Note: Boston Green Drinks will be discussing the provisions of the Boxer/Kerry bill, and its impact on the environment, with Ben Wright, the Global Warming Advocate at Environment Massachusetts, on Nov. 3 at 7 pm.  I hope to see you there!

Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act in the US Senate.  This is the Senate's version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman/Markey bill, which passed the House in June.  The legislation would, among other things, set a nationwide renewable energy portfolio and create a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Although I write a lot about ideas for renewable energy and energy efficiency which can be pursued by individuals, organizations, and businesses with minimal governmental support, the fact is that major governmental action is needed to stop catastrophic climate change.  The problem is simply too huge to leave to the private sector.  Moreover, current government policies encourage the unsustainable practices, including dirty fuel energy production, excessive driving at low mileage, and deforestation, which are the main factors in catastrophic climate change; the government should reverse this destructive path.  With regards to Congressional action specifically, climate change will have massive impacts on interstate commerce and national security, and it is therefore Congress's constitutional responsibility to take action on this issue.

The immediate task before anyone who wants to avoid catastrophic climate change is to push the Senate to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to push the Congress to merge the two bills and to pass the final legislation.  Ideally, the final passage would be accomplished before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, set for Dec. 10.

If you've paid any attention to the debate on health care reform, you're no doubt aware that passing major legislation in Congress, and especially in the Senate, is not a piece of cake.  There are dozens if not hundreds of hurdles, amendments, votes, procedural questions, and sundry sub-plots to track.  There are massive, and in some cases very wealthy, interests who want to have a say.  There are lines in the sand, and it's often quite difficult to tell when they have been crossed, who is acting in good faith, what's just a feint, and what is going on behind the scenes.

With regards to the Boxer/Kerry bill, it appears that there will be at least a few major issues with the bill:

• Will the bill, in its final form, allow the EPA to continue regulating greenhouse gases?
• Will the bill encourage green collar job creation, thereby spreading renewable energy prosperity broadly?
• What numerical targets will be set for renewable energy creation and emission reductions, and how aggressive will the timetables be?
• Will the bill rely on carbon capture, or support natural gas as an intermediary solution, in emission reductions?
• When will the bill pass, and how will the Senate bill be merged with the House bill?

Clearly, the debate on this bill will be just as complicated, if not more so, than the debate on health care reform, and a great deal of work needs to be done to track the progress on these issues, and to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

Luckily, there are plentiful tools available to organize this massive and complex stream of information, and there is already a decent-sized body of practice in tracking legislation and holding leaders accountable, particularly within the progressive blogosphere and other social media forums.  But it seems to me that blogs, wikis, social media streams, and Twitter feeds, for all their power, are not really sophisticated enough to capture the complexity of the climate change debate.  All of these sources have the main weakness that they are mainly suited to highlighting one thing at a time, whereas the climate change debate requires us to keep track of multiple things at once - the five questions I listed above, and perhaps a few others.  It would be nice to have a site where a visitor could get a quick glimpse of the status and recmmended action for each of these issues.

The best infrastructure for creating such a complex site, in my opinion, is Drupal, the content management system used in almost every Lightbulb First project.  As it happens, there is an excellent distribution of Drupal targeted specifically at supporting online newspaper sites, called ProsePoint.

I'd like to see someone create and maintain a ProsePoint site whose main focus is to track stories on the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to organize civic action to push legislators to vote the right way on the bill.  Now, Prosepoint is mainly intended as a tool to manage news sites, not to oragnize civic action, but it's not hard to imagine extending the basic software a bit to incorporate activism.  One approach would be to add a "Suggested action" field to the Store content type, and then to extend the theme to highlight actions alongside the story body in some way.  Another approach would be to create a separate "Action item" content type, and to allow those content items to be attached to stories.  This latter approach might work better, as it would enable the creation of different types of actions - e.g. signing a petition, calling Senators, donating to an activist group or to a Senator who helped push the legislation along, etc.  It would also allow the site editors to highlight important actions over the course of several stories.

What I like about ProsePoint is its native support for multiple channels, which is vitally important for the climate change debate.  Channels are found on almost every news site these days; the channels at the top of the ProsePoint demo site include "National", "World", and "Business".  To track the questions I listed above for the Boxer/Kerry bill, it would be easy enough to create channels with titles like "EPA authority", "Green collar", "Renewable energy standard", "Carbon capture", and "Legislative calendar" (although I'm sure that someone with more experience managing online news sites could come up with something a bit snappier.)

Moreover, the software includes personalization capabilities, which appear to be focused around allowing visitors to easily access the stories most interesting to them through a "My Magazine" page.  Unfortunately the documentation for these features is not too clear, but these features could be a good foundation for giving visitors the tools to focus on the stories and actions most interesting to them, and also to recruit their friends and personal networks to support the elements of the bill they are most passionate about.

The biggest challenge in running such a site would be time and money.  If (and this is a rather big "if") the bill is indeed passed by Dec. 10, then the time frame for launching, stocking, and marketing a major new site focused solely on the Boxer/Kerry bill is indeed quite short.  And don't forget that we need to account for the time to incorporate or find an existing organizational home, untangle legal issues, put together a decent design, etc.

On top of that, such a site would require at minimum a part-time contributor, and probably more like one or two full-time staff.  Even for a couple of months, at a decent salary for each staff person, the costs for the site could run into the $30-40,000 range.  Unless the site manages an exceptional amount of traffic, online advertising certainly won't cover those costs.  Instead, I would suggest corporate or organizational sponsorship.  There are certainly no shortage of public interest groups for whom passage of the bill would be priceless, and there are now several major corporations lobbying for aggressive passage of the bill.  Beyond these big-name brands, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of nascent renewable energy and energy efficiency companies for whom the bill is a major boon, and who should be willing to kick in a little money to promote passage of the bill.

Even if it's not feasible to launch such a site in time to catch the major part of the debate on the Boxer/Kerry bill, it's still worth thinking about the idea of for-profit news/action sites that rely on sponsorships.  The Boxer/Kerry bill will not be the last piece of legislation dealing with catastrophic climate change.  At a minimum, the Senate will have to ratify the Copenhagen treaty once it's negotiated, and Congress will probably revisit the issue at some point in the next few years.  Moreover, states and cities are sure to continue to take action on any number of green issues, including green job initiatives, building codes, transportation policies and food system reforms.  Preparing for these debates now will only strengthen the hand of ordinary folks who want to protect the environment, and will help create the structural reform necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.