Strategists attempting to gauge the likely scale and scope of Green Energy War initiatives after the clamor of the current election cycle is past may gravitate to the lodestar of gasoline prices. Posted outside every service station in statutorily prescribed type-size, these context-less numerals are the primary navigational aids by which most Americans determine whether energy is a problem or not.

Pragmatists in the Green Energy War tend to consider natural gas a necessary transition fuel for electric generation. They are cognizant of the role quick start, fast ramp gas generation will play in integrating intermittent wind and solar generation until large scale, dispatchable demand response and storage technologies become commercial realities. They embrace the material environmental benefits offered by modern gas-fired plants when compared to coal, even if only a half-way step toward decarbonizing electricity. And they acknowledge the easier financeability of such plants in contrast to faith-based options like nuclear power.

Strategists in the Green Energy War are forced to make do with the analytic tools the early years of the 21st Century have made available to them. How to properly value future costs and future benefits has long been a conundrum for decisionmakers in all walks of life who are called upon to choose between alternatives in the present. The "time value of money" is a truism of economic orthodoxy, but ethicists have always questioned whether it gives proper attention to the interests of future generations.

With thousands of demonstrators expected to converge this weekend on Kingsnorth, a powerplant site in Kent where the German utility E.On hopes to build the first new coal units in Britain since 1974, a much larger battle is emerging in Parliament that may force-feed private sector embrace of carbon capture and sequestration.