Sometimes I think the Wall Street Journal editors are phoning it in. In a piece titled, "The Environmental Motor Company: Making Detroit a subsidiary of the Sierra Club," the Journal complained about those horrible Democrats in Congress that want to tie the $25 billion in loans to Detroit to "green retooling." I guess pushing U.S. automakers to make cars that get much higher gas mileage, and thus will sell better, is a bad idea.

The Journal also makes the ludicrous statement that the real problem for Detroit has been those awful fleet fuel-efficiency standards (the CAFE rules) "that force the companies to make cars domestically that are unprofitable." To add to the absurdity... the same day, in the same op-ed section, GM's CEO Rick Wagoner explains "why GM deserves support" and talks about the super-fuel-efficient cars GM will make with the loan. So even GM is saying it needs to make different cars.

We're seeing an amazing act of willful ignorance here. The knee-jerk response in some circles seems to be that these poor companies were just burdened by bad regulations (not to mention big bad labor). This crazy idea comes on top of the general fiction -- which Wagoner is pitching -- that Detroit is reeling because of the credit crunch and the economic downturn. But the proof on this one is in the data.

The U.S. automakers were having very serious problems months before the financial meltdown.

Let's look at May '08 sales in the United States, when high energy prices forced Detroit's hand. While the Fall has been the real Armageddon for U.S. auto sales, the spring year-over-year comparisons told a scary story. The overall car market was down 11%. But Ford was down 16%, Chrysler down 25% and GM down 28% (which in retrospect looks pretty good compared to GM's nauseating 45% drop year-over-year in October). But how did the other guys do in May? Toyota was also down after making some mistakes and trying to sell some big vehicles also, but only dropped 4%. Nissan was up 8% and Honda sales were up an astonishing 16%. Let's repeat that: Honda sold more cars this spring than the year before. If you look at total sales through October, the difference between U.S. and Japanese performance isn't quite as bad (only Suburu is up for the year). But the companies that sell smaller, more energy-efficient cars are doing ok.

My favorite media moment on this topic came on one of the 24-hour news stations yesterday. While covering the Congressional hearings with auto CEOs, one story explained that U.S. automakers spend an extra $1500 on each car (vs. competitors) to pay for pension and health care obligations. To be sure, these costs don't help Detroit. But the news anchor went on to say something like, "so Detroit is struggling because of that $1500...and the fact that it's known for making low-quality cars." Oh, just that little problem of making bad products.

The business guru Jim Collins, in his fantastic book Good to Great, focused on the importance of "Facing the Brutal Facts." Pretending that evil regulations are the primary cause of Detroit's fall does not help our automakers. Acknowledging that they were making the wrong cars at the wrong time is at least admitting we have a problem (in whatever 12 or 200 steps Detroit needs to heal).

The predicament that Detroit has found itself in is an American business tragedy. Let's not make it worse by lying to ourselves.

This post first appeared on Huffington Post.

In a remarkably bold regulatory move, the Obama administration is setting new, aggressive fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. The new goal will be 39 miles per gallon by a 2016 (which is around the corner in car model development time). This is big environmental news this week and for good reason. But as important wide-reaching as this kind of rule is, it seems like only half a solution.

The arguments against the ruling are of course being vociferously proclaimed from the usual suspects. But it's not easy to write them all off. It will cost more to make the technological changes, all at a time that the U.S. automakers are on life support. I tend to think the claims of expense from new standards that force innovation are generally overstated by alot...but it won't be costless to producers. The total cost of ownership to customers should go down with these kinds of fuel efficiency improvements, but that only matters if they buy the cars. And this brings us to the real problem -- what's the incentive for consumers. This concern, voiced by the industry and others, is far harder to dismiss. Unless gas is over $4/gallon, or we pay consumers to buy greener cars, why will they buy these new vehicles?

I've wondered since the car bailout packages why we didn't just take that money and commit to buying greener vehicles. GM wants $20 billion -- ok, we'll put $20,000 towards 1 million Chevy Volts as fast as you can make them. The government could buy them for government vehicles (imagine every FBI agent with a Volt -- if the bad guys saw one, I guess they'd know an agent was coming, but then again, they wouldn't hear it coming).

Remarkably, the industry is not responding quite as negatively as you'd think to all of this. they're happy not to face California's rules -- and then 49 other state regs. One national standard is preferable. And a very optimistic piece in the Wall Street Journal says "Car Makers Expect to Hit Fuel Goals."

