The Republican side remains empty during the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee markup on climate change legislation in Washington on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009. All Republicans except one boycotted the start of committee debate, protesting that the bill's economic costs have not been fully examined. (AP)

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The global climate conference next month in Copenhagen has had a long drum roll of sky-high expectations.

This is it, the world has been told as recently as last month by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The make-or-break moment on reining in climate change.

Apparently the U.S. Senate did not get that memo. A comprehensive climate change bill has faced tough going there. Republicans boycotting the whole process. Democrats divided and afraid of economic fallout. The clock ticking.

This hour, On Point: One month before Copenhagen, where the U.S. stands.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Margaret Kriz Hobson, energy and environment correspondent for National Journal. She wrote recently about “the Senate’s climate-change dealmakers.”  She also writes a federal column for the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Forum magazine.

Dave Hamilton, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming and energy program.

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio. He wants Congress to provide free allowances under the cap and trade program to companies that need to transition to using cleaner burning fuels and manufacturing green energy products. He is also pushing Senate Democrats to require that importers pay a carbon dioxide fee for products made in countries that don’t control their greenhouse gases.

Maya Lin, "What Is Missing?" Listening Cone, 2009, installed at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. (Photo: Bruce Damonte Photography, Inc. © Maya Lin Studio, Inc., courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.)

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Architect, designer, and environmental artist Maya Lin carved a permanent, powerful place in the American heart with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

She was 21 when she drew that black granite line in history, and she went on to a wide-ranging life in design.

Ten years ago, Maya Lin announced she was out of the memorial business entirely. But now, she’s done one more: to all the species vanished or vanishing from the Earth. A king-sized listening cone, filled with the sounds of birds and frogs and primates slipping away.

This hour, On Point: Maya Lin and “What Is Missing?”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Maya Lin joins us from New York. An award-winning architect, designer and environmental artist, she’s best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.  Her  latest work, which she calls her final memorial, is “What Is Missing?” It focuses on extinct and vanishing species, and incorporates sculpture, video, sound, hand-held electronics, printed material and an interactive website.

More links:

Maya Lin’s official website offers a rich visual experience. Covering the full scope of her work, it includes a wealth of beautiful images and provides detailed background information on the art and the artist.

“The Missing Piece” — Susan Morgan reported on Maya Lin’s “What Is Missing?” in a multimedia feature for The New York Times Style Magazine that includes a photo gallery.

You can also browse a slideshow of her work below, or view the slideshow at full size. Click on the images to view descriptions.

Stewart Brand

In today’s first hour, Whole Earth guru Stewart Brand and energy expert Amory Lovins debated whether the U.S. should build more nuclear power plants in the effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Brand’s new book, “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,”  takes on a number of what he calls environmental “pieties,” including opposition to nuclear power. He says nuclear is now “green” — and that we can’t afford to oppose it any longer on the old grounds, given the urgent need to address climate change. 

Amory Lovins

Lovins has recently argued against Brand’s view, in a posting at Grist.org, and he layed out his case for us on the air today.

It all mirrors a debate in Washington about whether more nuclear power should be a serious component of a new energy-climate bill.

You can listen to the exchange here:

And here’s a transcript:

TOM ASHBROOK: Amory Lovins, you’ve pushed back fairly hard and quite publicly on Stewart Brand’s embrace here of nuclear power. Why?
AMORY LOVINS: Although Stewart and I share a great sense of urgency about climate change, I think the more urgent you think that problem is, the more important it is to invest judiciously to get the most solution per dollar and the most solution per year. And nuclear flunks both those tests. It gives about two to twenty times less carbon savings per dollar and about twenty to forty times less carbon savings per year than if you brought instead the things that are walloping it in the market, namely micropower and energy efficiency.
TOM ASHBROOK: What is micropower?
AMORY LOVINS: Micropower has two parts. One is renewables other than big hydro. So it’s sun, wind, geothermal, small hydro, and so on. And the other part is co-generating electricity and useful heat together in factories or buildings, which saves at least half of the fuel money in carbon.
TOM ASHBROOK: So your core argument is not the nuclear waste argument, but a cost-effectiveness argument around nuclear?
AMORY LOVINS: Correct. Nuclear is about the most expensive and slowest thing you can build. And I don’t think it’s true you need to build everything. You can’t afford to build everything. You need to choose the best buys for your goal, just as in assembling a financial portfolio you don’t stuff it full of one of everything on the market. You figure out the diversified set of assets that will best meet your investment objectives. If you buy something really expensive and risky, that actually makes your portfolio perform worse because you didn’t get to buy stuff that would have performed better.
TOM ASHBROOK: Stewart Brand, what about the argument? You’re arguing a big push in nuclear. Amory Lovins says it’s not the most cost-effective way forward and it really matters what we pull the trigger on here.
STEWART BRAND: I was surprised that in Amory’s good and thorough response to the chapter [on nuclear energy], which I’m glad to see is out there, and it’s downloadable from Rocky Mountain Institute. One of the things, Amory, you didn’t address in that was [nuclear] microreactors, and I’m delighted you’re talking about micropower because it looks like the new generation of those small reactors down around 100 to 125 megawatts coming from half a dozen manufacturers are right in there. And [they] could do co-generation and local adaptivity and all the things you’d like to see distributed micropower do.
AMORY LOVINS: It might have been a good idea to look at 50 years ago, but it’s way too late. Actually, I did describe it… I wrote a special paper on this called “New Nuclear Reactor, Same Old Story” last spring, because I got really curious about these arguments and dug into them. There are two basic issues, that again are economic, that I get to before the other attributes. I think the Gen 4 reactor types are broadly comparable to today’s reactors in waste production. They might in some respects be respects be safer. They’re generally as proliferative or more proliferative. But their economics are not sufficiently better to make any difference, for two reasons. One is that of course what makes a reactor work is that you have a very concentrated source of heat and also of radioactivity, and the physical devices you need to harness the heat and manage the heat and radioactivity do not scale down very well. It’s just a matter of physical scaling laws. Secondly…
STEWART BRAND: Wait, wait, wait. Isn’t that the case also with solar thermal? They’re using the same thing. They’re using smaller steam turbines.
AMORY LOVINS: To some degree, it’s true of the steam turbine, except that there you don’t have a concentrated source and you don’t need shielding. And the mirrors—or troughs or whatever – are very well suited to scaling down and to mass production. The more serious problem, though, is one of timing. The things you’re competing with, or the things that all nuclear fails to compete with by large margins, are already getting their economies from mass production. They’re things like photovoltaics and wind turbines. And they are decades further along in getting their scale economies. And then by the time you’ve got some kind of new reactor that’s usually been on the books for forty or fifty years to be actually licensed, financed, built, tested – and then you’ve scaled up production of it – you’d be more decades behind, at least one or two, the things that are already several times cheaper. In fact, if you were to take today’s nuclear plants and make the nuclear part free, the other roughly two-thirds of the investment would still be grossly uncompetitive with efficiency and micropower.

Brand and Lovins also took up the issue of nuclear safety, after one of the show’s callers raised the issue. Here’s the exchange on that:

TOM ASHBROOK: Stewart Brand, what about the safety issue when it comes to nuclear?
STEWART BRAND: It’s been very good…[t]he people around nuclear reactors, they’re polled every so often: “What do you think about nuclear, nuclear reactors, would you like to have another nuclear reactor at the plant nearby?” It’s the most positive support the industry gets, people who are closest to the industry out in the landscape. So, at least all the data from that shows it’s not so big an issue…
TOM ASHBROOK: Amory Lovins, the safety aspect of nuclear?
AMORY LOVINS: …I think we need to remember that, although there are many honest and conscientious people in this industry that know they’re dealing with serious matters, organizations are fallible, just as individuals are, and they often do things that the individuals in them would not do by themselves. Historically, whenever you get a period like we’ve been in the last eight years, where there’s a very pro-nuclear administration and that sends all the signals against dissent and rocking the boat, this turns out to be bad for the nuclear industry. Because bad things end up happening that wouldn’t have if we had been more alert. And you get capture of the regulatory apparatus by the industry being regulated and so on. So I think the issues of human fallibility remain serious in this industry. I just don’t tend to treat those first, because if the technology is unnecessary, uneconomic and actually reduces and retards climate protection, I stop there. I don’t go on to whether it’s proliferative or unsafe or whether we know what to do with the waste.
STEWART BRAND: Amory, question, what do you make of the rather pro-nuclear stance of the current administration?
AMORY LOVINS: I think there are differing views within the administration. And I think the differences between our views are mirrored there and that our discussion will be helpful in informing those internal debates. I think also a lot of the pressure comes from members of Congress more than members of the administration.
STEWART BRAND: The Democrats there, the powerful ones, are sounding more pro-nuclear every day with the climate bill.

You can listen to the whole show here.

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In the 1960s, Stewart Brand became one of the country’s first and most famous champions of a new ecological awareness. His Whole Earth Catalog spoke to a generation of hippies and back-to-nature commune dwellers.

Now, at 70, Stewart Brand is calling on environmentalists to reframe their understanding of the problem — and solutions. It’s too late for back-to-nature, he says. Global warming is beyond that.

To survive now, Brand says, we need nuclear power, genetic engineering, giant cities. We must manage nature or lose civilization.

This hour, On Point: In the face of global warming, Stewart Brand redefines green.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Stewart Brand joins us from Denver. Founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, founder of The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronric Link), and co-founder of the Global Business Network, he’s president of the Long Now Foundation. His new book is “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.” 

Joining us from New York is Amory Lovins, co-founder, chairman, and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute. He’s author of “Winning the Oil Endgame.” You can read his critique of Stewart Brand’s book at Grist.org.

Later this hour:

We’re joined from New York by Bill McKibben, longtime environmental journalist and founder of 350.org, an advocacy group organizing events across the world on October 24 — “International Day of Climate Action.” He’s coordinating what he says will be about 1,000 events, from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the streets of the U.S.

More links:

Here’s Stewart Brand speaking at a TED conference in July on rethinking “green pieties”:

Amory Lovins was on FORA.tv in August talking about energy efficiency and climate change:

And here’s Bill McKibben in Australia this summer talking about the “350″ movement:

A U.S. delegate walk past solar panels on display outside a Future House, a clean energy resident development project in Beijing, China, on July 16, 2009. (AP)

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On Capitol Hill today, the Senate introduces a bill meant to slow global warming. Meanwhile, back on the windfarm, American entrepreneurs are taking the problem seriously — as an environmental threat but also as the next great economic prize.

In China, the government says it’s determined to become a green superpower — or risk drowning in its own pollution.

Some say the next great global race is on — the clean-tech race — and that China’s entry is a “Sputnik moment.”

Has America heard the wake-up call? Is there a clean-energy race to be won or lost? This hour, On Point: China, the U.S., and the clean-energy future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Fiona Harvey, environmental reporter for The Financial Times.

Joining us from Santa Clara, Calif., is Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, a California-based company that builds the machines and the factories that make solar panels. He was recently profiled by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

From San Francisco we’re joined by Barbara Finamore, China Program Director for National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She has worked for nearly 20 years with provincial and federal government officials in China to advise them on how to build a greener economy. She is also a founder and board member of the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance.

And from Shanghai, we’re joined by Charlie McElwee, Shanghai-based partner in the American law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. He is an expert on energy and environmental issues in China and author of the blog China Environmental Law.

The Tesla Model S, slated for 2011. (teslamotors.com)

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The all-electric, hot and sexy Tesla Roadster goes zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds and sits in the garages of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, David Letterman, and the founders of Google.

There are six hundred of them in the world, put together not in Detroit but in Silicon Valley. In 2011, backed by almost half a billion dollars in government loans, Tesla plans to roll out a high-performance sedan, the Model S.

In a decade, claims Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, there could be a million new Teslas a year. They could revolutionize the U.S. auto industry, he says. And save the world.

Elon Musk dreams big. Is he just dreaming?

This hour, On Point: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, on the future of electric cars -- and the planet.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is Elon Musk, chairman, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. A Silicon Valley entrepeneur, he’s also CEO of Space X, a space technologies company that resupplies the Space Station and aims to colonize Mars; chairman of SolarCity, a solar power provider; and co-founder of PayPal. 

From Detroit, we’re joined by Bill Vlasic, Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times.

More links:

You can see a photo gallery of Tesla’s cars at their website.

In a skeptical piece last June, BusinessWeek’s David Welch asked “Can Tesla Become a Real Automaker?”  And on The New York Times’ Wheels blog, Jim Motavalli looked at some of the challenges facing Tesla’s Model S.

Here’s the Edmunds.com video review of the forthcoming Model S:

Watch a video about the forthcoming Tesla sedan, the Model S:

Isabella Rossellini, photographed at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009. (AP)

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Actress, model, and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini has known years as one of the world’s most beautiful, most photographed women.

Five hundred magazine covers — Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair. Famous screen roles — “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “30 Rock.” Famous parents — Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini. Famous lovers — David Lynch, Martin Scorsese.

Famous independence of mind.

Now Isabella Rossellini has taken her talents, humor, and iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.

This hour, On Point: Isabella Rossellini on starfish love, environmentalism, and her new series, “Green Porno.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Isabella Rossellini joins us from Southampton, NY. An actress, model, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter, she produces, directs, and stars in “Green Porno,” a series of film shorts on sex in nature, for the Sundance Channel.  Daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, she’s starred in numerous movies, including “Blue Velvet,” “Big Night,” “Fearless,” and many more.

More links:

A “Green Porno” book and DVD set are due out Sept. 22. You can watch a number of the short films on YouTube, like this one, “Preying Mantis”:

And here she is in an unforgettable scene from “Blue Velvet”:

A rendering of Masdar City from the Masdar Initiative website (masdarcity.ae).

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In Arabic, the word Masdar means “the source.” And right now, the desert outside Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, is the source of a budding green revolution.

Construction is underway for Masdar City, a high-tech metropolis that will be home to 50,000 residents -- and be the world’s first city with no carbon footprint. No cars. Zero waste. A truly green metropolis.

The plans on the drawing board are very big. The challenges are big, too. Can it even work? We’re going direct to Abu Dhabi for answers, and a tour.

This hour, On Point: Masdar and the green city of the future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Khaled Awad, director of property development for the Masdar project. He joins us from Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

In our studio we’re joined by Kevin Bullis, energy editor at Technology Review. His article on Masdar, “A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert,” appeared in the March/April 2009 issue.

More links:

The Masdar City website offers an extensive overview of the project, along with videos and an image gallery.

Watch a video “fly through” of Masdar City as rendered by the firm Foster & Partners:

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With the whole world talking about climate change and global warming, arctic biologist Bill Streever is looking the other way. He’s thinking about the cold.

Cold ice caps, cold tundra, cold lips, cold lungs. He’s looking back at cold explorers, men who died of cold.

He’s looking around at animals that thrive and survive in the cold. Frogs that become frogsicles, and hop again in spring. All things cold.

A warming climate may make cold itself an endangered species.

This hour, On Point: Igloos, permafrost, absolute zero and one man’s relentless pursuit of the cold.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Bill Streever joins us from Anchorage, Alaska. A biologist, he chairs the North Slope Science Initiative’s Science Technical Advisory Panel. He started out as a commercial diver in harbors and oilfields in Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South China Sea. His new book is “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places.”

Browse and read excerpts from the book.

More:

You can’t build igloos with powdery snow.  But you can build a quinzhee.  Bill demonstrates how it’s done in this video on YouTube:

Songlist: Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow (Frank Zappa); Hey Ya (Outkast); Antarctica (The Weepies)

Banana Slug on Redwood tree. (Photo: eyesontheroad/flickr.com)

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The American turkey vulture is a marvel of sensory power.  It can smell the whiff of a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet in the sky.  It sweeps dead raccoons clean off the roads.  And still, when we see it’s bald, wrinkled red head at work, we say “ick.”

