One of the raps against President Obama is that he’s in over his head due, in part, to lack of executive management experience.

Here’s one thing Obama could do to shore up his management credentials: find a way to get rid of Greg Jaczko as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Now would be a good time.

Jaczko’s four colleagues—two Republicans and two Democrats—sent a remarkable letter to White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley that said Jaczko is a bullying, mercurial control freak who keeps vital information from his colleagues, browbeats technical advisers, and intimidates NRC professional staff.

Jaczko, his four colleagues told Daley, has interacted with them “with such intemperance and disrespect that the commission no longer functions as effectively as it should.”

A chairman’s bad behavior can poison any collegial body. This isn’t the state cosmetology board we’re talking about here, however. It’s the commission charged with overseeing the safety of America’s nuclear power plants, passing judgment on reactor designs, and licensing the final resting place or places for dangerous nuclear wastes.

And what did former Jaczko boss Ed Markey have to say about all this? Markey, a high-profile Dem on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, accused the four commissioners of conspiring to delay tightening of reactor safeguards following the Fukushima accident and of plotting a “coup” against Jaczko.

Conspiracy and coup mongering are serious accusations. If Markey were to be believed, four wild-eyed individuals—a nuclear engineer and adviser to former Senator John Warner, a MIT engineering professor, a former head of DOE’s nuclear energy program during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, and a retired Navy submarine squadron commander—are conniving intrigues straight out of a bad spy novel.

Pardon us if we don’t find Markey’s wild charges to be convincing. Last June, the NRC inspector general released a report taking Jaczko to task for intimidating staff and keeping fellow commissioners in the dark about his intentions to close down the proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository. Is the IG part of the plot too?

Closing down Yucca fulfills the political agenda of one Harry Reid, another former boss of Jaczko, who railed about a supposed “witch hunt” against the imperious NRC boss. Jaczko’s appointment smells like it was designed to advance a political objective, not to provide competent, objective leadership to the NRC.

At a crucial time for the U.S. nuclear industry, the NRC doesn’t need a chairman straight out of “Horrible Bosses.” Obama needs to fix a vital agency that’s in serious trouble by finding a way to replace Jaczko with a chairman who can get along with his or her colleagues and treat them and professional staff with the respect they deserve. If Reid and Markey don’t like it, that’s too bad.

Another biennial international climate negotiation jamboree wraps up today.

What does the world have to show for it? Durban shouldn’t turn out to be the belly flop that Copenhagen was in 2009. Other than that, not much. See you in two years and all that.

Even a few greens are wondering if trekking to these multi-national climate hoo-hahs is worth it. A Pace University blogger mused this week that one round-trip air ticket from the East Coast to Durban would result in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 8 tons of carbon dioxide—equivalent, he noted with apologies for the pointy jab at his colleagues who made the trip—to cruising about for a year at the helm of a very large SUV.

To be sure, a high old time was had by those who are convinced that emissions of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere are not trapping heat in the atmosphere. Lord Christopher Monckton, holder of a peerage in the climate denial clown car, parachuted into Durban—literally—to tweak morose greens about how right he thinks he is.

Is there a better alternative to talk-a-thons that attempt to produce an intricate treaty addressing a very complex, long-range problem that 193 nations can agree on? Such agreements can only come about through a great deal of advance work and legwork to build domestic backing.

At this point, it looks a better bet for the time being to break the problem into more manageable chunks. The International Energy Agency has suggested acting now to reduce emissions, rather than wait for a treaty nirvana that might never arrive.

For the U.S., that means Congress finding some spare time away from political gamesmanship to work on energy legislation that reduces emissions, delivers important side benefits, and that members of both parties can support, such as the Portman-Shaheen industrial energy efficiency bill.

It also means finding middle ground on shale gas and its promise to displace a significant chunk of coal-fired power generation by tapping gas reserves with production methods that follow best practices for keeping contaminants away from drinking water. EPA’s draft study indicating that hydrocarbons might have entered groundwater near a gas production zone in Wyoming is a cautionary sign that gas and water issues must be taken seriously.

And, it means Republicans pulling back from a flirtation with anti-science populism and Democrats taking calcium supplements to fortify their spinal columns.

Over time, we could even reach a point where most in the political class could agree on a common set of facts about climate change, the necessary foundation for an informed debate on what to do about it—such as a big-bang tax reform bargain that includes a carbon tax fully offset with payroll and/or income tax reductions.

We’re not there now, and until we are, don’t expect much except talk from international climate gabfests.

