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You are at a formal dinner party. The guests are in evening wear, the food and wine are of the best ... and there is a live elephant in the room.

Everyone knows that there should not be elephants at dinner parties but is so shamed at its presence — and so polite — that no one even mentions that it is here. People are like that; we will not acknowledge something right in front of us if we do not think that it should exist.

It is a very human thing to do: to ignore reality which contradicts one's own view of the world. But this very human thing makes it almost impossible to solve a problem which contains the "elephant" because one begins to solve the problem with a false view of the world.

• The elephant in the room of energy production is that every known form of producing energy also produces pollution. Yes, this pollution varies greatly in type and amount — some forms of generation are definitely cleaner than others. But since each favorite form of energy generation produces pollution, any new generating plant will hurt someone. That someone will object, the plant will not be built, and we remain with the same types of generating plants we have had for the last 30 years.

A great example is the wind-power plant proposed for off-shore Cape Cod. The wealthy residents object because the turbines would spoil the ocean views of their expensive beachfront homes — which is, to them, one type of pollution.

• The elephant in the room of health care is every given amount of health care has a cost. By "cost" I mean the true amount of resources needed for that given amount of health care, not the price that any one person or agency has to pay. No government-run health system, no run-for-profit system, no single-payer insurance system can change this. The Canadian and European health-care systems will crash even sooner than ours — their financial costs keep going up due to the real costs of providing care, but they are so proud that their systems provide health care for everyone that they ration the amount of health care they provide as their only real method of holding down costs. And rationing can only go so far.

• The small elephant in the room of global warming is that, although it is an article of faith (and I mean this literally) to many people that President George Bush rejected the Kyoto Accords — which bound the industrialized nations to reduce their pollution — Bush in fact had no power to accept or reject the accords. They were rejected by the Senate under President Bill Clinton. Since our Constitution requires that the Senate "consent" to any treaty, its rejection meant that no president could accept the accords.

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