This morning, Mayor Mike McGinn and Climate Solutions Policy Director KC Golden testified in the US House of Representatives’ Energy and Power Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce on the local impacts of the coal port terminal proposals to expand coal exports to China (a topic I cover extensively over here). Meanwhile, the Bellingham Herald reports this huge setback for environmentalists and politicians, like McGinn, who oppose coal ports in Washington and Oregon:

WASHINGTON - The U.S Army Corps of Engineers will not review the broader climate-change impacts of proposed coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest, an agency official told Congress on Tuesday, June 18.

The much-anticipated decision is a significant victory for the supporters of three coal terminals in Washington and Oregon - including Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point - and a setback for environmentalists and state and local officials who oppose the projects.

... Moyer added that the Corps would not consider the impact of the transportation of coal by rail from mines to the ports on waterways and air quality - something that the governors of Washington and Oregon, environmental groups and Indian tribes had demanded.

Well, fuck.

Thanks to Slog tipper Jeff.

What unchecked colony collapse would look like in the supermarket.

I'm beginning to believe that the gears for the kind of massive social change that's needed to solve the current environmental crisis might not exist in the US but in another country...

The Census Bureau released updated statistics this morning on new single-family housing completed within the past year, a snapshot of the latest demand for fireplaces (in 43 percent of new homes), fourth bedrooms (41 percent) and three-car garages (19 percent) in the housing construction market," reports Emily Badger.

After a celebrated decline in the average square footage of new single-family homes in the United States, the latest data suggests "that we're building big again," she notes. "The average single-family house completed in 2012 was 2,505 square feet in size, just shy of the all-time high. In fact, a larger share of those homes had a fourth bedroom than at any time since the Census started counting."

The market-based humanism of American democracy can absorb things like the rights of blacks, women, and homosexuals (all of whom are after all consumers), but it can't democratize rising sea levels or desertification or the fate of polar bears. That kind of absorption requires a truly universal politics, a post-human politics. Because the US is proving to lack the means to expand its politics beyond democracy or even expand the vocabulary of its democracy, we may have to look to societies that can. It's easy to laugh at a country like Boliva for including Mother Earth in its Law of the Rights, but in terms of the current crisis, which is the only real crisis (the dominant crisis, The Great Recession, is only cultural), there's more reality in that kind of political language than what you will find in the four major political institutions of our great democracy. (The fourth is the Federal Reserve, if you were wondering.)

Waste does not exist in the biosphere but only in the limited view of things that exist in the biosphere...

Napster founder Sean Parker, who it must be said looks nothing like Justin Timberlake, wanted to get married in an old-growth redwood grove. He spent ten million dollars on the wedding, and the California Coastal Commission says he spent that money like a huge dotcom asshole:

The Parker Respondents proceeded to perform unauthorized development activities within the campground. Existing roads and campsites were graded and contoured to create the appearance of ruins. Stone gateways and walls were constructed. Staircases were crafted around existing habitat and redwood trees. An artificial pond was dug and installed. A stone bridge over the pond was constructed. Several elevated platforms were created, some adjacent to Post Creek (Exhibit 9). Over 100 potted trees and plants were partially planted within the existing road beds and campsites, and lighting was installed in the redwood forest. In addition to the unpermitted development, other items to facilitate the event have also been placed on the site including tents and generators.

The Atlantic goes into further detail about the shitty things that were done in the name of Parker's love. It really does feel like the late 1990s all over again.

Because political power at a national level is tied up with the overrepresented rural vote, it is up to cities to save the world...

Global CO2 levels just passed 400ppm for the first time! #Walkable Cities could cut CO2 by up to 36%gu.com/p/3fmv2 #ClimateChange
— Walkonomics (@Walkonomics) May 13, 2013

At the end of the day, the thing that makes this building very green is not so much its materials, its special fixtures, fancy glass, computer system, water system, solar panels...

Capitalism all around...

