Photo:refractionless, Creative Commons, Flickr

Welcome to April.

On Sunday night, 3/30, Al Gore announced his new $300 million public service ad campaign on "60 Minutes." The hopefulness of the moment was undercut by the Toyota (TM – $102.90) dealer ad that preceded the segment.

The Toyota spot featured good deals on the Sequoia and the FJ Cruiser. The existence of the FJ Cruiser, in particular, can tell you more about the entire global warming conundrum than Al Gore can, because what’s interesting about the FJ — a toy S.U.V. gas guzzler that gets 16-18 mpg — is that it was designed by Toyota years after the Prius.

The Toyota spot, the types of vehicles on sale, and Gore’s new strategy, all combine to underline a theme: not much is happening, not much progress is made.

This is like a dream where your feet are stuck in mud.

Photo:sreejibabu, Creative Commons, Flickr

Toyota turns out to be a fascinating case in corporate responsibility. As described in an article by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, even the forward thinking Prius was the result of a misunderstanding.

In the mid-90’s, the Clinton administration and Detroit agreed on a show project called "A Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles," designed to make very efficient, high mileage cars with new technology. Of course, it was a fake program that went nowhere (just like the one before, from Bush 41, and the one after, featuring the ‘hydrogen car,’ from the younger Bush).

The thing is, Japanese manufacturers were shut out of the Detroit-centered "Partnership," and they actually took it seriously — so they designed and built the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, just to keep up.

This explains why the subsequent slump back into FJ and Sequoia-land was so easy for Toyota, and why the environmental halo over the Toyota brand has perhaps dimmed a bit. More puzzling is trying to figure out how long Gore can tell people to change their light bulbs, and never mention their S.U.V.’s.

Oddly, the prize from his Climate Alliance for the best homemade public service ad was a Toyota S.U.V.

Getting dizzy from thinking about this, I decided there must be simpler imaginary steps even than the "Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles," or the Animal Farm-like slogan, "We Are Succeeding."

Climate is a global issue and it will soon become a kitchen table issue. Someone is going to have to explain it again, in increasingly practical terms. (“An Inconvenient Truth” seems to have hit its limit of media persuasion.)

So I came up with three aspirational and fictional ideas that are (relatively) cheap, that would make concrete environmental gains, that could be accomplished almost instantaneously by motivated people in positions of power (by phone calls, in two cases), and that would immediately set an agenda for the next election.

A skeptic might find my ideas fanciful, but each offers the chance for the participants to gain status. And in America, a chance to gain status should never be scoffed at:

1. The University Consortium
2. Conde Nast Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is
3. Bill Clinton Calls Jay-Z