It has become customary among global warming deniers to remark during winter's coldest days that global warming can't possibly be true when it is so cold outside.

So let me beat them to the punch.

Man is it f*#%ing cold outside!

How cold is it? It' so cold snowmen are massing for their final assault on humanity. (See above)

How cold it it? I saw a guy try to light a cigarette on the street today and the flame froze.

How cold it is? I saw a polar bear holding a sign that read "Will Work for tickets to Florida."

Hell, they even had freezing temperatures in Florida this week. Hell, that's like hell freezing over. How do I know? Let's just say I have sources.

It's so cold that I couldn't get into my car when I went out this morning. It had a bit of an ice problem.

Then, when I gave up, I went down to Riverfront Park here in Pottstown for a brisk walk along the Schuylkill.

Well let me tell you, what I saw nearly took my breath (and my body heat) away.

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitress.

Well they say timing really is everything and that is apparently true for blogs as well.

Fast-forward three days. When I started this one, it was MF cold outside and of course now, it's been 60 for two days.

Hey wait, it's warmer, that must mean global warming is real!

And it's real right here in Pennsylvania. How do I know? The Union of Concerned Scientists came to Berks County and told us so.

When they came in October, they said "The Pennsylvania we know and love today might not be here in our children's lifetime," at least according to this article in The Reading Eagle (if you can believe anything they report).

According to their study, accessible by clicking here, a broad number of changes are in store for the Keystone State as a result of our carbon emission lifestyle.

Here are a few:

Yields of Concord grapes, sweet corn and some kinds of apples will decrease as temps rise and pests have an easier time in warmer climes;

Widespread ski resort closures will occur, along with a decrease in snowmobiling (no great loss there);

By 2040, our climate will be more like Virginia and North Carolina than the place that made Valley Forge famous because of its winters. By 2070, it could well feel like Georgia here.

Here's another way to look at it, by 2039, the number of days hotter than 90 degrees will double, more than 70 days a year for us along with a 10 percent increase in precipitation. Can anyone say "the Manatawny is flooding ... again"?

From 1961 to 1990, Philadelphia had about 20 days a year over 90 degrees, according to a handy chart in the report. By 2099, we will see more than 80 such days.

Not that we didn't do some of this ourselves. According to the scientists, Pennsylvania contributes 1 percent of total global emissions of CO2, and is the third highest in the U.S., behind only Texas and California.

There's another reason to worry about global warming -- it might kill you.

According to a report issued by the EPA (link not available either to the report of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune story that reported on it), climate change is "unequivocal" and blame is placed squarely on humanity's shoulders.

The report said as temperatures rise, extreme weather events; diseases borne by ticks and other organisms and an increase in asthma attacks cause by higher levels of pollen and smog will kill more people. (It was unclear whether that will be offset by fewer people freezing to death.)

And, because no environmental column would be complete without a swipe at the Bush administration's record on this issue, the Star-Tribune reported several months ago (yes I am a pack rat and save all kinds of things) that the former administration tried to "bury" the report so as not to have to regulate greenhouse gases.

In the governmental equivalent of sticking its fingers in its ears and saying loudly "I can't hear you lalalalalalalala," the former White House staff chose to deal with this issue by refusing to open e-mails about it from the EPA (this after Darth Cheney's office brazenly deleted testimony on the science made to a Congressional panel.)

Unfortunately for us all, what they don't know can hurt us.

So it's a question long overdue in the asking: Will President-elect Obama be able to enact his ambitious plans for energy independence in the midst of a financial meltdown?

We here at The Thin Green Line polled our extensive staff -- including field researchers, laboratory assistants and policy wonks -- and concluded the answer to that question will depend as much on the man as the circumstances.

But since the man is not even in office yet, and because we won't fully know what kind of president he is until he is president, over-stuffed with turkey as we are, we have decided to confine our effort today to examining the circumstances.

This in and of itself is no small task as, like the issues, they are complex.

It was going to be hard enough to wean Americans off the easy and familiar energy sources of oil and coal in the best of circumstances.

Add to that the tension, fear and volatility of a collapsing economy and "hard" just went to "harder."

How to you jumpstart a new energy matrix when the financial resources required just got flushed down the proverbial de-regulation toilet?

Oddly, it seems, this question makes stark the observation that the world is full of basically two kinds of people, optimists and pessimists or, in this case, entrepreneurs and bean counters.