Gardner-journalist Constance Casey has made a specialty of “icky” creatures.  She can tell you all about vultures and slugs, ticks and jellyfish. The love life and dead fish consumption of snapping turtles.

Yes, they look bad, she concedes.  But they have their place in the world. 

This hour, On Point: icky creatures up close, with Constance Casey.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Constance Casey is a former newspaper editor and New York City Parks Department gardener.  Last summer, she started an ongoing series on revolting creatures for Slate.  She’s covered ticks, jellyfish, vultures, and slugs.  Her next article is about snapping turtles. She writes at The Observant Gardener.

James Harding is a naturalist and a wildlife specialist at Michigan State University.  He’s the “critter guy” for MSU Museum’s Wildlife and Natural History Question Line.  His specializes in amphibians and reptiles, especially turtles.

More links:

Watch Isabella Rossellini act out the bizarre mating rituals of bees, spiders,  and limpets in Green Porno.

A plastic 55 gallon barrel is seen among piles of driftwood and mud along the Potomac River in Cropley, Md., Feb. 8, 2006. (AP)

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For years now, the stories have been piling up. Frogs and salamanders with extra legs. “Intersex fish,” neither male or female. Eighty percent of male smallmouth bass in the Potomac producing eggs.

And the apparent culprit: chemicals in the water — endocrine disruptors — that are also in our water and everyday household items.

Now scientists are tracking large increases in genital deformities in newborn boys, early-onset puberty in girls, obesity and diabetes in animals and humans, and warning that these, too, could have a chemical cause.

This hour, On Point: Danger in the water — endocrine disruptors, and their long reach.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Amherst, Mass., is R. Thomas Zoeller, professor and chair of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is one of the authors a 50-page scientific statement by the Endocrine Society, “Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals,” which was cited by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in his column for Sunday, June 28. (Also see Kristof’s followup blog post on the topic.)

Joining us from Washington is Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and epidemiologist. She is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 1993 she was appointed by President Clinton to serve as Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, where she served for five years.

Author Rick Bass at his home in Montana. (Photo by Nicole Blaisdell)

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Rick Bass, award-winning author and environmental activist, has lived in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana for over 20 years.

Well known as a chronicler of the western wilderness, the Yaak Valley in particular, his newest book is something of a modern-day “Walden.” Like Thoreau, Bass records in lush detail the passage of seasons and the natural world.

But while Thoreau went into the woods alone, Bass is a family man — and he reflects on raising young children immersed in the wild.

This hour, On Point: Rick Bass and a year in the Montana wilderness.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Rick Bass joins us from Spokane, Wash.  An award-winning chronicler of the American western wilderness and an environmental activist, his new book is “The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana.” Among his many other works of fiction and nonfiction are “The Book of Yaak,” “The Ninemile Wolves,” “The Hermit’s Story,” “The Lives of Rocks,” and “Why I Came West.”

Read an excerpt from “The Wild Marsh.”

I think the most important question with this initial foray is not so much what it leads to next for the United States but whether or not this has an effect of helping the United States to play a leadership role in international negotiations to put in place a post-Kyoto Protocol climate regime…

Two countries in particular will hold huge sway in those negotiations: India and China. In India, the Environment Minister’s office issued a statement in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. bill’s passage that seemed less than promising for future negotiations: “India cannot and will not take emission reduction targets because poverty eradication and social and economic development are first and over-riding priorities.”

In China, which now leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions, news of the U.S. climate effort got a mixed review. The government-backed China Daily ran with the headline, “China Unhappy With U.S. Climate Bill.” A government minister, though, gave a more equivocal response:

We think that we should give a positive evaluation to this bill…. But in the area of tackling climate change, especially on the issue of cutting emissions, if they could take some more positive, effective measures it would give a bigger impetus to the year-end talks.

As Prof. Stavins said today during our hour, little matters if China and India don’t get involved. The math is simple: if China and India fail to take action, it will be impossible to avert reaching the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that many scientists now believe would create dangerous warming.

And just to complicate matters, another of our guests today, John Broder of The New York Times, has written that some tariff provisions in the House bill — which would penalize countries that don’t accept a carbon cap — are generating controversy. Indeed, those provisions could alienate the very allies the U.S. needs in Copenhagen.

Sunflower Electric Cooperative's coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kansas, seen in 2007. (AP)

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President Obama came to Washington promising to break the gridlock on climate change. He claimed an historic victory last week, when the first bill ever to cap carbon emissions passed the House on Friday.

But the celebrations were short lived. Critics, left and right, say the bill is a mess: that it will weigh down a struggling economy. That it’s so riddled with giveaways that it does little to address global warming.

So what exactly is in the bill? Will it stand up in the Senate? And what does it mean for a warming planet?

This hour, On Point: unpacking the climate bill.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is John Broder, a reporter for The New York Times. He’s been covering the climate bill in Congress, and his piece in today’s paper takes a close look at the horse trading behind the House bill’s passage.

From New York we’re joined by Elizabeth Kolbert. She’s a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she reports extensively on climate change.  Her most recent piece, “The Catastrophist,” profiles climate scientist and activist James Hansen.

And with us in our studio is Robert Stavins. A top environmental economist, he’s a professor of business and government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and director of its Environmental Economics Program. He also co-chairs the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. His forthcoming book is “Post-Kyoto International Climate Policy.”

More links:

Climate blogger Joseph Romm says passing the House bill involved some real twisting of arms. The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blog explains how the bill helps green building efforts. And the environmental news site Grist reports that efficiency efforts were weakened as the bill was hashed out.

A Clipper Windpower turbine (photo: clipperwind.com)

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Kermit the Frog sang “It’s not easy being green,” and that has always been the case for America’s alternative energy producers.

For decades, every time green energy got a foothold, a drop in oil prices or a change in tax policy would knock it down again.

Last year, with oil prices at $140 a barrel, the future looked glorious for green energy. Now, oil’s back at a fraction of that. The economy’s in the dumps. Future, unclear.

This hour, On Point: We’ll look at the struggles of one Iowa wind turbine plant, and what they tell us about taking American energy green.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

James Dehlsen, founder and chairman of Clipper Windpower. He has been working in the wind-turbine industry since  1980.

Jeffrey Ball, environmental editor and Power Shift columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where he has been writing about energy and the environment for more than a decade. His latest column is “Alternative Energy’s Fortunes Shift with the Winds.”

Chet Culver, governor of Iowa. A Democrat, he took office in 2007 and is an outspoken advocate of wind power.

Electric car "charging spots," part of the proposed Better Place mobile operator network. (BetterPlace.com)

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Electric cars have been kicking around the clean-energy conversation for decades, but they’ve been held back by short battery life and limited range.

Tech visionary Shai Agassi thinks he’s got a solution — and sees zero-emission cars hitting Main Streets in just two years.

It’s all about infrastructure: recharging stations and battery replacement bays blanketing the roads. Customers buying miles like cell phone minutes. Some think he’s dreaming — but he’s already got the governments of Israel, Denmark, and Australia signed on.

This hour, On Point: Shai Agassi’s vision for electric cars that go the distance.

You can join the conversation. Can electric cars break our dependence on fossil fuels? Is Shai Agassi dreaming – or really onto something?

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Shai Agassi is founder and CEO of Better Place, a green-tech venture that aims to bring electric cars with replaceable batteries to the mass market by 2011.

More links:

“Batteries Not Included” – a profile of Shai Agassi and Better Place in last Sunday’s issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Agassi spoke at the 2009 TED conference. Watch the video here.

President Barack Obama speaks at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va., Monday, April 20, 2009. (AP)

A gut check for America this week, as debate over torture burns up the air, partisan sparks fly, and the White House struggles to control the fire.

In Detroit, Chrysler prepares for bankruptcy. In Pakistan, the Taliban closes in on the capital — and alarms go off in Washington.

A green energy bill heats up on the Hill. A member of Congress is wiretapped – and the House Speaker knew.

Jobless claims are up — again. A Freddie Mac suicide. A Craigslist killer. And another Earth Day comes and goes.

This hour, On Point: Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.

You can join the conversation. What’s your take on the torture debate this week? Do you want investigations? Prosecutions? Or is it time to move on?

 Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and CNN commentator. He served as a presidential advisor in the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton.

Andrea Seabrook, congressional reporter for National Public Radio.

Jack Beatty, On Point News analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., right, is sponsoring a bill to address climate change. White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel stands to the far left. (AP)

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Starting today, Congress takes its first real look at capping carbon emissions.

It’s spurred on by some major momentum in the EPA and the looming deadline of a world climate conference in Copenhagen this December.

But Republicans, big business, and some Democrats are leading a strong countermovement and sounding the alarm about the costs and feasibility, especially in this economy.

This Hour, On Point: top environmental journalists, writer Bill McKibben and Congressman Ed Markey take stock of this big, green moment.

You can join the conversation. Do you support swift action to address climate change? Or are you worried that this effort could hurt the American economy? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is Chair of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee and co-author, with Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, of “The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” They’re holding hearings for the bill this week.

Juliet Eilperin, national environmental reporter for the Washington Post. She’s written recently about the paradoxes of the clean energy push.

Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes extensively on climate change. She’s also the author of “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.” She has a new piece on the origins of Earth Day.

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, writer, and activist. He’s currently scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Here’s some video of Bill rallying the grassroots.

More links:

The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson has a good backgrounder on the EPA’s decision to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant. The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer thinks the EPA decision is not ideal, but there are few good options. And the New York Times’ Tom Friedman is worried about the complexity of cap-and-trade and advocates a simple carbon tax.

“What we are going to do is to insure that in the early years…we are going to not auction off 100 percent of the carbon credits, but rather to insure that the trade-exposed energy-intensive industries will in fact receive some free allocations,” he said today.

The industries he mentioned included those involved in commodities such as steel, glass, and paper. He said that would insure that foreign competitors like China don’t “exploit” the new prices imposed on industry.

A central issue in the debate is the speed at which the costs should be imposed. President Obama’s campaign position favored auctioning off all the permits. Yet officials in his administration have also been signalled a softening of that position.

Markey’s draft of the bill, co-authored with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), sidestepped the issue and did not initially contain details on the issue of auctioning vs. giveaways to industry.

To persuade “Blue Dog” conservative Democrats from manufacturing states to support the bill, Markey said he would emphasize that new clean technologies such as wind turnbines and smart energy grids will require a great deal more steel, iron, and other resources important to industry. It’s also expected to create millions of “green jobs,” he said.

Listen to Rep. Markey’s interview with On Point:

Brush Cat

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American myth loves the lumberjack. Paul Bunyan. His blue ox, Babe. A big axe swinging and tall forests without end.

Well, the lumberjacks are still out there. But the world has changed around them. They’re not forty feet tall anymore. It’s a chain saw, not an axe. Kevlar over the blue jeans. And forests that are certainly not without end.

They’re not even the same forests, as climate change moves in. And still, Americans want the wood.

Jack McEnany has gone deep in one corner of the American woods to bring out the story of today’s loggers. He calls them “brush cats.”

This hour, On Point: Brush cat, in the woods.

You can join the conversation. Have you worked the woods? Have you done it lately? What do you see out there?

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Jack McEnany, author of “Brush Cat: On Trees, The Wood Economy, and the Most Dangerous Job In America.” He’s lived in northern New Hampshire for over twenty years and is co-author of world champion skier Bode Miller’s autobiography, “Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun.”

From Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, we’re joined by Bob Benson, an independent logger in New Hampshire since 1988.

From Augusta, Maine, we’re joined by Lloyd Irland, president of the forestry consulting firm The Irland Group, where much of his work concentrates on forests in the northern states from Minnesota to Maine. He is a lecturer at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and author of “The Northeast’s Changing Forests.” Formerly he worked as associate economist for the USDA Forest Service and as a Maine State Economist. He just completed work on a Maine logging report for the state attorney general’s office.