Part of the problem, though, is that coal has taken on a something of a mythical place in the American psyche -- as Duncan Black put it to me this weekend, coal miners are like farmers. Coal is Americana.

So let's remind ourselves that -- struggling to keep this short -- Big Coal is evil. It has a long history of lying, breaking the law, killing its workers, manipulating the political process, and oh yeah, fouling up the climate. The number of people it employs has been steadily declining for years, yet it remains one of the most pampered, subsidized industries in the U.S. Part of this is simply because it hasn't received the same level of public opprobrium as oil.

It's time for concerted pushback against coal, which is setting itself up to use global warming as an excuse to get more subsidies. The gall.

3. Energy barriers are political, not technological. It's true that we can look forward to many exciting technological breakthroughs in the area of clean energy in coming years. But make no mistake: we have the technology today to drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It's simply not true that there are "no alternatives" to remaining yoked to the fossil ball and chain. Clean energy is not some welfare project we're pushing for fuzzy moral reasons. It is the superior alternative, blocked by the disproportionate power of dinosaur industries on the political process.

What's needed is market reform (removing subsidies and tax breaks, preferably from all energy sources), regulatory reform (primarily but not solely in the electrical utility sector), and legislative reform (a price on carbon). If those reforms were in place -- if we had something approximating a level playing field in the energy world -- clean energy would already be winning.

4. The U.S. must go first. Navin Nayak told me that Mitt Romney's been using this line: "It's not called America warming, it's called global warming." The idea is that the U.S. can't/shouldn't institute a mandatory cap on GHG emissions unless and until China and India do. Can't be at a "competitive disadvantage" and all.

That is, to put it as bluntly as possible, moral cretinism. The developed countries, particularly the U.S., spent most of humanity's carbon budget, and benefited from it in the form of enormous economies and prosperous citizenries. To pretend that China and India, where billions of people remain in miserable poverty, are at the same starting line in this game is absurd.

We have a moral, political, and economic responsibility to clean up our own house, and to lend a financial hand to China and India as they struggle to shift to a sustainable path.

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So there you have it. If any of you folks out there in the fabled netroots are reading this, and want to engage in the public debate over global warming, please help "propagate these memes" -- only don't call them that. I hate that word.