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Here’s President Obama in April 2009:

Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy.  The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.

As of yesterday, it looks like we’re gonna go with decline. Prosperity was over-rated anyhow. That’s what seems to be the message, anyway, from DC, where “pragmatism” from leaders has resulted in a complete capitulation on any subsantive climate and energy bill.

It’s fairly well-known that economic activity tends to track energy use. It follows that we can learn some interesting things about the economy by examining trends in energy use.

For example: the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) tracks electricity sales, and its data holds intriguing—and troubling—clues on the prospects for growth in the U.S. economy.

In the U.S., electricity sales grow at a steady 1-2 percent rate per year, with occasional troughs mapping to slowdowns in economic activity.

With the climate bill officially dead, there’s already a trickle of “who’s to blame and what they should have done differently” pieces. I expect it will soon become a flood.

Most of these pieces will focus in the wrong places. Take Lee Wasserman’s new op-ed, “Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill,” an instant classic of the genre. Wasserman doesn’t like the way Dems talked about the issue and he doesn’t like the policy framework they put forward, which is of course his right.

As global warming accelerates, the world will become not only hotter, flatter, and more crowded but also thirsty, according to a new study that finds 70 percent of counties in the United States may face climate change-related risks to their water supplies by 2050.

One-third of U.S. counties may find themselves at “high or extreme risk,” according to the report prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council by Tetra Tech, a California environmental consulting firm.

“It appears highly likely that climate change could have major impacts on the available precipitation and the sustainability of water withdrawals in future years under the business-as-usual scenario,” the study’s authors conclude.