Would you pay a trillion bucks to save the Earth?

There are lots of pressing economic reasons to kick the fossil-fuel habit -- the risks posed by peak oil and climate change to name just two. There's an assumption, often implicit, that underpins the North American energy debate: clean, renewable energy is not up to the job. That assumption is flat-out wrong. Clean energy -- mainly solar, geothermal, hydro and wind -- isn't just competitive with fossil fuels, it is better able to power the civilization. But (there's always a "but") that's true only if people commit to build clean energy infrastructure on a scale comparable to the fossil-fuel apparatus built over the past century. That scale is enormous. Only if they decide to do it.