Although it contains a remarkable blind spot regarding financial risks stemming from construction schedule slippages, this month's major nuclear assessment from the Congressional Budget Office is appropriately sober about the magnitude of risks attributable to construction cost overruns. If construction costs average as high as they did in the 1970s and 1980s, CBO concludes that CO2 charges will have to exceed $80 per metric ton for new nuclear plants to be cost competitive.

The notable assessment of the future role of nuclear power, published this month by the Congressional Budget Office, derives significance less from its breadth or depth than from the insight it provides into the thinking of Congress' official fiscal scorekeeper. The report, assembled at the direction of revered nuclear champion Senator Pete Domenici, casts a wary (though bleary) eye at construction cost risk.

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As the debate over the future role of nuclear power in the Green Energy War continues to sharpen, the US Congressional Budget Office released a seminal text this month. The report succinctly describes the financial incentives in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) for third-generation nuclear technology, and projects levelized costs for the small number of plants expected to benefit. The study was commissioned by the patron saint of modern US nuclear promotion, New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici.

In the rear view mirror that seems to guide the US federal government's energy price forecasting, this week's revision to the Energy Information Administration's official "Short-Term Energy Outlook" looks unavoidable. The bigger question, exactly when the view forward through the windshield bug splatter of flawed assumptions will change, is less clear.

Ask any Green Energy Warrior what it will take to win the war, and the answer is likely to be "technological transformation." The feed-in tariffs in Europe and the renewable portfolio standards in the US focus on independent generators to prompt this change, implicitly believing the existing utility industry is too set in its ways to adapt quickly enough.

Simultaneous with the intense food vs. fuel debate presently underway, biofuels advocates on the environmental front of the Green Energy War have faced forceful arguments over the greenhouse gas impact of current policies promoting ethanol and biodiesel. Their response has been to emphasize the benefits expected from "second generation" biofuels like cellulosic ethanol, and to advocate technology-neutral, performance-based policies like a Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

Worldwide, there are three principal motivators -- or fronts -- in the accelerated move away from current methods of consuming fossil fuels that is known as the Green Energy War. As with most large scale endeavors attracting so many participants, communication and understanding across fronts can prove exceptionally difficult. It is by no means always clear that everyone is fighting the same war.

As debate continues to rage over the role which biofuels policies have played in the extraordinary inflation in world food prices, a sobering awareness may spread. Crop-based fuels like ethanol and biodiesel may have already become an indispensable element of global supplies of liquid fuels. Their absence could have a significant impact on the price of oil.

The Green Energy War, like every military campaign since the beginning of history, is fraught with unintended consequences. But strategy, once committed to, often takes on an irreversible momentum of its own. And secondary concerns, in the memorable words of the US Air Force Intelligence Targeting Guide, tend to be dismissed as "collateral damage".

Based on the historic US Supreme Court decision that brought him to the White House, George W. Bush probably ranks first among all US presidents in his acute appreciation of the co-equal role which the American Constitution affords the judicial branch of government.

Parsing last week's Bush climate speech has intelligence value in the Green Energy War irrespective of the esteem in which its deliverer is held. The dimensions of the defensive perimeter thrown up by the Republican Message Command and its business allies are detectable. They suggest an awareness of the blowback risk created by the Administration's infidelity to the principle of technology neutrality.

President Bush's "new national goal" announced yesterday, to stop the growth in economy-wide GHG emissions by 2025 and to make power sector emissions peak "within 10 to 15 years, and decline thereafter" rests heavily on technology. As he put it, "There are a number of ways to achieve these reductions, but all responsible approaches depend on accelerating the development and deployment of new technologies."

Green Energy Warriors habitually identify George W. Bush as the culprit in the "who thwarted progress?" lineup of suspects which has substituted for US action on climate policy these past seven years. His putative mastermind, Dick Cheney, is a consistent runner up.

Honest military historians have never known what significance to attach to battlefield precedent. Their views range from the dour George Santayana ("those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") to the more celebratory Yogi Berra ("it's deja vu all over again").

Why should the Green Energy War be different?

Like it or not, by the terms of some unwritten protocol governing the Green Energy War, no single piece of intelligence is deemed to hold more value than the expected long-term price of energy. It not only informs strategy, it defines the outer boundaries of what is considered possible given the virtually universal conviction that price signals cannot be defied indefinitely. Even the most willful of policymakers are forced to make their peace with price.

The thankless job of the electric utility supply planner is designed to attract the quantitative, the analytic, and the prudent -- not those with an ideological bent or propensity for heroics. Yes, politics constrains choices. The industry being what it is, there's a predictable tendency of planners to search for the "path of least resistance" -- an underpinning of the laws of physics which often finds adherents among regulated businesses.

The following open letter to Yakout Mansour, CEO of the California transmission grid manager, was written for the April 7, 2008 edition of California Energy Markets.

Hey, Yakout -- As a rule, former public officials should be denied access to the media because of their sworn duty to fade away. But when the editors of California Energy Markets solicited tenth birthday greetings for my second favorite non-profit public benefit corporation (your corporate sibling, the CalPX, dead these seven years, is still first in my heart), how could I refuse?