We’re not back to the energy glory days, when oceans of east Texas crude fueled the ships, aircraft, and tanks on which the Allies rode to victory in World War II.

U.S. imports of crude oil and petroleum products, however, have dropped a hair below 50 percent. And on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is exporting more refined petroleum products than it imports, the first time we’ve been in the black with refined fuels since the Truman administration.

America’s improving energy security position is rooted in greater fuel efficiency—which should draw applause from every conservative who loves to make a penny squeal—and new technology that has opened up previously inaccessible conventional oil reserves in deep shale formations.

Do these developments mean that the energy security problems associated with oil dependence are over? No.

Oil is still traded in a global market, where events over which we have little control—surging demand in China or supply cutoffs in this or that turbulent petro-state—can send prices scurrying upward. There isn’t a practical way to avoid an oil price surge. If beef prices get too high for your taste, you can quickly substitute chicken or fish. Not so with oil, which holds a monopolistic grip on the transportation energy market.

The International Energy Agency said in its 2011 World Energy Outlook that rising demand in the developing world will put strong upward pressure on prices in the years ahead, as more Chinese, Indians, and Middle Easterners take a fancy to having a car of their own. The global auto fleet is projected to double by 2035, to 1.7 billion cars.

Serving that demand and replacing played-out fields will force oil companies to head for high-rent districts, such as ultra deepwater. According to The Economist, Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, has budgeted $224 billion between now and 2015 to develop oilfields buried under deep salt layers thousands of feet below the ocean floor. Such technologically demanding production requires high enough prices to offset the costs and earn a return.

Despite the good news coming out of North Dakota’s Bakken field and other domestic shale oil fields, the U.S. achieving complete self-sufficiency in domestic crude oil production is not realistically foreseeable. Even an anything-goes policy to make oil production the dominant use on all public lands and offshore waters would not zero out crude oil imports, which would require a near tripling of domestic oil output.

And what if rising domestic output amps up political pressure to ease restrictions on crude oil exports? The shale gas boom has sparked interest in exporting U.S. gas to Asian and European markets. There is no reason to believe that market-chasing oil producers wouldn’t put the arm on Congress to ease up on crude oil export rules if economic opportunities beckoned. U.S. exports of refined oil products have more than doubled since 2005 as a result of changing market conditions. In 2010, the U.S. shipped out the equivalent of nearly 1 million barrels of gasoline and diesel per day. The upward trend of gasoline and diesel exports has continued this year.

More domestic oil production in suitable places such as the Bakken employs Americans, slows the flood of dollars going into the cashboxes of petro-states, and tops up supplies. That’s good. More domestic production, however, won’t cut the apron strings that tie us to the global oil market and the economic upheaval it’s capable of inflicting on the U.S.

Eli Lehrer ably defends the Department of Energy, the flawed and unloved agency whose name fell away from Rick Perry’s lips when his neural network took an inopportune coffee break.

As Lehrer pointed out, about half of DOE’s budget is allotted for watchdogging our nuclear arsenal and cleaning up “legacy wastes” left behind by production of fissile materials and nuclear weapons. One of DOE’s cleanup projects is Hanford.

Not many people outside the Pacific Northwest know about Hanford, a 560-square-mile federal reservation in the sage steppe country of eastern Washington State.

Hanford is the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere. There’s not a chance in hell that any entity except the federal government could oversee and carry out the cleanup, which—if funding holds—will be completed when today’s toddlers are grandparents.

Hanford was the Manhattan Project site where physicists’ theories were turned into industrial-scale plutonium production. Starting with the historic “B” reactor, nine reactors and five processing “canyons” to chemically extract plutonium from irradiated uranium were built at Hanford. Pu-239 production carried on until 1987, when the last operating reactor was shut down.

What’s left behind to clean up?

-177 underground tanks containing vile combinations of radioactive and chemical wastes totaling 53 million gallons. At least one-third of the tanks have leaked an estimated 1 million gallons into the ground.

-Hundreds of billions of gallons of liquid wastes that entered the ground from cribs, ponds, injection wells, and French drains.

- Millions of tons of solid wastes that ended up in pits, trenches, and dumps.

-Leaking plumes from the tanks and the liquid wastes contain an all-star team of radioactive and chemical hazards—strontium-90, technetium-99, and carbon tetrachloride, to name a few. Down the gradient lies the Columbia River, the biggest river in the West.

What’s being done?

