An austere, abbreviated and less political RNC kicked off yesterday in Minnesota, as Hurricane Gustav bore down on the Gulf Coast and stole the show.

What remained? A business meeting, writes the Washington Post. The American Spectator kicks off its coverage in "Bye Bye Bush:"

As thousands protested in the streets, the Palins announced the latest addition to their family, and the GOP turned its national convention into a Jerry Lewis-style telethon for the victims of Hurricane Gustav, John McCain's party began its transition into the post-Bush era.

President Bush’s appearance was canceled, along with Dick Cheney’s. (Here's the list of what was to have been the RNC line-up.)

Meanwhile, top GOP climate leader Gov. Schwarzenegger announced he will skip the full convention on account of California’s budget impasse.

Hurricane Gustav has revived the debate over the causal connection between global warming and hurricanes -- just in time for the Republican National Convention. Statistics compiled at Georgia Tech's Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department, reported yesterday by the Associated Press, indicate a sharply worsening trend.

From 1975 to 1990, about 17 percent of all hurricanes around the world were Category 4 and 5. From 1990 to 2004, that jumped to 35 percent. And from 2003 through last year it was up to 41 percent.

How much of that is attributable to human induced global warming? There's a range of scientific opinion, but no one disputes the fundamental equation at play:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wondered whether investors in coal-burning utilities were being sufficiently well-informed about the risks of where they were parking their money. So he subpoenaed five companies for information -- Xcel Energy, the AES Corporation, Dominion, Dynegy and Peabody Energy.

Were they disclosing the full roster of financial risks -- like the cost of possible future lawsuits or higher operating costs from new regulations that put a price on carbon?

Now a year later, Cuomo has reached a disclosure deal with a first company. Xcel Energy has agreed to give its investors detailed warnings about the risks that global warming poses to its business.

Cuomo, who used the Martin Act to press his case with the companies, explained the importance of the deal in a statement:

Here’s a pleasant surprise: Xcel Energy is retiring two coal-fired plants in Colorado and adding 850 megawatts of wind power and a 200-megawatt solar concentrating power plant -- one of the world's largest -- instead.

It’s the company’s first stab at utility-scale solar. Even better: It’s the first time a utility in America has volunteered to shut down a coal plant (let alone two) to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

And therein lies the point. The announcement suggests a serious intention from one of America’s largest coal burners to turn the tide of fossil fuels at a time of economic and energy danger for the nation.

Dr. Martin Weitzman is considered one of the world's top economists. He has degrees in Math, Physics, Statistics and Economics from Stanford and MIT, among others places, and is a Professor of Economics at Harvard. His area of expertise is Environmental Economics, and he says there’s a chance, roughly around 1%, that the temperature of the Earth will rise by 36 degrees fahrenheit in around 200 years.

In other words, there’s a small chance that global warming will lead to a mass extinction comparable to others that have happened before on Earth. For context, the "small chance" is 10,000 times more likely than the asteroid strike which wiped out the dinosaurs, a once in a hundred million year occurrence.

Dr. Weitzman is not an alarmist by any stretch of the imagination. Look at his paper -- On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change -- and you'll see for yourself. It's light reading only if you have an advanced degree in Economics or Statistics. He talks a lot about "fat-tailed probability distributions" and calculus. He also spells out the worst case in plainer English:

Because these hypothetical temperature changes would be geologically instantaneous, they would effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.

The point of the paper is to explore an important question: given that the probability of catastrophic climate change might be about 1% in 200 years, what's the most rational way to place our bets?

People opposed to action on global warming use three arguments most often: global warming is not caused by human activities, reducing CO2 will slow economic growth and really it's just an excuse for eco-liberals to create a neo-fascist nanny state to run everyone's life in an irritating and politically correct fashion.

There isn't much I can add to the debate on the first issue, but let's talk about the other two, with the help of the graph above which I found at the Canadian Green Party website.

We'll see that reducing CO2 by increasing energy efficiency improves the economy and that 'nanny' laws work when the free market doesn't.

That blue line going down shows the dramatic improvement in the energy efficiency of refrigerators in the US since 1973. That pinkish line rising tells an opposite story -- of the dramatic rise in standby power over the same period.

Together they tell a couple stories: one about vampires, the other about nannies.