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (David Owen)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 2280-84 | Added on Sunday, May 19, 2013, 03:59 PM

In 2006, a researcher at the University of Montana, in a study based on satellite data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, determined that the nation’s largest irrigated crop is cultivated grass, which covers more than 32 million acres in the continental United States. (The second largest irrigated crop, at roughly 10 million acres, is corn.) Homeowners spend more than $40 billion a year on their lawns, and they use approximately a hundred... (You have reached the clipping limit for this item)

From the Guardian:

Daily Beast:

“We’ve reached the limits of suburban development,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan declared in 2010. “People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.” Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City and Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Great Inversion—widely praised and accepted by the highest echelons of academia, press, business, and government—have advanced much the same claim, and just last week a report on jobs during the downturn garnered headlines like “City Centers in U.S. Gain Share of Jobs as Suburbs Lose.”

There’s just one problem with this narrative: none of it is true. A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.

This is just horrifying...

As Cienna told us, there's a proposal to build huge coal terminals on the Washington State coast, which would, naturally, require tons of coal to come barreling through the state each day to supply the terminals. And coal is very bad for oysters. Bummer! But lo! The bivalvapocalypse is not here yet. Stick out your pinkie and slurp down a little sea snot tonight at Coastal Kitchen to stick it to Big Coal. Every cent of oyster sales goes to Puget Soundkeepers Alliance and their campaign against the coal terminals.

Find more ways to indulge yourself gastronomically, politically, and otherwise on our News & Politics Calendar (the best calendar on earth).

Because oil pipelines never have problems:

Two recent oil pipeline spills have prompted new criticism from opponents of the proposed Keystone XL project, while raising more questions about whether the federal government is adequately monitoring the nation’s vast labyrinth of pipelines.

An Exxon Mobil pipeline ruptured in central Arkansas on Friday, leaving a sheen of oil on nearby streets and causing the evacuation of 22 homes in the small town of Mayflower...

The Arkansas spill followed an accident in Utah on March 18 in which a Chevron pipeline leaked more than 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel in a wetlands area about 50 miles from Salt Lake City.

The spill in Utah, it turns out, was blocked by a beaver dam. Oily beaver pics, and letters from children thanking the beavers, here.

Today the Puget Sound Regional Council, at the request of Mayor Mike McGinn, agreed to study a controversial proposal to allow coal terminals in Washington State. As has been much reported, the terminals would lead to some 18 trains of a half-mile each sprinkling coal powder in their wake every day—perhaps along the downtown Seattle waterfront. This study is designed to augment the official environmental analysis by gauging the trains' "impacts on trade and development, property values, land use, employment and railway congestion within the central Puget Sound region," McGinn's office says.

But the government's environmental studies—with or without research from regional councils—usually seem like a formality that ratify the interests of investors (see: downtown tunnel, Sodo arena). So if these terminals and their ensuing trains are approved despite obvious drawbacks, would you join a mass civil disobedience to stop them?

That's today's poll:

Right after Alaska approved a "Stand Your Ground" bill, the state decided to throw tons of money at the oil industry. Anchorage Daily News reports:

The Senate voted Wednesday night by the barest of margins to approve a massive tax cut for the oil industry in the hope that it would lead to more oil production in Alaska.

The vote on Senate Bill 21 was 11-9, with only Republicans supporting the measure.

I've got your good environmental news and your bad environmental news. Let's start with the bad:

An international team of 21 authors from 17 institutions in seven countries has just published a study in the journal Nature Climate Change showing that, as the cover of snow and ice in the northern latitudes has diminished in recent years, the temperature over the northern land mass has increased at different rates during the four seasons, causing a reduction in temperature and vegetation seasonality in this area. In other words, the temperature and vegetation at northern latitudes increasingly resembles those found several degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 30 years ago.

The south is climbing north at a startlingly rapid pace. But in happier news, those electric cars that conservatives have been hating on for ages are proving to be a good investment idea:

Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), which received $465 million in U.S. Energy Department loans to develop and build electric cars, will repay the funds five years ahead of schedule in a plan approved by the government.

Conservatives have been predicting the death of Tesla and deriding the Obama Administration's investment in Tesla for years now, so this is some welcome news for an industry that needs to succeed if we're going to keep palm trees where they're supposed to be.