Energy subsidies are a stick that champions of their favorite energy technologies wield against competing technologies.

Supporters of fossil fuel and nuclear argue that wind, solar, and others in the renewable family are welfare bums that can't stand on their own. Advocates for renewables fire back that fossils and nuclear have been supping at Uncle Sam's table for years.

The fact is that all forms of energy are subsidized. Not one - conservation, renewables, nuclear, or fossils - stands on its own in some libertarian paradise free of tax preferences, research grants, loan guarantees, or other flavors of federal gravy.

That's not necessarily bad. Using subsidies as a rhetorical cudgel clouds a more fundamental question - what are the top energy problems that we're trying to solve and what subsidies should be employed to solve them...?

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Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? Back in 1999, a couple of researchers in Cornell University's psychology department, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It carried the provocative title, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments. The gist of Dunning's and Kruger's paper was that people unskilled in areas of intellectual inquiry tend to overstate their abilities in those areas. Worse, in addition to jumping to erroneous conclusions, they don't realize they've jumped to erroneous conclusions.

For example, the skills enabling you to solve a math problem are the same skills needed for recognizing when the problem has been solved correctly and when it hasn't. If you don't know enough to solve the math problem, you won't know enough to recognize when it's been solved correctly and when it hasn't, the Dunning-Kruger Effect tells us.

Donald Rumsfeld had a phrase for this cognitive sand trap: We don't know what we don't know. Back in the day, reporters made fun of Rumsfeld when, in the middle of some convoluted statement, he would use that phrase. For all his circumlocutions, the former defense secretary had it right.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a significant reason why climate change debates are so vexatious. People with all manner of opinions about climate change are susceptible to the phenomenon.

Here is one example of how the Dunning-Kruger Effect plays out: Climate scientists and those who accept their conclusions that human activities are changing the climate often are confronted with a contemptuous question, to the effect: "Don't scientists realize that climate changed naturally in the past, before there were people building coal plants and driving SUVs?"

The short answer is, yes, scientists do know about past climate change episodes that had perfectly natural causes. They study them for clues on how the global climate system reacts to "forcing" events that can shift it into a different state.

Take, for example, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Sounds like a heavy-metal rock band, but it's sci-speak for a serious warming episode that took place some 55 million years ago, long before hominids showed up on the African savanna. The PETM, as climatologists refer to it, has been scrutinized for the insights that it might offer on how the current CO2 buildup in the atmosphere affects global temperatures.

While there is more to learn about past climate change episodes, they are part of the body of evidence that the climate system is sensitive to CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.

Overcoming the Dunning-Kruger Effect requires some conscious effort. If something seems puzzling or odd about what a scientist says about climate change, it's best not to assume that the scientist is a dummy who overlooked something obvious or a mendacious conspirator out to hoodwink the public. You know what can happen when you assume. Do some digging, find out what's known with a high degree of confidence about how the climate works, and understand the range of impacts that climate change could have, and the odds of those impacts coming true.

There's no shame in understanding the limits of one's own knowledge. In honor of Donald Rumsfeld's contributions to public discourse, remember one of his great musings in that regard: "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

Imagine the California Legislature trying to close down Hollywood.

Or the New York Legislature sticking it to book publishers.

Or the Kentucky Legislature telling thoroughbred horse breeders to get lost.

State legislators usually make nice with industries that bring jobs and money to their states. Someone should tell that to the ideologues in the Arizona Legislature.

The state House seriously considered a bill that would have yanked away the welcome mat for the state's fledgling solar industry, less than a year after enactment of legislation creating tax incentives for solar manufacturers. After an outcry from renewable energy developers, manufacturers, utilities, citizens' groups, economic development officials, and Arizona's major newspapers, the bill was pulled on Friday....

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People who grew up during the 1930s and '40s can remember a day when the United States produced more oil than the rest of the world combined.

Those days are gone. U.S. oil production peaked in the early 1970s. The current U.S. share of global oil production is less than 10 percent. As demand rocketed upward over the decades and domestic production fell, we became more dependent on imported crude oil and petroleum products. Today, imports supply nearly 60 percent of total U.S. petroleum demand.

Transportation's dependence on petroleum is almost total. What are the chances of restoring self-sufficiency in transportation energy? America's Energy Future, a report sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, sheds some light on this question. The best near-term option is greater fuel efficiency. By the 2030s, we could take a bite out of imports, given generous assumptions about developing alternative fuels, some quite carbon-heavy. Beyond the 2030s, the best hope is widespread vehicle electrification using battery-electric drives and/or fuel cells.