DOE is building capacity to pump and treat 150 million gallons of contaminated groundwater per month. Contaminated soil and cleanup debris will go into an onsite landfill the size of 52 football fields, which now holds 11 million tons and counting of low-level wastes. Eventually, reactor buildings and support facilities will be demolished.

The centerpiece of the cleanup is construction of a vitrification plant that will take the hellish tank wastes and imprison them in glass logs for eventual burial, perhaps at Yucca Mountain, perhaps somewhere else. Cost of the “vit” plant is $12.2 billion and likely to go up. No one can say for sure whether the vit plant will work because remediation on this scale has never been tried.

An unresolved question is the fate of the 177 tanks after they’ve been emptied. Leave them in place and monitor them for all eternity, or chop them up for disposal? Removing the tanks and ancillary structures would create a mound of waste totaling a billion cubic feet—enough to fill the New Orleans Superdome eight times over.

Estimated cost of emptying the tanks, vitrifying the wastes, and remediating the tank farms ranges from $34 billion to $261 billion. Where the final number falls depends on how the public and decision-makers answer the central question: how clean is clean enough?

DOE’s oversight of the mammoth cleanup job has been bedeviled by ongoing controversy over its competence. Some critics have suggested taking DOE off the job and turning the mess over to a federal corporation chartered for the sole purpose of carrying out the cleanup.

No one knowledgeable about Hanford, however, has seriously suggested turning the job over to a non-federal actor. No other entities could handle it, nor should they even if they could. For more than four decades, Hanford was a critical defense facility, defense is inarguably a federal duty, and the cleanup of the wastes that came with defense production is a federal responsibility.

A guy closing in on retirement can speak uncomfortable truths that he might not have felt as free to share before.

John Rowe, the soon-to-retire CEO of the giant utility Exelon, rolled out a few grenades about energy politics in a recent interview published in the October 22nd Wall Street Journal.

Rowe argues that market-friendly Republicans are as eager to pick technology winners as government-knows-best Democrats are.

Rowe finds himself pricking the bubbles of Republicans who call him up wanting to talk about a nuclear renaissance that he says can’t happen without subsidies and lots of them. This, from the head of America’s biggest nuclear utility. Same goes for carbon sequestration, he says. And offshore wind. And just about everything else except, for now, natural gas.

A related Rowe observation, as quoted in the Journal…

There is no such thing as a sort of Garden of Eden energy market in this country—never has been, and we’re not going to live long enough to see one.

As I’ve told any reporter who’s asked, every form of energy is subsidized. Oil, coal, gas, nuclear, renewables, even energy efficiency—you name it, not one stands by its lonesome in an unadulterated free market. Any politician who says his favorite technology is not subsidized is not telling the truth.

R&D didn’t come up in the published interview, but some focused long-term R&D—an appropriate role for the federal government—could drive down the costs of cleaner alternatives, leading to smaller, safer nukes, practical ways to capture and store carbon, and solar technologies that could beat the price of coal. Poisonous budget politics could play havoc with energy R&D, however.

One more Rowe thought…

EPA has been knocked for churning out regulations like popcorn. Better to have regulations, however, than politicians picking favorites and reaching into taxpayers’ pockets to fund them, Rowe declared.

Rowe thinks that with EPA rules in place, the market would aim toward the cleanest, most economical power plant fuel, which for the next decade or two is likely to be natural gas. Not only is there plenty of gas coming out of the ground, there are underutilized gas-fired power plants that could substitute for dirty coal plants that can’t cut the pollution control mustard.

Sure, Rowe added, EPA has probably overdone it here and there. Yet in spite of righteous indignation you hear from politicians about regulations shutting down coal plants, owners of old coal clunkers have been “gaming the system,” Rowe pointed out.

EPA didn’t pull the proposed regulations out of thin air. Utilities have been on notice for years that rules required by the Clean Air Act were on the way.

“Most of the utilities actually spent the money to get their plants somewhere close to compliance,” the Journal quoted Rowe as saying. “We think about 60 percent of the coal fleet is. But some just decided to gamble. They just made one very big bet that these rules weren’t ever going to happen.”

That tilts the playing field, Rowe added, because old beaters trying to get a pass from cutting their emissions depress market prices for the output of cleaner plants fitted out with pollution control equipment.

Rowe, however, has what he calls a better idea—levy taxes on pollutants, including carbon dioxide, and shift away from command-and-control regulations and technology-specific subsidies.

That won’t happen anytime soon, but the pollution tax issue will come up again, Rowe believes. A Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican taking office in 2013 as No. 45 would be forced by unyielding arithmetic to at least take a look at pollution taxes as part of a bigger tax and budget fix, if the numbers are to pass the laugh test.

