costs, and so on.

I started talking about the concept of "sustainable information" here at Grist a couple of months ago, and drew mostly blank stares. It was as if yoking the two words together couldn't possibly make sense.

I didn't mean information about sustainability, valuable though that is.

I didn't mean the sustainable delivery of information -- as in, "think of the trees before you print out this e-mail," or "don't leave your laptop on its charger round the clock."

And -- important though this might be to my own livelihood -- I didn't mean "how do we keep news organizations in business," which is what people in the media often think "sustainable" means.

I was thinking more about what it might mean to apply the ideal of sustainability to the news and information that we produce and consume every day.

What you see on the pages for this blog represents the first phase of some redecorating, and rethinking, that's going to unfold here at Grist in coming weeks and months.

We're aiming to make our pages friendlier to read, gentler on the eyes, and easier to use. We're testing out some aspects of the new design here and plan on rolling it out more widely to other parts of Grist soon. Down the road we'll also be improving our mobile edition and our email services.

Along with these changes in how things look we'll also be revamping how our coverage is organized, beefing up our news coverage and making other improvements.

We're doing this in stages so we can make course corrections as needed, and that's where you come in. We do really want to know what you think about what we're doing. So I'll be checking in regularly with you all right here. Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below.

I've been a regular blogger since 2002 -- first at Salon.com, then at my own site. Since joining Grist last September, I've sorely neglected the old blog; there's simply been too much to do here to keep up.

So I'm thrilled to begin this new blog at Grist. It's the first new feature we're rolling out now that we've completed our transition to the WordPress platform. And that's not because I have a burning need to see that little drawing of my face at the top of the page. (Flattering though it is, plainly I need hipper glasses -- but I refuse. On principle.)

The real point of this is for me to be able to talk with you about what's happening at Grist, and to hear back from you about what we're doing and how we could do better. There's a lot of change afoot at this place; we need to know how it's going and what you're thinking about it.

In addition, of course, I'll be weighing in on all things sustainable and green and Grist-y, as I feel the need and find the time. No point in having a blog if you don't use it!

P.S. If you're the creator of the movie-poster image above or you know its original source, let me know so I can credit you. This one has been kicking around the Web for a long time and its origins are lost -- at least to me.

1. When they say: "The Keystone XL pipeline will bring down gas prices!"

You can say: In your dreams.

Gas is a global commodity and its price is set by global markets. It rises and falls based on all sorts of factors, including current demand, demand forecasts, global economic conditions, and international events that affect distribution channels. Local supply fluctuations rarely have any but the tiniest impact on gas prices. New pipelines carrying costly-to-extract tar-sands oil might extend the lifespan of climate-wrecking fossil fuels by a few years, but they won't bring down the price at the pump. (In fact, in the Midwest, Keystone XL might actually increase the price per gallon -- this report explains why.)

As the camera pans around the Capitol chamber for President Obama's State of the Union address, see if you can spot the representatives from the state of Oil: four avid supporters of the Keystone XL Pipeline who will attend the speech as the guests of House Speaker John Boehner.

Every few years somebody comes along and tries to break the internet. Sometimes it's a corporation that thinks it can replace the open network with a more profitable company town. Other times, it's a government that thinks it must tame the online wilds with new laws. Each time, the internet seems to brush off the assault. The network is, after all, simply an idea -- a set of agreements to trade digital signals according to certain rules that over the past two decades produced a new kind of open public sphere, a media commons. That idea has proven highly resilient. …

Today Grist is switching our publishing system from one platform to another. (For those of you interested in this stuff, we've moved to WordPress.) It's a big deal for us, but shouldn't be, for you: In fact, the changes we've made so far ought to be nearly invisible. We haven't altered much about the site for now. We do have all sorts of improvements up our sleeves for the coming weeks and months! But at the moment we don't think you'll notice too much that's different. Still, this is technology we're dealing with here -- so of course there will …