Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.

There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.

"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

We have to transition to new technologies, making it more expensive to continue with the old and polluting technologies and cheaper to go to the clean ones.

With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we're holding the fossil fuel industry in check, the engineers in the renewable energy world are undercutting them from the other side.

We have to get our states to adopt what are called "renewable portfolio standards" pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)