I awoke from my dream in a puzzled state. A little man at a high desk was hard at work at the Environmental Protection Agency. Little yellow post-it notes kept flying into his left hand and without looking he piled them up into an ever-growing haystack of paper. All the while he kept pouring over a document, studiously editing it with pen in hand. While he didn’t look at the post-it notes, I could see that they had the names of states on them – New York, California, and others. What could this possibly be about?

And then I remembered. I had read the paper late the night before, and items which hit me sometimes make it into my dreams. This was about the fact that 10 states including New York and California has sued the EPA for declining to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants.

But how did those tiny yellow post-it notes figure in? That took a while.

A half-cup of coffee later, and I remembered. When post-it notes were brand new, I was working on design documents at NASA, and one of the challenges was including all the various needs, ideas, requirements, special cases, details and whatever into the designs. I carried around a pad of sticky notes, and wrote one item per note as it occurred to me, or as someone said something in a meeting, or I found it in a memo or an email, which was at that point a newfangled technomarvel provided to us by the ARPANET.

I would come back to my office and start distributing the notes. Stacks abounded on my desk, each assigned to a different design project, and it worked great. The current version of each design document rested on its stack, and I could pick a project up and work on it at any time.

Curious visitors would ask about the chaos, and I would tell them simply, “When the post-it notes are gone, the design is complete.” Looking at the cluttered field of yellow haystacks, left a few quite skeptical, which was the general feeling I had about my dream.

Was the EPA taking in all the tiny yellow notes and simply ignoring them?

It was time to remind myself that dreams defy logic, and re-visit the facts.

It seems that the EPA can take regulatory measures for anything that is a pollutant under of the Clean Air Act. The problem is that there is plenty of carbon dioxide in clean air. In fact, there is so much carbon dioxide everywhere, that it’s chief among contributors to global warming. And that’s why these states are asking for controls on power plants – except … except … there is no Global Warming Act. So, it is the interpretation of the EPA – under this administration – that it has no authority to regulate carbon dioxide.

And while no one argues that man-made carbon dioxide is a driver of global warming, there are no fewer than 135 coal-powered plants being planned today right here in the US. It’s a little hard to fathom that we’re planning to build dozens of new power plants which intend to burn coal, when we know all this.

So, OK, EPA, write yourself one big post-it note about the size of a gas-guzzling SUV. On it, in big letters, write “NO MORE CARBON DIOXIDE,” and stick it over the front door to your building.

You can take it down when you’ve completed the design and the policy is in place.

You see, there’s a two-part trick behind why those little post-it notes actually work is: It ain't a problem, unless we say it's a problem. And only problems get solved.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.