I was so busy gagging on the crap the coal industry was saying in their ad I didn't connect all the dots.  

Any word on who's sponsoring this debate?

I looked around but couldn't find the answer of who's sponsoring tonight's debate. I guess we'll find out in the first commercial break!

mistakes in their latest ad campaign.  I had pity on them, poor souls, and cleaned up their graphic so it is now more accurate.  This one is from a billboard in Iowa.

WRONG:

MORE ACCURATE:

The point regarding spopnsoring debates is very well taken. I often wonder if we would ever see a published list published formally in the newspapers and not online regarding such things as well as campaign contributors as a percentage of industry. It is no wonder nothing gets done on the environment or regulation when industries like healthcare, insurance, oil and energy groups manipulate what Virginian Woodrow Wilson warned ninety years ago:
The corruption model of the Committee System in Washington. As long as these groups are allowed the level of access , either in sponsoring debates or lobbying committees for agendas the cause of real America will be underserved. Wilson knew this back then and it is even worse today regardless of whether its the coal companies, power, insurance, lawyers, auto ot whomever influencing policy.
MY only pause here in Virginia is what is right around the corner in the next wave. We have seen tobacco, a former bumper economy staple to the Commonwealth all but disappear, coal now under fire which is another Virginia resource could potentially go next in the coming decades through regulation on carbon (remember the Clean Air Act in the 80's cost Virginia almost one third of its coal capabilities as plants shut down and loss of jobs since then has impacted parts of Virginia ever since with very slow new economic replacement activity inthose areas), there has been moves gainst the fisherman in the Bay and I am just concerned as to what area next may come under attack here in the Commonwealth. I would like to see these things be improved, upgraded to lesson the environmental impacts but not do away with them altogether.  

I hope the candidates go off script and address it themselves.  

This is nothing short of a scandal.

... have been trying to slip it into their answers about other questions as best they can. But when they only have a few seconds to answer each question as it is, it's hard to get to anything the moderators don't want to talk about.

You want to beat the Coal Industry, Dominion, Exxon Mobil, the legion of corporate lawyers and lobbyists they employ, you need a mass movement.  It needs to move beyond the small crowd of affluent, educated whites that normally show up for these things.  A march on the state capital by a million Virginians or a couple of 100,000s would be impressive.  Or we could have a self-induced black-out, we could flip the breakers on everything except the gas furnace for a night.  I don't know if we could shut down the street lights, but that would be pretty awesome.  One night where we could eliminate light pollution and see the stars.  And, of course, send Dominion a very big message.  All of Dominion's service territory dark for one night.  That would be awesome.  

It doesn't seem like these other things are working.

You've identified a fundamental problem with the environmental movement, that it hasn't broken out from a small niche to a point where large percentages of Americans name "the environment" as a top priority (more like 1% or 2% do).  See Shellenberger and Nordhaus for instance:

If environmentalists and progressives are to seize the moment offered by the collapse of the Bush presidency, they must break from the politics of limits, and grapple with some inconvenient truths of their own. The old pollution and conservation paradigms have failed. The nations that ratified the Kyoto protocol have seen their greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down. And tropical rain forest deforestation has accelerated.

What the new ecological crises demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands not pollution control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union--those breakthroughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future.

The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good.

This situation has to change, but how?!?  The fate of Chap's Clean Energy Future Act this year is a case in point -- if that wasn't a no-brainer, I don't know what would qualify.