The other night, after a long day elephanting, I curled up with my new-old bartered TV and watched some Planet Green (I’m a big fan of their Renovation Nation show, with Steve Thomas, the guy from This Old House—all about renovating green). Later, surfing during a commercial, I ran across good ol’David Letterman—going off on global warming—and he had me hooked. He had Thomas Friedman of New York Times environmental articles fame on the show—which on its own represents a rising-sea-change for guests on a late-night show—and I guess Friedman’s presence inspired Letterman to rant (and manage to be funny, and not offputting though he was being full-on depressing) the entire show. In one memorable moment, he declared that if we all rode bikes instead of cars that would be amazing—but we’d still all be dead meat ’cause what we’d done for the last 60 years will just be catching up with us for the next 60 years.

Then Friedman came on and said neither candidate had it right—that the answer was to adjust prices of oil and solar etc so the market would figure solutions with that famous American can-do know-how—that we could invent our way out of this problem.