OK, so now we have the guy we wanted in the White House. So what is the outlook for clean tech?

Martin Lamonica, green-tech writer at CNet, surveys the landscape. I am always informed by Martin's writing.

[added] Greenbiz.com covers some of the same ground, but also looks at how voters reacted to clean-energy referenda nationwide.

Dave Beard, major domo at boston.com who maintains an interest in green matters, turned to Ian Bowles, Mass. secretary for energy and the environment, for five suggestions to the president-elect. Good idea, and good ideas. Check them out here.

Eric Taub of the Times has a story this morning saying that the coming age of LED lights is just about here, but I don't know if he hit it just right.

The story touches the usual points about LEDs — very expensive, but lasts longer, has no mercury, and can generate any color — but on the question of white-light intensity, he devotes no more than an aside: "L.E.D. bulbs, with their brighter light and longer life, have already replaced..."

Three months ago, at a Northeast Sustainable Energy Association public forum in Boston, green PR guru Solitaire Townsend said the movement to overcome climate change needs to tell its equivalent of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, rather than what it’s has been doing, which she called, “I Have a Nightmare.”

Townsend has a good point. Environmentalists have been militating for decades for drastic changes from businesses and consumers, and for most of that time, all it really gained us was a reputation as do-gooder killjoys. Frickin’ treehuggers.

Even among those of us who want to be part of the solution to global climate change, there is a lot of confusion on how to get there. Buy a Prius? Put a solar cell on the roof? Grow your own vegetables? All helpful ideas, but is any of those the best way to proceed?

The problem, of course, is that there is no one right answer. It's true that if you take one of those actions, you'll likely be helping. But we're on a deadline here: The level considered safe is 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we're already at 385 and growing by 2 ppm a year.

I can't cite a source, but I remember "learning" when I was a kid that an early-20th-century Farmer's Almanac predicted that soon enough, the streets would be made impassable by all the horseshit from all the horse-drawn carriages. What the writer didn't envision, of course, that an unseen development would change the course of everything.

There is just an amazingly pervasive gloom at the show, not in feeling, but in expression of the problems the planet is facing.

This morning, Alex Wilson of BuildingGreen Inc., a founder and early supporter of NESEA, intended to give a speech that covered the "challenges" and then gave 10 categories of solutions, but then had to rush through the second half because the governor arrived. So he ended up spending more than 30 minutes, easily, on the many areas in which, it seems, we're just screwed, any minute.

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.

Switching to lower-energy-use CFL lightbulbs and driving a hybrid car are good responses to the planet's climate crisis, says Lester Brown, the internationally recognized climate-change advocate, but the most important step a concerned citizen can take is to become politically active, he told a near capacity crowd at Cary Hall in Lexington Sunday night.

"Saving civilization is not a spectator sport," he said near the end of his hour-plus address, using the sort of sweeping language that characterized his remarks.