The bean counter argument is not hard to imagine and has many good points to its credit, not the least of which is "is now the time to invest what little money is available for lending in an untested industry?"

This is being seen already as it relates to wind power, hence our symbolic windmill photo at the top of the page.

Initially, the fastest growing of the major green energy initiatives -- the others being solar, ethanol and, to a lesser extent, geo-thermal -- wind power is now suffering from the collapse of its financial backers, like Lehman Brothers.

As this article in The Christian Science Monitor indicates, projects already underway in wind-rich places like Wyoming and Michigan are now becalmed by a lull that has nothing to do with wind-speed.

"Financing for wind projects is likely to shift more to deep-pocketed utilities and other companies far from Wall Street – including big foreign companies searching for a foothold in the United States," the now solely on-line newspaper reported. "Until this fall, plowing billions into new wind farms from North Dakota to Texas to California had been the epitome of renewable-energy investing for hedge funds and big banks."

Once, the second-fastest growing source of electricity generation after natural gas, wind has hit the perfect storm: Falling fossil fuel prices, especially in natural gas, rising steel prices and a paucity of investors.

And there is another, more integral matter with which green energy must contend in the electrical arena -- the infrastructure itself.

It's not enough to just build graceful wind farms across the plains and stand back to admire our tardy-but-necessary initiative.

The power grid that must carry those busy electrons from the plains to the cities is already seriously over-taxed and not designed for the task at hand.

A recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation notes that switching over to more wind and solar power plants without upgrading the transmission capacity would result in more blackouts and less reliability -- not the kind of thing on which a thriving, high-tech economy is built.

And, as this report in The New York Times makes clear, the issue puts two green constituencies as odds.

"The report calls for construction of new power lines, which has become more difficult in some regions because of the diminished clout of utilities and the growing strength of preservationists trying to protect rural areas. "

Just such an effort is underway here in eastern Pennsylvania and is meeting with stiff resistance.

Even potential measures to ease this pressure, like voluntary shut-downs in exchange for price breaks, will not be enough to alleviate the shortage of transmission capacity however.

All of which brings us to the optimists or, as we fashioned them earlier, the entrepreneurs.

Some of the nation's most successful entrepreneurs succeed by seeing opportunity in difficulty, solving new problems in new ways.

Not being entrepreneurs here at The Thin Green Line (where wage slavery crushes our inner creative capitalist on a daily basis) we cannot propose those solutions, only have faith that they exist and that those so inclined will be able to find them.

One way to encourage them, argue some, is for a President Obama to enact a "Green New Deal" and use what financial fortitude the U.S. Government has left to support those efforts.

"Such a Green New Deal, woven into the economic stimulus package being crafted for early next year, could create millions of government-subsidized jobs and build a new energy infrastructure," The Boston Globe reported in this Nov. 24 article.
"It's a smart thing to do for the economy and a strategically wonderful thing to do for the environment," said David Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership between the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers that works to develop green jobs. His group points to a University of Massachusetts report earlier this fall that said a $100 billion investment in clean technology could create 2 million new jobs in the next two years. "It leads us down the path for energy independence. It's a historic opportunity," he told the newspaper.

Supporters of Obama's $150 billion energy plans, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, say such a plan could include federal financial incentives to quickly build large-scale solar, wind, and other renewable projects. It could also include massive investment in new transmission lines to bring renewable power from rural areas into cities, creating a new electricity grid, according to the Globe.

But it won't be easy. Any reduction in carbon emissions from coal-fired plants are likely to raise electricity prices at a time when deregulation is already set to do that, at least in Pennsylvania, just when most consumers can't afford it. That will make it politically unpopular, requiring an effort to educate the country on why its necessary.

“In times of economic stress, the last thing you want to do is increase peoples’ energy costs with something like cap-and-trade,” Anne Korin, cofounder of the Set America Free Coalition (SAFC) of energy-security hawks and environ­mentalists, told The Christian Science Monitor in this Nov. 12 article which examines Obama's plans in some detail.

"SAFC calls for policies that would disconnect the US from imported oil. 'There’s a lot of talk about that, but a congressman who wants to be reelected would be very wary of that,' Ms. Korin says."

If you ask him if he can do it, Obama would likely say it is not him, but all of us that must accomplish this. "Yes WE can" was the mantra of his campaign.

But with the campaign over and his presidency looming, he must also recognize that while we may indeed be able to do it, we won't be able to do it without him.