The extraordinary findings on energy productivity published recently by McKinsey & Company is a wartime anomaly. Not so much for its basic conclusion -- Green Energy Warriors have long recited an energy efficiency catechism. But the magnitude (roughly half the GHG abatement needed to reach 450 - 550 ppm) and sheer profitability (a 17% rate-of-return) of the portfolio of measures should be a shock-and-awe awakening in a political debate still mired in the rhetoric of economic deprivation.

As Americans have been painfully reminded several times over recent decades, the possession of and respect for sound intelligence are prerequisites of successful military campaigns. The Green Energy War is no exception, which makes a clear understanding of the recent McKinsey report on energy productivity all the more important.

The private sector routinely outsources its most perplexing analytic challenges to management consultants. In that extremely competitive profession, the global blue chip standard is widely considered to be McKinsey & Company. Policymakers caught up in the debate over what contribution to expect from energy efficiency in the Green Energy War should give careful consideration to a McKinsey report recently presented to 450 institutional investors, Wall Street leaders, and CEOs from around the world.

The California Air Resources Board, widely regarded as the most aggressive technology-forcing regulatory agency in the world, has made a shambles of its "zero emissions vehicle" program since first mandating in 1990 that 10 percent of all new cars be pollution free by 2003 (roughly 100 - 150 thousand vehicles per annum). This week, in the fifth revision to the requirement, it reduced that target to 7,500 over the three-year period 2012-2014.

The rhetorical fight over nuclear power continues to rage. It will retain a certain shadowboxing feel, at least in the US and EU, until markets or governments begin making the massive financial commitments necessary to construct new units.

The energy security front in the Green Energy War is broad and deep. Countries all over the world profess a desire to move away from oil -- some out of concern for the environment and climate change, many from a desire to sidestep the debilitating economics of petroleum dependence, most with growing apprehension about continued reliance on OPEC exporters.

The past several years have seen considerable, and wishful, attention paid to the role of so-called "enlightened" corporate leaders in pushing the U.S. federal government into a more activist stance on climate issues. Some of this has been calculated political strategy, a dry-eyed search by environmentalists for middle-of-the-road message carriers. More of it has been naive sentimentality, reinforced by massive advertising expenditures designed to boost company image.

The zeal of the renewable energy movement is one of the wild cards in the Green Energy War. Opinion surveys show exceptionally broad "do-it-now" support in many countries. The depth and commitment of such support, and its ability to knock down barriers of institutional inertia, will ultimately determine the pace and scope of any transition away from fossil fuels.

World War I saw an escalating, though not particularly effective, use of poison gas by the combatants. Because of the horrific effect on victims, more often wounded than killed, the Geneva Convention of 1925 banned the use of such weapons. Considerable opprobrium has attached to their deployment ever since.

In the Green Energy War, renewable energy is generally considered to be the ultimate weapon against whatever adversary is identified: energy security, climate change, escalating fossil fuel prices, etc. Significant disagreement exists about time frames, scalability, and costs, but a broad consensus exists among policymakers that promoting greater reliance on renewables is a desirable priority for government.

The second largest operator of nuclear power plants in the US, the New Orleans based company known as Entergy, is trying to secure regulatory approval to spin off five of its 10 nuclear plants into a separate, publicly traded company initially called SpinCo. This would create the first pure play nuclear company in the U.S. stock markets at a time of growing enthusiasm in some quarters over the role for nuclear on the Green Energy War's climate front.

Perhaps the most controversial question among climate activists worldwide is what role to assign nuclear power in the Green Energy War. The answer from the Labour Party government in the UK, with full support from the Tory opposition in Parliament: a very big one.

By almost universal consensus, improvements in energy efficiency represent a core strategy in the Green Energy War. Because price signals alone have not prompted efficiency improvements to a level policymakers consider economically rational, there also exists a broad consensus that a legitimate role for government is to correct this market failure and establish minimum efficiency standards for key energy-using appliances.

Nothing in the Green Energy War has stirred the hyenas of talk radio more than Big Government's move to override the marketplace's judgment about lightbulbs. The energy legislation signed into law by President Bush last December sets efficiency standards for lighting which will begin phasing out the incandescent bulb -- a technology largely unchanged since the 1880s -- in favor of compact fluorescents, halogens and LEDs.

Carbon capture and sequestration, the waste disposal technology underpinning the "clean coal" vision, is perceived by many as a strategic weapon in the Green Energy War's climate front -- if for no other reason than to accommodate the seemingly irrevocable commitment China and India have made to coal to fuel their economic development.

The presence of abundant deposits of coal in China, India, the United States -- and its general lower cost as a feedstock compared to other energy sources -- creates a presumption that, one way or another, this resource is likely to be used over time. Soldiers on the climate front of the Green Energy War are insistent that this only be done with full capture and sequestration of the associated carbon emissions, also known as CCS.

The most active front in the Green Energy War this past decade has been the international crescendo of alarm about climate change. The "Fourth Assessment Report" published by the IPCC in November, 2007 defines the time frame by which governmental actions should be evaluated. As summarized by DEFRA, the environmental agency of the UK national government, the relevant points are: