When Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, set out to write Clean Energy Common Sense her goal was simple- To bring more people into the climate change conversation now. Now? Conversations on climate change are happening in real time across the internet, on talk radio, in nightly news casts, and beside the water cooler. With only weeks until the UN's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a book seems like the wrong medium to insert yourself into the conversation.

With all due respect to Don Draper sometimes the best way to sell a message isn't a clever campaign but the truth. A recently exposed whopper conjured up by climate change deniers highlights exactly what is behind the fight against climate change solutions: lies. The site Fight Clean Energy Smears has been tracking the attempts by a very small minority of deniers out there who are using, quite simply, lies to protect their interest in the status quo

The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce's recent actions on two of the most important issues facing our country, healthcare reform and climate change, are a complete riddle to not only me, but to many of the chamber's own members and former supporters.

"Now you don't talk so loud/Now you don't feel so proud/ About havin' to be scroungin' for your next meal"-Bob Dylan

It is not that the big banks themselves are "too big to fail".  They are too big because they can cause all of us to fail.  In the military terms, that tragedy is cleansed by the use of the innocuous sounding term, "collateral damage".

The problem is this: One is just as dead from collateral damage as from a targeted hit.

We launched BreakUptheBigBanks.com because the political power wielded by the big banks is incompatible with a functioning democracy.  Such political power renders regulation inadequate--we have already seen Congress bow to the will of the very people whom a year ago it rescued from oblivion.

-"I don't want these guys forced to take their shoes off in airport security lines with every one else" -CNBC commentator Melissa Francis on whether the bailed-out banks should provide private jets for their CEOs.

Thanks to the big banks, we are all in pain, a lot of it.  

We have lost our jobs and our homes and our children's teachers and our savings and our good names and our economic security.  To prevent it from being even worse, we have mortgaged our children's futures, provided those big banks with our tax money, and then seethed as they awarded themselves obscene bonuses.

And, after all this, we are going to "reform" them?  And, then they will become good little boys and girls, stop listening only to their shareholders and start showing care and concern for the country instead?

And, we are expected to rest our futures on that outcome, one that has never happened before in world history?

Us? No.

Newspapers are in trouble. Big, end-of-the-road death spiral big trouble. The Boston Globe was recently pulled off the market because its owners who shelled out $1.1 billion for the paper were a little upset at the $35 million offer plus assumption of some debt that they received.

This isn't pennies on dollars, this is pennies on hundreds of dollars. Nice.

One week ago today, Sigourney Weaver and Frances Beinecke went to Washington to show the ground-breaking movie, Acid Test: The Global Challenge Of Ocean Acidification. It's a great short film, well worth watching, with really incredibly scary conclusions about what will happen to the ocean, not in the distant future but in the next few decades.

The US Chamber of Commerce is up to its eyeballs in disgruntled members and as a membership organization, perhaps it will consider the incredible amount of damage it has done to is reputation by aggressively resisting climate change initiatives and legislation.