CIBC World Markets Chief Economist Jeff Rubin recently analyzed the explosion in shipping costs in the steel sector from triple-digit oil prices and came away with some thoughts (pdf) about which nation will prosper the most:

Soaring transport costs, first on importing iron to China and then exporting finished steel overseas, have already more than eroded the wage advantage and suddenly rendered Chinese-made steel uncompetitive in the US market.

In other words: Chinese steel manufacturing production is coming to America, along with the sector’s long-lost wages. That's promising news for the US Steelworkers of America, says Rubin, and a telling sign of things to come. The numbers:

China’s steel exports to the US are now falling by more than 20% on a year-over year basis—the worst performance in almost a decade. While many might attribute this decline to the slowdown in the US economy, it is noteworthy that US domestic steel production has risen by almost 10% during the same period.

Who knew that the US is currently exporting 1.8 million barrels of oil a day?

To make sure everybody does, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a public letter to President Bush, asking him to "keep our oil at home."

The letter didn't specify how, but it didn't miss the opportunity to take a shot at the GOP plan to open up protected offshore waters to oil drilling.

Shares in Denmark's Vestas -- the world's #1 wind turbine maker -- shot up 8 percent last Friday on news that the company had an order backlog worth $10.7 billion. The backlog grew 67 percent since a year ago -- a strong indication of continued robust growth.

The company also announced it was investing $120 million in a new factory in Colorado -- on top of $200 million it's already sinking into another factory -- which will bring 1350 new jobs to the state. That is going to put a total of 2450 people on the Vestas payroll in Colorado.

It's nice that this Danish company that owns a 25% market share in wind turbines globally is outsourcing clean tech jobs to the US, ain't it?

The best part, though, is that the development is playing into the volatile energy politics of the state. As renewable energy takes on a new attractive luster, incumbent oil and gas industries in Colorado are being rocked back on their heels.

Might this be the preview of a larger national drama?

Cement is at the heart of increasing global warming emissions. It's production releases large amounts of CO2 -- both from the chemical process that creates it and the energy consumed in manufacturing. China alone makes 45% of the world's cement, and globally the industry is booming.

That's why two promising new developments related to the production of cement - an ancient and mundane material -- are drawing attention. Reducing CO2 from making cement isn't as sexy as electric cars, but it's the third largest US CO2 producer so there’s an opportunity to make a real contribution.

"We choose to go...not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to measure and organize the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
-John Kennedy in his bid for an American moon landing before the end of 1969

With Al Gore's soaring speech last month calling for an America powered with electricity from 100% renewable sources, a stirring vision comes to mind of a Can Do America, an America that looks at the seemingly impossible and says "why not?"

Since the Presidential campaign has taken on an automotive theme -- what with the introduction of the Obama tire gauge -- we thought it only fair to come up with a Republican counterpart: the McCain Dipstick.

Just insert it into the presumptive nominee's campaign coffers, wipe it off, and see how much oil money is there!

Barack Obama unveiled his energy plan in Lansing today, the capital of the state of Michigan, primary home of the US auto industry.

There are two elements in particular of Obama's energy plan that deserve special attention for the healing touch they apply: to combat vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the ailing US auto industry.

And lord knows they -- and this nation -- need a healing touch.

Touting US coal as cheap and abundant is a favorite pastime of fans of coal expansion.

Want proof that it’s not true? Just look at this shocking new data from the Energy Information Administration on the costs of Appalachian coal, parsed here by Appalachian Voices.

It’s hard to know where to start: maybe that Central Appalachian coal, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of US coal production, has zoomed suddenly to nearly $140 ton. In 2007, prices were at $40 ton. That represents a jump of 350% in a single year.

If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?

Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2008

Here's my answer. I'd give $1 million of it to Bjorn Lomborg to go away. Lomborg might not take a powder so cheap, but he ought to if he's really concerned with humanity, because his noise is delaying progress on climate action.

It would actually be hard to prove he's doing a million dollars worth of damage, and equally hard to quantify the benefit of the expense, but let's just consider it a rounding error and move on, Bjornless. Besides, there'd still be $9,999,000,000 left.

Anyway, his question is fundamentally silly. It stems from a consumer mentality -- as if you can "spend" $10 billion to buy solutions to immense geo-political and structural problems such as global hunger, disease, terrorism, or climate change. Maybe you can in a Copenhagen conference center, but not in the real world.