Many Republican officeholders and would-be officeholders are telegraphing to voters an either-or message: They can have more jobs or they can have cleaner air. But they can’t have both.

Rhetoric about closing down EPA and removing bureaucrats’ boots off industry’s throat, however, is more about drawing distinctions between Republicans and Democrats rather than taking reasoned positions that draw from empirical evidence.

Actually and surprisingly, not much scholarly research has been done to examine the impacts of environmental regulation on employment, according to Resources for the Future (RFF) testimony earlier this year to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s energy and environment panel.

Nor, according to the testimony, does EPA have clear guidance on how it should analyze the employment impacts of its proposed regulations. An Office of Management and Budget circular setting out how agencies should comply with a 1993 executive order requiring cost-benefit analysis of regulations does not provide guidelines for how employment analyses should be carried out.

RFF recommends that OMB set such guidelines, “but only after soliciting and considering public comment and genuinely independent expert advice.” Well, good luck with that in the middle of a polarizing campaign season in which clean air is one more political football.

Meanwhile, GOP candidates sending an either-or message about jobs and clean air ought to consider guidelines from Republican pollster Greg Strimple, whose firm, GS Strategy Group of Boise, joined with the Democratic firm Peter Hart & Associates in a survey about clean air regulations put out last week by Ceres, which works on business sustainability issues.

According to results of the poll, which queried 1,400 voters, 62 percent of Republicans joined 85 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of independents in opposing Congress substituting its judgment for EPA’s in deciding whether stronger air pollution limits are needed.

Strimple told E&E News that Republicans ought to be careful about marginalizing themselves on air quality issues with the middle of the electorate, i.e., voters who don’t have time to march around in tri-corner hats or occupy public parks.

The payoff message, Strimple said, is that “Republicans like clean air too.”

Solyndra is a lesson in how the substitution of wishful thinking for green eyeshades can stimulate the growth of costly energy carbuncles that emit malodorous political fumes.

Today it is Solyndra. Yesterday it was Colony Shale.

Don’t remember Colony Shale? Coloradans do. In the mesa country of northwestern Colorado, May 2, 1982 is still referred to as Black Sunday. That’s the day Exxon pulled the plug on a $5 billion extravaganza to excavate massive quantities of sedimentary rock, cook it in massive ovens to extract kerogen, a low-grade hydrocarbon within the rock, and produce an oil-like liquid suitable for refining into diesel and jet fuel. The operation would have consumed spectacular quantities of water in an arid region.

Colony Shale was a mushroom spawned by Jimmy Carter’s rain of federal subsidies aimed at developing kerogen, colloquially known as oil shale, as a made-in-America alternative to high-priced OPEC oil.

When oil prices took a dive, Exxon quickly figured that oil shale wouldn’t pay, shut down Colony, and vamoosed from the business. Money and political reputations weren’t the only things that were lost when the boom went bust. Jobs vanished. Homes went into foreclosure. Businesses crumpled. Marriages broke. Desperate breadwinners poached wild game to feed their families.

To this day, oil price volatility is a barrier to developing a viable oil shale business. Producers have to be sure that conventional crude prices will remain high enough long enough for oil shale to be competitive and yield a return on the hefty up-front investment required to stand up oil shale plants.

Same sort of thing happened with Solyndra, whose ill-fated plant was supposed to produce cylindrical photovoltaic modules based on CIGS (copper indium gallium diselenide) thin films, with which markets have less experience than conventional photovoltaics fabricated from silicon.

Obama administration officials apparently didn’t see or didn’t take seriously warning signs that the price of silicon was headed down. High silicon prices were an essential underpinning of Solyndra’s business model, which counted on competitors producing conventional silicon panels paying a high price for their feedstock.

An obvious lesson from the Solyndra and Colony Shale fiascos is this: Investments in cutting-edge technologies are inherently risky. When public dollars are used as risk capital and federal overseers don’t do their homework, there is a good chance that a flaming scandal will erupt. Predictably, headline-hunting politicians will make like Casablanca’s Captain Renault and pronounce themselves shocked, shocked that the government is gambling with taxpayers’ money.

Consequently, should the federal government stop using public dollars as risk capital for chancy technologies? Should the Department of Energy underwrite research, enforce energy efficiency standards, and let it go at that?

Given the briar patch of security risks, economic volatility, and environmental damage that are inseparable from oil dependence, a minimalist approach to energy policy is not sufficient.

