The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.

In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.

Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.

Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.

So if you want to know how Exxon Mobil can make $10 billion profit in 90 days, just look around. The whole world was built for them.

In reality, Republicans have long been at war with clean energy. They have ridiculed investments in solar and wind power, bashed energy-efficiency standards, attacked state moves to promote renewable energy and championed laws that would enshrine taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels while stripping them from wind and solar.

One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America's energy problems never give up.