But will they really hit the goals without the demand side pushing for it? It seems like a good time to have an even tougher conversation about what we can do to help consumers buy green. We have a remarkable consensus brewing that we need to move off of fossil fuels. The report from retired generals and admirals that just came out in the last few days was astonishing. As BusinessWeek reported, these military leaders believe fossil fuel, if it included the costs of transport and security, would run the army (and all of us) hundreds of dollars a gallon. Only 10% of the oil supporting the troops is actually moving the vehicles -- the other 90% went to "other vehicles delivering and protecting fuel and forces." As the report sums up, "This is the antithesis of efficiency." In a telling passage, the article reported:

"Our energy posture is not sustainable. It can be exploited by those who want to do us harm," retired Air Force Lieutenant General Larry Farrell, a co-author of the report, said in an interview. Finding a suitable alternative fuel and scaling it up to the size of the U.S. economy "is a 30-year project," Farrell said. "We've got to get started now."

It seems that starting with cars and trucks now would be a good idea then -- at the very least, maybe it frees up fuels for uses that are harder to avoid like flight and military. But we won't get there if people don't buy the cars. And why would they at $2 a gallon? With even the military saying we need some massive shifts, can we actually talk seriously now about giant subsidies to car buyers or, better yet, a tax on gas that puts a $4 floor on the price? Without those demand-side measures, we have only half a solution.

[This first appeared on Huffington Post]

Happy New Year all (ok, I'm a bit delayed, but I entered the new year and promptly got really sick -- lost over a week in there). So let's start fresh now!

Anyway, I took a bit of time at the end of 2009 and early 2010, with a couple weeks' perspective, to think about the stories that really grabbed me in 2009. The top 10 is below, but see my brief write-ups and logic on each at my e-letter site here.

1) Copenhagen fails…or does it?
2) The debate over climate science rages on (in the U.S. at least)
3) The EPA steps in
4) Wal-Mart keeps the pressure up (and saves the rainforest?)
5) Domino's employees deliver a new kind of openness.
6) IBM starts building a "smarter planet"
7) GM goes bankrupt
8) Some of our biggest capitalists get serious about carbon
9) China emerges as a green tech leader…and the world's biggest emitter
10) The bottom of the pyramid becomes a source of innovation

And the bonus, theater of the absurd, wacky story...
10 1/2) Forbes names Exxon green company of the year

It's been a couple months since the global climate negotiations in Copenhagen. Whether you're a fan of a global cap on carbon emissions or not, it's important to think about what COP15's failure means (that a global agreement is going to be unlikely in the near term) and what it doesn't mean for business (that companies will be off the hook for tackling carbon emissions).

The climate negotiations brought together committed activists and world leaders, but led almost nowhere; instead, the gathering only highlighted and revealed some major structural hurdles getting in the way of a multinational agreement.

So it might seem that near-term regulatory or policy pressure on companies is unlikely. But actually there are some significant sub-national initiatives affecting business as usual that every company should know about. The pressure to measure, be transparent about, and reduce carbon is still on.

First, even without a global carbon trading system, other major multinational cap-and-trade systems are in place or in the works, including the EU's trading program, which has already been running for a few years. In North America, three separate carbon trading programs are in the process of setting regional caps covering states that include half the U.S. population (and provinces with three-quarters of Canada's). And city-level initiatives like the Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement are driving new local rules and fomenting competition among municipalities to cut emissions.

Second, within the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency is not sitting idly by either. The series of climate-related rules that the powerful EPA has announced in the last year began with the National Climate Reporting Plan, which forces the largest 10,000 facilities in the country to measure and report their carbon emissions. This new system has much in common with the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a very public, and mandatory, database of toxic pollution by facility mandated by the federal government in the 1980s. TRI raised awareness within companies about their own footprints and drove aggressive efforts to reduce toxic pollution (along with cost and risk) that continue to this day. The same awakening about the carbon pollution companies cause -- and the financial costs of this form of waste -- even without an agreement from Copenhagen..

Going well beyond the regulated transparency of the reporting plan, the EPA recently declared greenhouse gases a public health threat. After a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that basically said CO2 could be regulated, the EPA's "endangerment finding" was no surprise. What's still unknown is what it will mean for business.

So far, virtually all the action -- from the regional trading schemes to new EPA rules -- has been aimed mainly at utilities and the biggest factories. What does all this activity mean for the average company?

The caps and efforts to reduce utility emissions could result in higher energy prices. Any business that, well, uses electricity will be affected. And the EPA's intentions for the longer term, while up in the air, are getting clearer. There is almost no chance that forced transparency for the big guys is the end of what the EPA will do. One glimmer of what will come: rules newly proposed in 2009 (in conjunction with the Department of Transportation) to reduce emissions from light-duty vehicles.

The bottom line is that business must still plan for rising restrictions on greenhouse gases by legislative means or by regulation. Despite the confounded state of international climate policy negotiations, companies will continue to face new mandates to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions.

[This post originally appeared on Harvard Business Review]