Government largesse, however, cannot guarantee success. Fostering market conditions that will encourage the growth of cleaner energies made in America must be a central part of the game plan.

One way to put energy policy onto a sounder, market-oriented footing that attacks the status quo without risking the waste of taxpayer dollars on boondoggles would be folding energy into broad tax reform. Bulldoze the tax code and start afresh. Make a bonfire of credits, deductions, exclusions, inclusions, and other dangling whereases, take an ax to rates, and shift some taxation from things we like – e.g. work, savings, investment – to things we don’t – e.g. pollution.

Could “going big” on tax reform rationalize our energy policy in the bargain? It’s worth a serious debate.

The Obama White House is many things—flailing as it fishtails from an adult-in-the-room pose to screaming populism; cack-handed, as it both infuriates its base and loses independents; and passive to the point of paralysis, as Chris Christie pointed out in his Reagan Library speech.

The Obama White House, however, is not insane.

The Daily Caller’s breathtaking insistence, with a gratuitously crude reference to a TV wardrobe malfunction, that a what-if scenario painted in an EPA court brief (as an undesirable outcome) is a real proposal doesn’t have a whiff of plausibility.

The Daily Caller wants us to believe that EPA is about to nearly triple its budget and increase its regulatory staff by a factor of nearly 14 in order to slap millions of small businesses with greenhouse gas permit requirements. Right before an election year.

Not even the Obama political operation is that obtuse.

Here’s the background: EPA has proposed regulating greenhouse gas emissions from large stationary sources—power plants, refineries, and the like—using Clean Air Act authority that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that EPA has authority to use.

The rub, however, is that Clean Air Act permitting programs can apply to plants that emit as few as 100 tons per year of regulated pollutants. Since greenhouse gas emissions come out of every furnace exhaust and boiler stack, EPA recognized that imposing permit requirements on an estimated 6.1 million stationary sources would be beyond onerous. And, from an emissions reduction standpoint, beyond the law of diminishing returns, since 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from fixed sources come from a manageable set of big industrial operations.

Consequently, in tandem with proposing the emissions permitting rule, EPA proposed a “tailoring rule” to raise the permitting threshold to where only an estimated 14,700 big dogs would need the permits. Without the tailoring rule, EPA has acknowledged, state and local agencies that handle most Clean Air Act permitting chores would be overwhelmed. Not to mention the political resistance, which, it’s safe to say, would rise to the level of a firestorm.

In a federal appeals court brief defending the tailoring rule, EPA estimated what it would take to write the permits if the tailoring rule were thrown out and the universe of permitees expanded more than 400-fold. That hypothetical – $21 billion to hire 230,000 permit writers – gave rise to the accusation that Lisa Jackson is about to unleash a swarm of red tape-happy bureaucrats on small businesses.

Even if the administration were bent on regulating every greenhouse gas source, from the biggest coal burning power plant to the smallest herd of ill-mannered flatulent cows, it wouldn’t. Not a risk-averse White House that flinches as quickly from political pushback as the Obama White House does – witness the recent dropping of a proposed tightening of the ambient ozone limit.

Beyond that, the optics around an outlandish budget request for EPA would be as politically toxic as Rick Perry demanding the force-marching of every schoolgirl in America into an immunization clinic.

Which brings up another point that the Daily Caller didn’t touch on. Even if the White House seriously proposed that EPA hire 230,000 permit-writers, all those bureaucrats wouldn’t work for free. They would have to be paid through an appropriation. Only those who indulge in exotic smoking materials would believe a House majority and 60 senators would be up for throwing another $21 billion at EPA. Or that the White House would believe it could persuade Congress to go along.

The Daily Caller should leave creative journalism to a real pro – like Glenn Beck – and try to stick with boring old facts.

While it can be great fun to fill media echo chambers with gaseous rumors and speculations, such frolics are another sign of how a fractured—and often agenda driven—media has degraded public discourse on serious matters and needlessly polarized the American public.

What would a President Perry mean for the U.S. energy-wise?

First, Perry’s election would mean environmentalists might as well scrub “climate change” and “global warming” out of their vocabularies for four years. There would be no climate initiatives offered or accepted as such by a president who dismisses rising temperatures as the concoction of unnamed conspirators, even as his state bakes and burns.

Second, Perry’s policy for oil development on public lands and offshore waters could be summed up as “come on down.” Sportsmen and conservationists who support balancing oil production with other multiple uses, such as wildlife habitat conservation and watershed protection, would be in for four years of hand-to-hand legal combat with industry-cozy political appointees running the land management agencies.