Let's look at some numbers. Total U.S. petroleum demand is 19.5 million barrels per day. Total daily crude oil production from U.S. oilfields is a shade below 5 million barrels per day. Once you net out other factors - production of usable natural gas liquids, imports of gasoline and other refined products, and exports - yes, U.S. producers on the hunt for market advantages export some 1.8 million barrels daily in crude oil and refined products - net imports of liquid fuels total 11.1 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

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I suppose it was inevitable. When heavy snow falls inside the bubble that serves as the nation's political and media center, the career politicians who are supposedly anti-government and the bloviators serving up dumbed-down populism disguised as conservatism announce that climate change is a crock.

Out where I live, 3,000 blessed miles away from the bubble where the politicians and pundits breathe each other's exhaust, it's hard to relate, not when Seattle experienced its warmest January on record. Up the road a hundred or so miles, Vancouver is sweating bullets that winter seems to have left the premises as the world's most livable city began strutting its Winter Olympics stuff.

Of course, the East Coast's heavy snow - can someone please banish that hideous term "Snowmageddon?" - no more disproves human-caused climate change than Vancouver's balm validates it. Weather is short-term, climate is long-term, but long-term is outside the comprehension of career politicians and the modern-day versions of what Mary Todd Lincoln in her day called the vampire press....

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How can the energy market scale up technologies that don't pump copious quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

Put a price on carbon that sends those markets a price signal that burning carbon-rich fuels, including coal and oil, have economic, environmental, and national security costs that energy prices today don't communicate.

With that price signal in place, the market would open up for low-carbon alternatives - efficiency and renewables, for example - the development of which would create jobs, seed new industries, and lower demand for oil.

The price signal is the linchpin of the deal that the tripartisan trio of Senators Lindsey Graham, John Kerry, and Joe Lieberman are attempting to negotiate.

Which is why all of the recent talk of settling for a shilly-shally, small-bore, energy-only bill that takes a pass on pricing carbon caused Graham to push the envelope on his word choices in an informal talk with business leaders last week.

"If the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me"....

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Striding across the countryside like metallic cartoon characters, transmission towers grasp in their stiff, unwieldy arms the wires that enabled me to write this and enable you to read it.

The long-distance lines don't care where the electricity that they're carrying comes from. For the record, half the electrons that they shunt around America are generated by burning coal, which comes with steamer trunks of environmental baggage - billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon pollution, particulate matter that sears lungs, toxic mercury that sears brains, and disfigured landscapes in the Appalachians.

Many greens would like to replace much of that coal with wind and solar energy. Both have a long way to go; wind and solar combined account for less than 3 percent of U.S. generating capacity. The rub is that the best wind resources in the nation are in the short-grass country of the Great Plains and the best solar is in the sun-blasted expanses of the Southwest - in both cases, far from where people expect electricity to light their homes, power their businesses, and energize their plethora of electronic toys 24/7/365.

Without transmission lines, there is no way to move ...

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ExxonMobil's CEO went before a House energy subcommittee last week to talk about the plan for America's biggest company to become bigger. Exxon is getting into the natural gas business, big time, with its proposed $41 billion acquisition of Texas gas produer XTO Energy, which holds the nation's second largest gas reserves.

Exxon plays a long game, so its entry into the gas world is a strong signal that gas might have a much bigger role in the nation's energy future. Once burned off by oilmen as a nuisance, gas has attained a charmed image as the elixir that could deliver both energy security – take that, OPEC! – and clean energy – take that, King Coal!

Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee's energy subcommittee, likely is not on Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson's Christmas card list. Markey has had numerous policy run-ins with Exxon, but at the hearing, he pointed out that the company's proposed merger with XTO signals a "fundamental shift" in America's energy markets. The shift, he explained, is the boom in "shale" gas that has attracted Exxon and other big players in the energy world.

At Markey's hearing, Tillerson said that shale gas and other "unconventional" gas sources are expected to meet most of America's domestic gas demand by 2030.

So, what is shale gas, why is production booming, and why is it unconventional? ...

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Last week's post about the incongruity of high gasoline prices in oil-rich Alaska torqued at least one Alaskan.

Where does your gasoline come from, torqued Alaskan asked yours truly, with a scolding undertone that people who use gasoline shouldn't air hypocritical criticisms about the drawbacks of producing more domestic oil.

Well, since the question was asked, a significant fraction of the gasoline that I buy comes from Alaska, given that I live in the Pacific Northwest market. One can never tell for sure, however, where each hydrocarbon molecule sitting in my buggy originated. Some of those molecules came from Canada. Others hail from Southeast Asia. Since they don't come with country-of-origin labels, there is no way to tell which came from where.

Which brings us to the sequel of last week's story about the workings of the gasoline market.

Off and on, there have been calls for "country of origin" labels on gasoline pumps. Usually, those calls are loudest when prices spike upward and/or one of our oil trading partners has vexed us yet again.

There is a tantalizing model in the food business. Cruise through your grocery store's produce section and you'll see helpful country-of-origin labels required by federal farm legislation. Those bananas were shipped from Ecuador. The red, ripe tomatoes were picked in Mexico. That box of blueberries took a long boat ride from Chile.

Suppose you could pull up to the pump and see labels showing you where gasoline comes from?...

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Alaska produces more oil than any other state in the country except for Texas. Alaska has higher gasoline prices than any other state in the country, period. Alaskans are flummoxed and mad. A few state legislators are talking about regulating fuel prices. You don't often hear calls for more government regulation in the land of Sarah Palin.

Alaska's situation raises intriguing questions about the economics of oil and gasoline. When gasoline prices are perceived to be too high, such questions regularly come up, sometimes with an accusatory flavor garnished with mutterings about price gouging and oil industry conspiracies.

Let's compare two states - Alaska, which produces some 700,000 barrels of oil per day, and South Carolina, which produces no oil to speak of. In Anchorage, gasoline costs around $3.25 per gallon. In Charleston, gas costs about $2.50 per gallon.

Why the big difference? Why are fuel prices higher in a state where oil is plentiful than in a state that relies on outside suppliers for all its petroleum products? What does it cost to deliver a gallon of gasoline to customers at the pump? How are gasoline prices set? ...

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The diplomats, politicians, entourages, activists, reporters, and hangers-on are heading home from Denmark - leaving behind trash for Copenhagen and a throbbing headache for the rest of the world.

It was probably unrealistic to expect representatives of 192 countries - each of which have different interests and politics - to come to terms on a treaty settling all of the details involved with reworking the world's energy economy in time to keep the global climate out of the red zone.

Disappointment at the dishwatery deal that came out of Copenhagen is understandable. Still, the tortuous history of nuclear arms control negotiations shows that there might be a productive roads towards progress.

Back in the day, the Big Two were the United States and the Soviet Union. Both maintained nuclear arsenals that posed existential risks to civilization. None but the Big Two could dial back the risks. Haltingly, through many high-level summit meetings, some friendlier than others, and many sets of highly complicated, difficult negotiations, the Big Two found ways to shrink their arsenals. Success took longer than was optimal, but the result was a safer world.

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At the December 10 press conference rolling out a bipartisan - or, is it tripartisan? - framework for climate legislation, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, set a high bar for environmental achievement.

"Why can't America have the cleanest air and the purest water?" Graham asked. "Why would any Republican or Democrat want that not to be so?"

In a darkened bedroom, inside the last redoubt of true patriots, a tea party activist is tossing and turning, worrying that some conservatives, somewhere, agree with Lindsey Graham.

What's immediately important, however, is whether Graham can sign up a few more of his GOP colleagues to support a bill to limit carbon pollution. Graham, joined by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry and Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman, rolled out what they hope will be a launch pad that will lift climate change legislation past the 60-vote threshold necessary for passage. If that occurs sometime in the spring, the next step would be reconciling what are likely to be considerable differences between the Senate legislation and the the bill that the House passed June 26. But that's a story for another day.

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Before delving into the fracas surrounding the climate scientists' purloined e-mails, it's important to say that I have yet to hear one climate denialist acknowledge that it's not OK to steal other people's mail in the electronic equivalent of breaking and entering.

Not even a weasly "Naturally, we don't condone theft, but..." statement. No, faux "conservatives," who supposedly champion law and order and property rights, are brazenly waving around stolen property like hooligans who have just ransacked a liquor store.

With that point made, let's examine a few points about the e-mails.

They show that scientists are human, complete with all the emotions wrapped up in the human package. When people feel that their integrity has been wrongfully impeached and that their life work has been manipulated, misrepresented, and distorted by grandstanding politicians and ideologues, then people are likely to act out. They might behave badly, like call people names - heaven forfend if climate denialist bloggers and talk show hosts were to call people names. They might exercise poor judgment by discussing ways to withhold information from said grandstanders and ideologues, which simply gives the merchants of deception another club with which to beat honest scientists.

To assert that the stolen e-mails disprove the case for climate change linked to human activities, a case bolstered by multiple, independent lines of evidence, is absurd. Such arguments reveal more about the denialists who spend their time breathing each other's exhaust than about scientists who are managing the most complex research enterprise in the history of the world.

Skeptics who honestly are not sure about climate science and are willing to do the hard work of finding things out for themselves rather than accepting information regurgitated from Rush Limbaugh, can take a look at raw data, including temperature sources, paleo-records, modeling outputs, and more by clicking here....

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It took Theodore Roosevelt a few months to find his sea legs following his unexpected ascent to the presidency.

He found them five months later, when in February 1902, his administration took on America's swaggering financial barons by filing an antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Co.

The monopolists who dominated the nation's economy did not take kindly to such impudence. As Edmund Morris described it colorfully in Theodore Rex: "Now they stood shoulder to shoulder against him, legionnaires of the established economic order, bristling with wealth, courteously hostile behind their breastplates of boiled cotton."

From that point forward, TR became known to history as a trustbuster, intolerant of monopolies, and of the abuses, economic distortions, and loss of freedom that follow in their wake.

Jump ahead a century. We are gripped by a monopoly of a different sort. It imposes growing risks to the economy, makes us vulnerable to hostile, undemocratic regimes, and threatens lasting damage to the natural capital that makes modern civilization possible. It begs for a TR-style intervention.

The monopoly is the grip that fossil fuels hold over the energy that we use to grow our food, move our goods, warm our homes, and power our cities.

If we proceed with business as usual and allow the fossil fuel monopoly to continue its unfettered sway, we face "alarming consequences for climate change and energy security," the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its World Energy Outlook 2009.

"The rate of growth of fossil-energy consumption projected in the (business-as-usual) scenario takes us inexorably towards a long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in excess of 1,000 (parts per million) of CO2-equivalent." The result: "massive climatic change and irreparable damage to the planet," IEA warns.

The IEA is made up of career civil servants and diplomats trained in economics, law, and public administration. Such people are not in the habit of using white-hot language unless they have a damned good reason for doing so.

Which is why conservatives ought to think about fossil fuel dependence as a harmful monopoly that must be dealt with swiftly and forcefully. Climate blogger Joseph Romm pointed out recently that conservatives repelled by big government and its regulatory reach ought to consider what could be in store if we remain in thrall to the fossil fuel monopoly. If the climate spins out of control as a result of thick-headed resistance to changing the energy status quo, we'll be regulated by big government, within an inch of our lives. No other institution could armor the coasts, re-allocate water supplies, and deal with all of the other emergency adaptations that likely would be necessary.

If conservatives can't bring themselves to accept climate change science because Al Gore made a movie about it, then perhaps oil's monopoly over transportation and its pernicious threat to national security ought to interest them. The new book, Turning Oil into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice, makes it clear that drill-baby-drill doesn't solve that problem.

As authors Gal Luft and Anne Korin, co-directors of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, put it bluntly: "Playing in the same playing field with the likes of Hugo Chavez, Saudi King Abdullah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin is playing a game we can never win. They have most of the world's oil; we have - drill everywhere - barely 3 percent of conventional oil reserves."

David Sandalow, formerly with the Brookings Institution and now the Department of Energy's head of policy and international affairs, wrote in his 2008 book, Freedom from Oil, that we must wrap our heads around the idea that we ought to have energy choices like we have choices in food, drink, and countless other essential products. "For most Americans, in most situations today, there are no substitutes for oil available. We grew up with this. So did our parents and grandparents. We consider it normal. But it is deeply abnormal."

Breaking monopolies breaks the abuses and harms with which they burden our lives. It is a blow for freedom. Theodore Roosevelt understood that a century ago. Conservatives resisting a change in the energy status quo ought to think about that today.

I haven't made up my mind about Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO and current Republican candidate for governor of my birth state of California. And REP's California chapter hasn't made an endorsement decision for next year's primary, so what follows is not an endorsement.

However ... after finding out what extremists have been saying about Meg Whitman lately, I'm ready to bake her a cake. Whitman, you see, has been criticized for - oh, the humanity! - donating large sums of money to environmental organizations. For her support for conservation, Whitman has been branded not conservative by the chiefs of the ideological thought police at the far right edge of the political spectrum.

This all came about because Whitman donated $1.15 million to a Colorado land protection organization that persuaded the town of Telluride to condemn nearly 600 acres owned by a developer who planned to build homes, a golf course, and a hotel. Reasonable people can disagree on whether such measures should be pursued to protect open space. Nevertheless, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, 6-1, that the town was within its rights to do what it did. A jury awarded the development company $50 million in compensation, equal to its appraisal.

Whitman also has been taken to task for donating a tidy sum to Environmental Defense. ED is hardly a bunch of radicals; the buttoned-down group works closely with household-name companies such as DuPont, McDonald's, FedEx, and WalMart on projects to reduce waste and chemical hazards.

None of that matters, however, to radicals for whom stewardship of our natural heritage is the first step on the road to socialist perdition.

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