Today, in celebration of Blog Action Day, I'm blogging about what we can do to prevent catastrophic climate change. This blog has focused on ideas to deliver renewable energy and energy efficiency for a few months now, but today I'd like to step back and discuss the one really big idea which I think is our single most powerful tool in fighting catastrophic climate change: democratization.

What's so great about democracy, and what will democratization do to prevent catastrophic climate change? Plenty!

• Reducing barriers. Renewable energy and energy efficiency must be made more readily available to ordinary people, so that everyone can take part in the green revolution. That means that we must reduce the cost of renewable energy and make it feasible for ordinary people to create renewable energy through their own initiative; it also means that we must make energy efficiency know-how more readily available, more easily navigable, and more immediately actionable.

  Think of what the web, and blogging software in particular, did for political organizing. It used to be that only fairly wealthy organizations and individuals had the means to broadly publish political opinions and news analysis. But with the advent of blogging software, it became radically easier to publish and organize around political opinions. The result was the modern progressive movement and, arguably, the presidency of Barack Obama. I'd like to think that steadily decreasing the cost of access to renewable energy and energy efficiency will have similarly dramatic effects on the green revolution.

• Transparency and creativity. Transparency and creativity are the lifeblood of democracy - they allow ordinary people to identify problems in society and fix them. They will also be the enablers of the green revolution. What I mean by that is that ordinary people must have access to the information necessary to diagnose problems in the green economy, and must be given free reign to use their creativity to fix those problems.

  Fortunately, policymakers seem to support this idea. The smart grid is, in some sense, all about creating transparency around critical energy use information, and the trend towards opening up government data certainly indicates that many policymakers want to unleash the creativity of civic-minded developers.

  There is still a long way to go, however. To begin with, open access to smart grid data (up to the limit necessary for security, of course) is not yet assured. A good deal of the emerging smart grid seems to be oriented around private deals between utilities and brand-name hardware and software developers. Open standards and APIs, and more than that open-source smart grid software and hardware, will be key to making the smart grid truly transparent.

  Moreover, energy usage is not the only area where we need transparency. The food system and transportation system are rife with hard-to-find and hard-to-use information. Labeling for food and data standards for metro transit systems are certainly a good start, but even these are too limited in scope. Both are aimed primarily at providing consumers information - which is a laudable goal, of course. But consumer information doesn't really address the problem at the source; it only allows us to solve the problem of agricultural emissions indirectly, for example.  Furthermore, there are plenty of greenhouse gas emissions from commercial and industrial users, and these users also need to reduce their footprint - and they need the help of creative people to do that. The green revolution will really take off when high-quality, real-time, standardized data about the impact and services provided by every level of the food and transportation sectors becomes available and actionable to ordinary people.

• Structural change through civic action. A lot of green entrepreneurs focus on private action to fight climate change. Again, that's a laudable goal, but it's not enough. We will only be able to reverse climate change through the structural reform that is possible when ordinary people use the power of government to green the economy.

  To be sure, that includes action at the highest levels, and here in the US that means that the Senate needs to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, with strong targets for renewable energy and emission reductions. It also means that global leaders will need to craft an ambitious anti-climate change treaty in Copenhagen this December, and that the Senate will again need to ratify that compact.

  But civic action shouldn't stop there; indeed, action at the highest levels will not be nearly enough. States and municipalities will need to experiment on the right mix of incentives, regulations and investments needed to make energy efficiency the "business as usual" option; to make renewable energy affordable and widely-accessible; and to make our living spaces, food systems, and transportation systems sustainable. Ordinary people will need to lead the charge in pressing governments to adopt these measures, to be creative in trying new policies, and to be honest in changing course when those policies don't work.

It may seem odd that a web developer with a penchant for the green economy might be so interested in democratization. But at the end of the day, I think democratization is precisely what the web is about.  That's why I think it is such a powerful platform for change, and part of the reason why I've chosen this career. Democracy is one of the more powerful tools we've ever invented, and I think it is the key to preventing catastrophic climate change.