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“The government can’t change the weather,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio last week, describing his opposition to President Obama’s State of the Union call-to-action on climate change policy. Given the staggering costs of droughts, heat waves, and super storms, it would seem our political leaders would come quickly to some consensus on these seemingly urgent issues and take some kind of concerted action. So where do our political leaders get their information that has instead led to partisan gridlock?

In his inaugural address this week, President Obama committed us to get back to work on the challenge of a sustainable energy future.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” he said. But will this reignite the debate on climate change or have three widely publicized stories already done that for us?

As the world assembles in Doha to debate climate change policy, solutions, and costs, few attendees at “COP18” are looking at this as a profit-making opportunity. 

If they did, there might be agreements among nations instead of continued gridlock and finger-pointing.

In a political commercial that has been viewed by over a million people so far, Samuel L. Jackson shares his views on national priorities with the tart refrain “wake the [blank] up!”

After the 2000 census, many states used politics and innovative mapping technology to gerrymander new electoral districts to lock in gains for one party or the other. California politicians, for example, drew new “safe” seats and the result was hyper-partisanship and politicians who didn’t need to pay attention to anyone that wasn’t singing from their sheet music. Unfortunately, the results may also be dirtier air and a less sustainable future.

One of the first things you notice about Vietnam is the hundreds of thousands of motorcycles darting in and around the cars and trucks.  The second thing you notice is that most of the riders on motorcycles are wearing masks to reduce the soot from getting into their lungs. 

Recent campaign stops by Mitt Romney and President Obama could not provide a more stark contrast of energy policies. Romney promises coal miners that he’s in favor of energy from “below the ground”, albeit preferring domestic sources of all fossil fuels.

Until headlines last week announced the end of his marriage to Katie Holmes, it seemed there was no mission too impossible for Tom Cruise to accomplish. But even his cool, Burj Khalifa-climbing character in the famous film franchise might refuse the Mission Impossible assignment facing global economies today – – powering growth with nuclear energy.

When I helped Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger create the Million Solar Roofs Initiative in California a few years ago, we designed it to stimulate mass production of solar panels to bring down cost.

Consider the extraordinary efforts we undertake to secure a barrel of oil. Lives lost from wars.

Oil-rig blowouts. Cancer clusters downwind of refineries. 100,000 premature deaths each year in America alone when we combust the stuff in our engines.