New Orleans' post-storm predicament keeps getting stickier. The latest sticking point, as detailed in this article, is a fight over a new landfill the city opened two weeks ago near a wildlife refuge on the town's swampy eastern outskirts. City officials plan to use the site to inter about 2.6 million of the estimated 7.2 million tons of Katrina debris still remaining to be bulldozed and carted off.

Area environmentalists and a group of about 1,000 Vietnamese-American families that live near the site oppose the plan and have vowed to fight it tooth and nail. They say the landfill will endanger their water supply because it won't be adequately lined and because some of the material disposed of in it will be hazardous.

And while this latest landfill hot-potato gets batted around, along with all the others, several large deserted swaths of the city sit moldering and crumbling. New Orleans: The Town That Time Forgot.

Riddle: Which will happen first: the completion of New Orleans' rebuilding; the end of the war in Iraq; or the capture of Osama bin Laden?

Answer: Hell freezing over.

Independence Day: Another item I could have added to the above list of hoped-for events that seem to be moving farther away as time passes rather than closer is America's need to become energy-independent. Imagine how many problems could be solved by such a circumstance coming to pass -- environmental, geopolitical, economic, you name it.

But yes, of course: Easier said than done. Pie in the sky.

Funny thing, though. A lot of Americans said those same things when, 45 years ago, President Kennedy challenged the nation to send men to the moon and bring them back safely -- and to do it in eight years' time.

Achieving energy independence is a matter of leadership, of vision and nerve. And while it is important to ensure that we have adequate oil supplies and access to keep the country and the economy chugging along in the here and now -- as Vice President Cheney did when he visited our new special friend, suddenly oil-rich Kazakhstan, last week -- that type of action strictly addresses the short- and medium-term.

The obvious long-term solution -- forgive the cliché -- is the paradigm shift we need to make to noncarbon, nonpetroleum-based energy sources. And as this op-ed piece from yesterday's New York Times persuasively argues, while we are starting to move in that direction, the steps we're taking are tentative and insufficient.

Energy independence. Vision, nerve and leadership are sorely needed. This is our moonshot.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.