There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland's Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually "an attack on middle-class American capitalism." His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, D.C., Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: "To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?"

Green energy is no baby any more. These days it's more like an over-achieving graduate student. The sector that has birthed itself in a climate of denial, financial and fiscal crisis and policy ping-pong is doing surprisingly well despite getting its higher education in this school of hard knocks.

Innovation is still the essential ingredient required to bring all the pieces together to make clean energy and money, too. Two new projects that are coming to light right now give a great glimpse of the outside-the-box approaches that are bridging the new industry's needs for breadth, resilience and, above all, financing. Thank goodness, because that's what we still so desperately need.

"The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels."

These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Snow-Flakes, published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin's flubbing of the history of Revere's famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin's incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.

More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to discuss, organize, mobilize and protest around the issue of climate change. While tax day Tea Party gatherings of a few hundred scattered around the country made the news, this massive gathering, Power Shift 2011, was largely ignored by the media. They met the week before Earth Day, around the first anniversary of the BP oil rig explosion and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, while the Fukushima nuclear plant still spews radioactivity into the environment. Against such a calamitous backdrop, this renewed movement's power and passion ensure that it won't be ignored for long.

Today I joined the newly formed Board of Directors of 350.org, coinciding with a range of exciting new changes at the organization. I have been a supporter of 350.org since I first heard about the wacky plan to turn a wonky scientific target into a global people's movement, and I'm thrilled and honoured to be officially joining the team.

The Bush/Cheney undead are still stalking the land, and on the global warming issue they've sunk their fangs into fresh blood.

Continuing from the Bush government's suppression of the work of its own climate scientists, propaganda and befuddlement go from strength to strength.

Driven by U.S. right-wing politics and polluting-industry money, they've unnerved scientists with their tactics to the point that some of them have apparently suppressed data -- or thought of doing so -- rather than feed it into this engine of political disinformation, in the now famous University of East Anglia emails episode.

Three points to bring the picture into focus.

What does Climategate prove -- those e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at a British university that show a will to manipulate data to confirm the case for warming? I don't think it proves climate change is just a "global warming scare" (National Post). The Arctic ice is still melting, the polar bears are retreating inland, the Northwest Passage is opening wider. Nor does it simply establish that scientists are human (Paul Krugman), although I wouldn't dispute the point. I think it shows that politics makes people crazy.