Today, in celebration of Blog Action Day, I'm blogging about what we can do to prevent catastrophic climate change. This blog has focused on ideas to deliver renewable energy and energy efficiency for a few months now, but today I'd like to step back and discuss the one really big idea which I think is our single most powerful tool in fighting catastrophic climate change: democratization.

What's so great about democracy, and what will democratization do to prevent catastrophic climate change? Plenty!

• Reducing barriers. Renewable energy and energy efficiency must be made more readily available to ordinary people, so that everyone can take part in the green revolution. That means that we must reduce the cost of renewable energy and make it feasible for ordinary people to create renewable energy through their own initiative; it also means that we must make energy efficiency know-how more readily available, more easily navigable, and more immediately actionable.

  Think of what the web, and blogging software in particular, did for political organizing. It used to be that only fairly wealthy organizations and individuals had the means to broadly publish political opinions and news analysis. But with the advent of blogging software, it became radically easier to publish and organize around political opinions. The result was the modern progressive movement and, arguably, the presidency of Barack Obama. I'd like to think that steadily decreasing the cost of access to renewable energy and energy efficiency will have similarly dramatic effects on the green revolution.

• Transparency and creativity. Transparency and creativity are the lifeblood of democracy - they allow ordinary people to identify problems in society and fix them. They will also be the enablers of the green revolution. What I mean by that is that ordinary people must have access to the information necessary to diagnose problems in the green economy, and must be given free reign to use their creativity to fix those problems.

  Fortunately, policymakers seem to support this idea. The smart grid is, in some sense, all about creating transparency around critical energy use information, and the trend towards opening up government data certainly indicates that many policymakers want to unleash the creativity of civic-minded developers.

  There is still a long way to go, however. To begin with, open access to smart grid data (up to the limit necessary for security, of course) is not yet assured. A good deal of the emerging smart grid seems to be oriented around private deals between utilities and brand-name hardware and software developers. Open standards and APIs, and more than that open-source smart grid software and hardware, will be key to making the smart grid truly transparent.

  Moreover, energy usage is not the only area where we need transparency. The food system and transportation system are rife with hard-to-find and hard-to-use information. Labeling for food and data standards for metro transit systems are certainly a good start, but even these are too limited in scope. Both are aimed primarily at providing consumers information - which is a laudable goal, of course. But consumer information doesn't really address the problem at the source; it only allows us to solve the problem of agricultural emissions indirectly, for example.  Furthermore, there are plenty of greenhouse gas emissions from commercial and industrial users, and these users also need to reduce their footprint - and they need the help of creative people to do that. The green revolution will really take off when high-quality, real-time, standardized data about the impact and services provided by every level of the food and transportation sectors becomes available and actionable to ordinary people.

• Structural change through civic action. A lot of green entrepreneurs focus on private action to fight climate change. Again, that's a laudable goal, but it's not enough. We will only be able to reverse climate change through the structural reform that is possible when ordinary people use the power of government to green the economy.

  To be sure, that includes action at the highest levels, and here in the US that means that the Senate needs to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, with strong targets for renewable energy and emission reductions. It also means that global leaders will need to craft an ambitious anti-climate change treaty in Copenhagen this December, and that the Senate will again need to ratify that compact.

  But civic action shouldn't stop there; indeed, action at the highest levels will not be nearly enough. States and municipalities will need to experiment on the right mix of incentives, regulations and investments needed to make energy efficiency the "business as usual" option; to make renewable energy affordable and widely-accessible; and to make our living spaces, food systems, and transportation systems sustainable. Ordinary people will need to lead the charge in pressing governments to adopt these measures, to be creative in trying new policies, and to be honest in changing course when those policies don't work.

It may seem odd that a web developer with a penchant for the green economy might be so interested in democratization. But at the end of the day, I think democratization is precisely what the web is about.  That's why I think it is such a powerful platform for change, and part of the reason why I've chosen this career. Democracy is one of the more powerful tools we've ever invented, and I think it is the key to preventing catastrophic climate change.

Note: Boston Green Drinks will be discussing the provisions of the Boxer/Kerry bill, and its impact on the environment, with Ben Wright, the Global Warming Advocate at Environment Massachusetts, on Nov. 3 at 7 pm.  I hope to see you there!

Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act in the US Senate.  This is the Senate's version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman/Markey bill, which passed the House in June.  The legislation would, among other things, set a nationwide renewable energy portfolio and create a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Although I write a lot about ideas for renewable energy and energy efficiency which can be pursued by individuals, organizations, and businesses with minimal governmental support, the fact is that major governmental action is needed to stop catastrophic climate change.  The problem is simply too huge to leave to the private sector.  Moreover, current government policies encourage the unsustainable practices, including dirty fuel energy production, excessive driving at low mileage, and deforestation, which are the main factors in catastrophic climate change; the government should reverse this destructive path.  With regards to Congressional action specifically, climate change will have massive impacts on interstate commerce and national security, and it is therefore Congress's constitutional responsibility to take action on this issue.

The immediate task before anyone who wants to avoid catastrophic climate change is to push the Senate to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to push the Congress to merge the two bills and to pass the final legislation.  Ideally, the final passage would be accomplished before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, set for Dec. 10.

If you've paid any attention to the debate on health care reform, you're no doubt aware that passing major legislation in Congress, and especially in the Senate, is not a piece of cake.  There are dozens if not hundreds of hurdles, amendments, votes, procedural questions, and sundry sub-plots to track.  There are massive, and in some cases very wealthy, interests who want to have a say.  There are lines in the sand, and it's often quite difficult to tell when they have been crossed, who is acting in good faith, what's just a feint, and what is going on behind the scenes.

With regards to the Boxer/Kerry bill, it appears that there will be at least a few major issues with the bill:

• Will the bill, in its final form, allow the EPA to continue regulating greenhouse gases?
• Will the bill encourage green collar job creation, thereby spreading renewable energy prosperity broadly?
• What numerical targets will be set for renewable energy creation and emission reductions, and how aggressive will the timetables be?
• Will the bill rely on carbon capture, or support natural gas as an intermediary solution, in emission reductions?
• When will the bill pass, and how will the Senate bill be merged with the House bill?

Clearly, the debate on this bill will be just as complicated, if not more so, than the debate on health care reform, and a great deal of work needs to be done to track the progress on these issues, and to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

Luckily, there are plentiful tools available to organize this massive and complex stream of information, and there is already a decent-sized body of practice in tracking legislation and holding leaders accountable, particularly within the progressive blogosphere and other social media forums.  But it seems to me that blogs, wikis, social media streams, and Twitter feeds, for all their power, are not really sophisticated enough to capture the complexity of the climate change debate.  All of these sources have the main weakness that they are mainly suited to highlighting one thing at a time, whereas the climate change debate requires us to keep track of multiple things at once - the five questions I listed above, and perhaps a few others.  It would be nice to have a site where a visitor could get a quick glimpse of the status and recmmended action for each of these issues.

The best infrastructure for creating such a complex site, in my opinion, is Drupal, the content management system used in almost every Lightbulb First project.  As it happens, there is an excellent distribution of Drupal targeted specifically at supporting online newspaper sites, called ProsePoint.

I'd like to see someone create and maintain a ProsePoint site whose main focus is to track stories on the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to organize civic action to push legislators to vote the right way on the bill.  Now, Prosepoint is mainly intended as a tool to manage news sites, not to oragnize civic action, but it's not hard to imagine extending the basic software a bit to incorporate activism.  One approach would be to add a "Suggested action" field to the Store content type, and then to extend the theme to highlight actions alongside the story body in some way.  Another approach would be to create a separate "Action item" content type, and to allow those content items to be attached to stories.  This latter approach might work better, as it would enable the creation of different types of actions - e.g. signing a petition, calling Senators, donating to an activist group or to a Senator who helped push the legislation along, etc.  It would also allow the site editors to highlight important actions over the course of several stories.

What I like about ProsePoint is its native support for multiple channels, which is vitally important for the climate change debate.  Channels are found on almost every news site these days; the channels at the top of the ProsePoint demo site include "National", "World", and "Business".  To track the questions I listed above for the Boxer/Kerry bill, it would be easy enough to create channels with titles like "EPA authority", "Green collar", "Renewable energy standard", "Carbon capture", and "Legislative calendar" (although I'm sure that someone with more experience managing online news sites could come up with something a bit snappier.)

Moreover, the software includes personalization capabilities, which appear to be focused around allowing visitors to easily access the stories most interesting to them through a "My Magazine" page.  Unfortunately the documentation for these features is not too clear, but these features could be a good foundation for giving visitors the tools to focus on the stories and actions most interesting to them, and also to recruit their friends and personal networks to support the elements of the bill they are most passionate about.

The biggest challenge in running such a site would be time and money.  If (and this is a rather big "if") the bill is indeed passed by Dec. 10, then the time frame for launching, stocking, and marketing a major new site focused solely on the Boxer/Kerry bill is indeed quite short.  And don't forget that we need to account for the time to incorporate or find an existing organizational home, untangle legal issues, put together a decent design, etc.

On top of that, such a site would require at minimum a part-time contributor, and probably more like one or two full-time staff.  Even for a couple of months, at a decent salary for each staff person, the costs for the site could run into the $30-40,000 range.  Unless the site manages an exceptional amount of traffic, online advertising certainly won't cover those costs.  Instead, I would suggest corporate or organizational sponsorship.  There are certainly no shortage of public interest groups for whom passage of the bill would be priceless, and there are now several major corporations lobbying for aggressive passage of the bill.  Beyond these big-name brands, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of nascent renewable energy and energy efficiency companies for whom the bill is a major boon, and who should be willing to kick in a little money to promote passage of the bill.

Even if it's not feasible to launch such a site in time to catch the major part of the debate on the Boxer/Kerry bill, it's still worth thinking about the idea of for-profit news/action sites that rely on sponsorships.  The Boxer/Kerry bill will not be the last piece of legislation dealing with catastrophic climate change.  At a minimum, the Senate will have to ratify the Copenhagen treaty once it's negotiated, and Congress will probably revisit the issue at some point in the next few years.  Moreover, states and cities are sure to continue to take action on any number of green issues, including green job initiatives, building codes, transportation policies and food system reforms.  Preparing for these debates now will only strengthen the hand of ordinary folks who want to protect the environment, and will help create the structural reform necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.