Ellington

President Barack Obama's administration recently set tough emission standards for electric utility companies that still rely heavily on burning carbon-heavy fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal.

Generally, utilities accept that fossil-fuel power will become an increasingly smaller part of our electricity infrastructure, but many utilities still cling to the idea that coal remains the most sensible option for generating electric power in the medium term.

To boot, coal and other powerful interests have seen to it that elected officials echo that coal meme. Probably not coincidentally, the biggest player on the congressional scene is Southern Co., which is building a coal plant in Kemper County under the auspices of its subsidiary, Mississippi Power Co. The plant has been mired in controversy, cost overruns and delays for close to three years.

Kemper IGCC, as it's known, is supposedly a shining example of so-called clean-coal technology. It is engineered to run on lignite coal, which is common in Mississippi but of such poor quality that a commercially untested technology had to be designed to burn the stuff. Environmentalists have criticized the power plant as costly, dirty and unnecessary. They're probably right, but a few important ideas have been absent from the debate over Kemper IGCC and coal.

To be sure, tragedies such as the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia in 2010 and the BP Gulf oil disaster of the same year make Big Coal and Big Oil easy targets for our national disdain.

It's also easy, if not apt, to blame the government for not investing enough in renewable alternatives to dirty fuels. Case in point: Funding for the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., shrunk to $352 million in fiscal year 2012 from an all-time high (but still relatively paltry) $536.5 million in 2010.

But it's also high time for us to look inward. The truth is, Americans use a lot of electricity powering our laptops, tablets, mobile phones and other toys. Specifically, the U.S. ranks second only to Canada in daily kilowatt-hours—the unit of measurement that electric utilities use to bill customers—consumed per capita.

Electric power consumption in the United States (the third largest overall electricity user in the world) and emerging economies of China and India (the world's No. 1 and No. 2 electricity users) has resulted in global climate change.

Yes, the government should do more to slow climate change. Yes, we should urge our representatives to invest in renewable energy.

In the meantime, we should each think about the power we individually use and overuse: electricity. We are the first line of defense, and we can't expect power companies and politicians to change their behavior until we're willing to change our own.