While reviewing last month's press about President Bush's climate summit, I thought, "Here we go again." The administration was still rejecting caps on greenhouse gas emissions even as it celebrated the role of new technologies and the need to protect our economy -- as though these concepts were contradictory. Having spent most of my career working to advance green technologies, I'm hardly a Luddite. But it's the human side of technology -- from design to market conditions -- that largely determines its impact. In the case of climate change, a cap is simply fundamental to creating an emissions trading market, which, in turn, provides the best climate for innovative technologies. No wonder so many corporate executives are calling for a national cap sooner rather than later;

On September 9, the Oregonian headlined its Sunday edition with a story about the Greenland ice sheet melting much faster than scientists had predicted. The well-crafted story found the news "...particularly unsettling because elaborate climate models that scientists use to estimate the effects of global warming did not foresee it."

While many scientists had been warning that such acceleration could be underway and that we were entering unchartered waters, it's true that recent observations on different kinds of ice loss have not yet worked their way into global peer-reviewed models. Such is the nature of peer-reviewed science and the hazards in communicating such complexities.

The good news about stories like this -- if there's good to be had in such dismal news -- is

Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, once pointed to the criterion that often separates high-impact movies from those forgotten with the last handful of popcorn: do you care about the characters?

Recently, that simple question helped explain why my recent trip to China carried such impact.

Like others, I've often cited facts and figures surrounding China's economic growth to underscore the global imperatives for moving to a sustainable economy. China's economy is doubling every eight years, boosting consumerism to levels that are rattling markets around the world.

It has set ambitious goals for efficiency and renewables, though it is building a new coal-fired power plant every week. Half the world's new buildings between now and 2015 will be built