Thomas Friedman loves coal, and Maureen Dowd hates the Iraq war.

All environmentalists have their favorite “green” energy source that they think will break our addiction to oil and slow down climate change. I’ve come out to Montana to see mine. It’s called coal.

Yes, yes, I know, you thought I was going to say corn ethanol or switch grass or soybean diesel. Well, one day they all might reach a scale that can get us off oil. But the cheap, available fuel that China, India and America all have in abundance today — and are all going to burn for the next decade — is coal. So unless we can burn coal in a cleaner way, you can kiss the climate goodbye — we’ll all be wearing bikinis and shorts in Manhattan in January.

When it comes to what it will take to “green” coal, there’s no more informed or intrepid tour guide than Montana’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer. The governor, a bulldozer of a man, met me in Billings in his little prop plane, we flew into a winter gale that tossed us around like salad pieces, and then we set down on a makeshift runway in Colstrip, on the edge of a coal strip mine. On the way back, after flying through another howling storm that caused me to dig my nails so deeply into the armrests I left my fingerprints in the leather, I thanked the pilots profusely. The governor simply bellowed, “I’m glad we had our best interns flying today!”

When it comes to cleaning up coal, though, Governor Schweitzer is dead serious.

“Here in Montana we make our living outside,” said the governor, an agronomist who got his start building farms in Saudi Arabia, “and when you do that, you know the climate is changing. We don’t get as much snow in the high country as we used to ... and the runoff starts sooner in the spring. ... The river I’ve been fishing over the last 50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years ago, and it is hard on our trout population. ... So when Exxon Mobil hires someone who calls himself a ‘scientist’ to claim this is not true, you don’t have to get The New York Times to know the guy is blowing smoke.”

But here’s what the governor also knows: Montana has one-third of all the coal deposits in America — 8 percent of all the coal in the world. Montana’s coal is roughly equivalent to 240 billion barrels of oil. “That’s enough to replace all our imported oil for 60 years,” he noted.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that because of global warming — fueled in part by carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning electricity plants — the only way we’ll be able to use all those coal reserves is if we can burn coal without emitting the CO2. Otherwise we’re cooked, literally.

So Governor Schweitzer’s crusade is to get the coal-burning industries to take the lead on this, in partnership with government. The governor recalled a recent conference of coal-dependent industries, held in Phoenix, at which he held up a lump of coal and warned: “You are the people who represent the companies who will decide whether I’m holding up the future of energy or the past. Take a look at all the other people sitting at your table. You know who you see? You see the last remaining people on the planet who don’t believe CO2 is a problem. ... The only way you will make this the energy of the future is to recognize C02 as a problem and that you have to be part of the solution.” And by the way, he added, “there is a lot of money in it for you guys. You can sell this technology all over the world.”

Governor Schweitzer has a plan for Washington: 1) Set a floor price for crude oil in the U.S. at $40 a barrel forever. That will tell Wall Street that if it invests in new, clean coal technologies — which can be run profitably at the equivalent of $40 a barrel — OPEC will never undercut them. 2) Set up a European-style cap and trade system rewarding companies that buy clean coal technologies and punishing those that don’t. 3) Have Washington co-invest in a dozen pilot gasification and liquefaction technologies — which already exist — for cleaning coal and sequestering the carbon dioxide. Then we’ll identify the best technologies quicker and move down the innovation curve. 4) Write the regulations now for how we will manage carbon dioxide that is removed from coal and stored underground.

As we talked, four smokestacks from the coal-fired electricity plant in Colstrip, which helps power Portland and Seattle, were belching CO2.

“For the last 100 years we built plants like this one,” the governor said. “It takes crushed coal, ignites it to heat water that produces steam, and that turns a turbine and produces electricity. ... You build that smoke stack real high so that nasty stuff goes to someone else’s backyard. Well, we’ve run out of backyards.”

And now Maureen Dowd, who has managed to write a column without being bitchy about Speaker Pelosi.

It isn’t really a romance turned sour, because it was never sweet.

The American military’s cocky heroes were supposed to sweep in and carry off a poor, grateful Iraq to security and bliss, like Richard Gere did Debra Winger in the finale of “An Officer and a Gentleman.” The strategy was: Love lift us up where we belong/Where the eagles cry/On a mountain high.

Didn’t happen. Yet the search goes on, in this country obsessed with hookups and breakups, for the right relationship metaphor to describe our deadly embrace of Iraq.

My colleague Tom Friedman wrote last week: “Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid. Then one day they say to each other, ‘Hey, let’s have a baby, that will bring us together.’ It never works. If the underlying union is not there, adding a baby won’t help.”

Juan Williams repeated Tom’s metaphor on Fox News, agreeing that “a bad relationship” cannot afford the “pressure” of a newborn.

One reporter who writes about the war told me he thinks of the American entrenchment in Iraq more like a marriage that’s run out of gas, but you decide to stay together because of the kids.

Bill Maher used a bawdier metaphor of a man who promises his date a glorious romp, doesn’t deliver, and then just refuses to admit it and get out.

Some women say that the Surge will not work because it’s like starting over with an old boyfriend: you think you’ve learned the pitfalls and can resume with more success — you can set benchmarks! — but instead you’re swiftly ensnared by the same old failures. And the most maddening romances, of course, are those in which you think you have the power, you should have the power, but somehow in the end, you don’t have the power.

Many Bush officials and lawmakers now talk about the Iraqis with impatience, as though they are deadbeat relatives who have got to stop putting the pinch on us for a billion a week and try harder, in the immortal words of Rummy, “to pull up their socks.”

They may still speak diplomatically, but in body language, Condoleezza Rice and her chosen new deputy, John Negroponte, radiate irritation with the Iraqis, as though they are the most irksome of cousins or in-laws who have long overstayed their welcome, or children who not only don’t thank you for presents but also leave the playroom a mess.

The favorite analogy of Rummy and others who pushed the war was parent-child. “If you never take the training wheels off a kid’s bicycle,” Paul Wolfowitz would say, “he’ll never learn to ride without them.”

But that is too Norman Rockwell for a scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.

At times, the American-Iraqi relationship seems so cursed that the most apt metaphor would be a fairy tale like “The Golden Goose” of the Brothers Grimm, in which a girl sees a bling bird that belongs to a despised boy and tries to pluck a feather for herself, but instead her hand gets stuck fast to the goose. Her sister comes along, thinking she can snatch a feather, but she gets stuck as soon as she
touches the first girl. Then there’s a Surge, when the third sister rushes to help but ends up stuck in a daisy chain of disaster.

With the Surge, as with the invasion of Iraq, W. is like the presumptuous date “who
reserves a hotel room and then asks you to the prom,” as my friend Dana Calvo put it.

Teddy Kennedy gave a speech at the National Press Club yesterday about his new legislation that would require Congressional approval before troop levels can be increased. Afterward, he was asked if he would try to block the escalation with an amendment to an upcoming Iraq spending request.

“The horse will be out of the barn by the time we get there,” Senator Kennedy replied. “The president makes his speech now. We’re going to get the appropriation request probably the end of January, early February.” He said it could take eight more weeks for Congress to act. “By that time, the troops will already be there,” he said. “And then we’ll be asked, are we going to deny the body armor to the young men and women over there?”

In other words, the president will ask us to the prom once he reserves the hotel room.