Opinion | King coal: The future looks a lot like the past | George Will

A climate scientist told Fallows that stabilizing the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would require the world to reduce its emissions to Kenya's level — for America, a 96 percent reduction. Nations with hundreds of millions of people in poverty would, Fallows says, have to "forgo the energy-intensive path toward wealth that the United States has traveled for so many years."

In his new political science treatise ("Don't Vote — It Just Encourages the Bastards"), P.J. O'Rourke says, "There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick." So "go tell 1.3 billion Chinese they can never have a Buick." If the future belongs to electric cars, those in China may run on energy currently stored beneath Wyoming and Montana.