The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

If you’re in that top 1%, life is grand….

They back up this statement with 15 charts with titles like

The last two decades were great… except for American workers

Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years

Poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class

Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap

None of this is new, but it’s still pretty entertaining to see a business magazine laying it out in stark, nicely designed graphs. Maybe something to e-mail to your cranky Republican uncle?

The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. Any scheme cobbled together in Copenhagen for slowing—forget reversing—the growth of greenhouse gases will be way too little, way too late. In the apt jargon of industry, a hotter planet is already “baked in.”

But fear not — technology will save us!

Coastal communities, for example, will survive not because the world will somehow unite to stop sea levels from rising (it won’t). They’ll survive because they’ll learn to adapt—much as the Dutch have done since the Middle Ages.

I’ve got one word for you, Spencer: Katrina.

I don’t know how anyone could see how our country abandoned our poor brothers and sisters during & after Katrina and think technology will save us. Maybe it’s the “us” where Spencer is having trouble opening his imagination; guys like him don’t worry that our government would abandon them.

But it wasn’t just poor folks of color our country abandoned. Here’s how well we’ve “adapted” to Katrina’s lessons:

Three days before the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), a coalition of 17 advocacy groups today urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to honor President Obama’s priority in his budget and campaign “to restore nature’s barriers – the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.”…

The severity of Katrina’s damage in Louisiana was caused, in part, by the fact that the state has lost 1/3 of its original wetlands – about 2,000 square miles — an area larger than Delaware.

“Scientists agree that these lost wetlands could have helped reduce Katrina’s storm surge,” said Charles Allen, assistant director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. “Wetlands are ‘horizontal levees’ that in many cases are more economical and effective at damage prevention than man-made vertical levees because they absorb storm energy, slow incoming waves, wind, and surge waters. It is widely recognized that we urgently need to restore these wetlands and coastal forests to prevent similar or worse storm damage in the future.”

Despite these facts, four years after Katrina, Congress has been unable to fund major coastal restoration projects it authorized in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not completed the projects’ design and engineering.

In the face of these facts, how can Spencer write:

Ditto the other supposed horsemen of the climate apocalypse. Drought? Check out Perth, on the edge of the Great Australian Desert, where more than a million people keep hydrated with seawater that’s been desalinated by wind power.

Who does he think is going to pay for building a system like this for Africa?

Spencer isn’t completely clueless. At one point he hints at the bigger issue:

But won’t the transition to a warmer world be painful? The honest answer is that we don’t know. It depends on the resources we can bring to bear, technological and otherwise.

But that’s about it.

Look, I love Wired as much as the next geek. But it’s stunning that after decades of political deadlock over stopping global warming, Wired assumes politics will disappear when we try to cope with global warming’s aftermath.

Spencer’s article appeared in the same issue as Wired’s holiday gift guide; here’s my recommendation for Spencer.

For starters, it’s hard to help folks in low income communities of color get access to green jobs when there aren’t many green jobs.

While these efforts are promising, by and large, most cities report that “green jobs” remain a concept — a target more than a reality. Some initial programs stalled, after cities discovered they were training workers for jobs that don’t yet exist. In Memphis, Tenn., officials were about to start adding solar installation training to a successful prisoner reentry program, which offers job training to low-level offenders. In the course of researching the program, however, they discovered that almost no one was actually purchasing solar systems in the city, leading them to focus instead on attracting solar companies before they start the job training program.

Ironically, Obama’s stimulus plan gives out a ton of cash for creating green jobs — a lot more than enviros had fought for the past. But, like the stimulus plan more generally, it’s nowhere near the amount of money we need to spend.

Even where green jobs exist, cities will have to change their strategy for economic development to fit these new green opportunities.

To attract jobs, traditionally, cities have focused on traditional business incentive packages, which favor largescale corporations, luring them to come or stay with promises of lower taxes, reduced utilities and developed infrastructure. That model may work for a large wind turbine manufacturer, but the green jobs sector in any given city is much more likely to rely upon dozens of smaller companies, such as contractors who do rehab work in homes or who install solar panels. The challenge for cities will be to adapt their existing strategies to the smallscale, dynamic green jobs sector.

The shift towards green jobs will also demand that cities rework traditional workforce development. This is a system that is typically uncoordinated and disconnected from local employers. Understanding the demand side will entail tremendous effort as these new green skills are just now being deciphered. Green jobs, like many other parts of the economy, demand different types of workers, from skilled carpenters and electricians to landscapers and mechanics, each with their own existing experience, and unique needs for new skills. And the potential employer will not just be a hospital chain or a school system but dozens or even hundreds of small shops and firms.

Another issue that makes Green For All tricky to pull off is that success, particularly smart growth-friendly “transit-oriented development” can ” propel gentrification, leading to skyrocketing rents in newly hip neighborhoods.” Cities are trying several strategies to avoid this problem.

In the Twin Cities, advocates, policymakers and funders are developing plans to ensure that neighborhoods along the corridor stay affordable for current residents. One idea they’re exploring is creating a land trust to preemptively buy up land around the corridor so it is secured for future affordable housing development. Similar efforts are underway in various neighborhoods in the Bay Area…. Advocates and funders elsewhere are exploring less costly strategies, including zoning rules, community benefit agreements, tax increment financing and other means to ensure that transit-oriented development achieves its full potential to boost neighborhoods while not ignoring the fates of its poorer residents.

So yes, it isn’t easy. But that’s no excuse for not trying. It’s not like stopping global warming is easy either.

And if cities — and enviros — don’t work hard to ensure that everybody benefits it’ll make stopping global warming all that much harder. The single biggest argument against seriously stepping it up to stopping global warming is that too many folks will lose their jobs or will be financially crippled by the cost of stopping global warming. If you want to counter this argument, the best way is to show that you’re serious about making life better for everybody.

four out of five cities report that sustainability is among their top five priorities as articulated by the mayor. Over 75 percent of cities have, or will soon have, detailed plans on how they will reduce greenhouse gasses; nearly all are calling for an emissions cut of between 10 and 20 percent in the next five to 10 years

But there’s a big gap in most plans: the needs of low income communities of color.

relatively few cities’ programs are incorporating working families and poor people into their sustainability plans. For example, new transit programs like new rail lines or bike paths tend to move residents of higher-income neighborhoods to the urban core, rather than offering service to neglected neighborhoods. And few city officials we surveyed on green jobs talked about ensuring that links are made between new green-collar job opportunities and the under- and unemployed.

As a result, cities are going to miss a once in a generation opportunity to actually do something about inner-city poverty — and to do it in a way that helps save the planet.

it is precisely in low-income areas that sustainability plans can have the most dramatic impacts: The housing stock is the least energy efficient, and the job seekers have the skills and motivation to plug into the expected growth in construction and retrofit jobs.

What’s particularly galling about the redlining by most city green plans is that, as the report points out, there are lots of ways cities can go green that help everybody. If you build better mass transit, middle-class folk can drive less and inner-city poor folk who don’t have cars now have a shot at jobs that they otherwise couldn’t take.

It would be a particularly awful irony if America threw away its best chance chance to rebuild low-income communities of color right after it elected its first black president.