Too often the media treat topics of great national import as MacGuffins, the things that politicians are fighting over this week--though it never seems to matter what thing or what week. Our national storytellers never particularly care what the consequences of "it" are.

Case in point: Senators will return in two weeks from their summer recess and are expected to consider a climate-change bill similar to the one the House narrowly passed in June. The policy would gradually reduce U.S. carbon emissions by adding a price to polluting that commodifies its potential social cost. Judged by the steady ticker of news headlines this year--Wall Street bonuses! Health care! Climate change!--it would be reasonable to conclude that "carbon" is just another in a series of media MacGuffins. This is to our universal impoverishment.

Never mind the serious risks posed by climate change, and the difficulties we have in addressing them. Instead, think about this: What are the consequences of narrowly depicting "carbon" as "troublemaker," as the MacGuffin we chase to move the climate-change story forward?

There are two main consequences here. The first is that we have become blind to something much bigger, the greatest detective story of all time. It's not a tale of murder--not yet--but whatever the reverse of that is. Carbon is the story of life (itself!): what science over the past couple of centuries has revealed about it.

About 20 percent of you is carbon. About 80 percent of your DNA is carbon. Life on Earth is a great story, even though we're uncertain how it begins and ends. The carbon atom, the most "sociable" of the elements, is the fastest way to learn the most about everything larger than a nucleus and smaller than a planet.