I mentioned previously that Building Energy '08, a trade show and conference run by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, was coming up, and now it's here. The main event today was a two-hour open forum on energy efficiency and sustainability that was fascinating, inspiring, depressing, and annoying, in parts.

From so long a program, with four participants plus moderator Jim Braude, I could write forever, but I'm not gonna! 'Least, not tonight. But at one point, Braude asked each of the four, "If you were the czar or czarina, and didn't have to get 218 votes in the House or 51 votes in the Senate, and didn't have to get the president to sign off, what one thing would you do first to address climate warming?" He got four pretty good answers:

Chris Martenson, an economic analyst living in western Mass.: "We need the equivalent of a Manhattan Project on energy, combined with a couple-of-billion-dollar campaign promoting the need for it."

Solitaire Townsend of Britain, CEO and cofounder of Futerra, a "sustainability communications agency": "Make it illegal to advertise unsustainable behavior."

James Howard Kunstler of New York, an author, urban planner, and journalist: Refurbish the nation's railroads, which he said is one big project that could quickly have an effect on energy use. "It's the one thing we could do to prove to ourselves that we're competent. ... We're a nation of clowns." Kunstler's most recent book is "World Made by Hand," his novel of a post-oil future.

Linda Gunter of Maryland, of the group Beyond Nuclear: "Ban the importation and transportation of food supplies. If it's not in season in your neighborhood, you don't get to have it."

I don't have a real quarrel with any of them, but really, how many of you reading can conceive of any of them actually happening without some very big, shocking change? When Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute spoke in Lexington a couple of weeks ago, he invoked the memory of the wartime industrial mobilization that followed Pearl Harbor.

My answer to the question would probably have been close to what Brown wants and Martenson suggested. The problem with the idea, of course, is that FDR had the unprovoked attack of the Japanese to rouse public sentiment to accept such draconian measures, and the implications of climate change are creeping up too slowly by comparison.

What we need is a leader, someone who will make clear the severity of the problem and then direct us toward solutions that we can do, if we're willing to. At another point in the forum, Martenson said as much, "Everything we need we already have, except the political will."