Theodore Roosevelt would not be pleased. OPEC oil barons, however, would be mighty pleased at the U.S. perpetuating its dependence on the sauce. The faster we use up our resources, the prettier they sit on their giant reserves.

Third, Perry is a loyal subject of old King Coal. As governor, he tried to fast-track 11 coal-fired power plants, a plan that – like the giant Texas Transportation Corridor road-rail-pipeline land-grabbing megaproject – fizzled under its own weight. Under Perry, Texas has fought tooth and nail against EPA crackdowns on coal pollution, including a new rule aimed at protecting states downwind from the filth emanating from other states’ exhaust pipes.

Look for a Perry EPA to bear little resemblance to the EPA of William Ruckelshaus or Bill Reilly.

A Perry administration, however, would not be all carbon-rich fuels, all the time. As governor, Perry has overseen a significant surge in gas production from the Barnett Shale and other shale gas formations, and would support the same nationwide.

Gas is the likeliest replacement for aged, dirty, inefficient coal plants that are prime candidates for retirement, regardless of what EPA does in the regulatory arena. As long as there is a long-term outlook for low gas prices, utilities will gravitate toward gas as a cheap, cleaner burning fuel that can replace the old coal clunkers and minimize future regulatory liabilities that could come down the pipe post-Perry.

As part of his all-of-the-above pitch, Perry has boasted about his state’s incentives encouraging construction of energy-efficient new homes, efficiency retrofits, and upgrading of lighting and appliances. A Perry-approved state law in 2007 upped the portion of load growth that Texas utilities must meet through efficiency measures.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which publishes an annual scorecard rating state efficiency policies, ranks Texas as a fair to middlin’ No. 32. Two states that were headed by Republican governors with a strong personal interest in critiquing Perry’s record are ranked much higher, Massachusetts at No. 2, Utah at No. 12.

Perry also had a hand in the growth of Texas wind energy, one of the great renewable energy success stories of the past decade. In 2005, Perry signed into law a bill requiring Texas utilities to bring 5,880 megawatts of wind power on line by 2015, a goal that already has been achieved. One-fourth of the 42,432 megawatts of the wind capacity on line in the U.S. today is Texan.

To wheel energy from the gusty savannas of west Texas to urban load centers, Perry has backed aggressive transmission construction, paid for with monthly charges on customers’ utility bills.

The likelihood of Perry supporting similar efficiency or renewables policies at the federal level, however, is doubtful, given his rhetoric about making the federal government “inconsequential” and leaving policy initiatives to the states.

Which about sums up the prospects for energy diversification under a Perry administration. Cutting the oil and coal portions in the U.S. energy diet would depend on gas staying cheap, nuclear getting cheaper, and on states taking the lead to push renewables. If any or all of those assumptions were to fall short of the mark, Perry’s “all-of-the-above” pitch would turn out to be oil and coal above all.

When it comes to climate change, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie annoys people on both extremes of the political spectrum. One more reason to see a bright future for this guy.

On the far left, the Daily Kos types fulminate that Christie is a stooge of fossil fuel interests. Over on the far right, the vein throbbing set obsesses that Christie has joined the church of Al Gore.

This is a positive development. In defying ideologues and their litmus tests, Christie is blazing a trail that could lead the U.S. out of its polarized rut on energy and climate policy.

What did Christie do that resulted in such diverse outbursts of ideological bloviation?

On August 19, he vetoed a bill that would have returned New Jersey to the Northeast’s regional cap-and-trade program for power plants. It’s called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI for short. He explained his veto as follows:

While I acknowledge that the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing, that climate change is real, that human activity plays a role in these changes and that these changes are impacting our state, I simply disagree that RGGI is an effective mechanism for addressing global warming.

In vetoing the bill, Christie angered enviros on the left who insist that acceptance of climate change science is not enough. One must accept the left’s preferred climate policy options, or you’re another marionette of the Koch brothers.

In explaining his veto decision, Christie upset the chattering classes on the right who have handed down a diktat that acknowledging the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide ipso facto makes one a crypto socialist. One must embrace climate Lysenkoism or be branded an enemy of liberty.

Set aside for a moment the merits of Christie’s policy judgment about RGGI. What’s important here is that he framed the debate about climate change as it should be framed – a debate about which policies should flow from a commonly understood and accepted set of facts. The left should be willing to have that policy debate and the right should stop conflating scientific questions with identity politics.