Let's say, just for fun, that you're in charge of a drilling company. You see a bright future in fracking.

And let's say you know that your state Department of Environmental Conservation is readying some rules around that popular drilling technique, which is upending the national and global markets for natural gas. Oh, about 1500 pages of rules.

You just might want to see those rules a little early. It could help your lobbying efforts; it could help you against the competition; it could just be highly convenient in all sorts of ways.

Turns out you're in luck! Because that's exactly the way things went down in New York late last summer. According to documents released to the Environmental Working Group under the Freedom of Information Act, New York regulators gave up to six weeks' advance peeks at their rules to representatives of drilling companies -- while local officials, landowners, environmental groups, and everyone else had to wait.

Take your coal and shove it. (Photo by ballanross.)

It will soon be nearly impossible to build a coal-fired power plant in New York. Regulators at the state Department of Environmental Conservation today set a tough CO2 limit for new plants that dirty coal units just won't be able to meet. The feds have proposed a similar, though slightly less stringent, rule on the national scale.

Lawmakers worked late last night to hammer out a final transportation bill -- the product of years of wrangling over how we’ll spend billions of dollars on roads, public transit, and biking and walking paths. The final language, which will be voted on before Congress breaks for the Fourth of July, is a huge disappointment to advocates of a cleaner, greener transportation system.

“If you’re not a paving contractor, you didn’t get much out of this bill,” says David Goldberg of the nonprofit Transportation for America. “This is just a really disappointing day.”

Yesterday I appeared on the radio show On the Green Front, talking about various and sundry things including my TEDx talk, the federal appeals court ruling in favor of EPA, and the paucity of environmental news sources.

Before me came Roz Savage, who's paddling solo across various oceans to raise awareness of climate and whose latest journey, across the Arctic Ocean, was scuttled by -- irony alert! -- melting glaciers. After me came my colleague Greg Hanscom, fresh back from Rio+20, to discuss the summit, what did (and didn't) happen, and what it means for the future of the planet. Here's the whole show:

We asked some influential thinkers and doers what they make of the Supreme Court's health-care ruling and its potential impact on sustainability, democracy, and America. See what they have to say below. (This is our second batch of responses; check out the first.)

Van Jones, president and cofounder of Rebuild the Dream

When we put our minimum against our opponents' maximum, we lose -- that's Wisconsin. When we put our maximum against their maximum, we win -- that's health care.

This photo's sepia-toned because coal plants are history. Get it? Har.

Despite what the coal industry would have you believe, the days of affordable coal-fired power are over. That’s the conclusion of the Sierra Club's recent "Locked In," a report that analyzes the wide array of financial risks coal plant investments face.

We looked into these risks because while the environmental and human health impacts of coal plant investments are increasingly well-known, the financial impacts are not. What we found was eye-opening: Some of the world's largest coal plants are on the verge of bankruptcy, but an emerging Organization of Coal Exporting Countries (OCEC) is on the rise. As the title of our report suggests, avoiding locking ourselves into this risky environment is tremendously important because, social and environmental damages aside, new coal plants are just lousy investments.

ExxonMobil's Rex Tillerson: We can adapt!

That talk by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations that Gristmill linked to earlier today is a stunning demonstration of how to sow confusion and delay. It's worth deeper analysis. So let's dig in!

It's very long, so we'll summarize some sections and zero in on a couple of key passages. You can read the whole thing here.

Paragraphs 1-6, in short: Energy prices sure go up and down a lot! But we keep finding more fossil fuels when we need to.

Next 3 paragraphs: Boy, there was a lot more natural gas in the shale here in North America than we expected.

Next 6 paragraphs: Let's all say "energy security" rather than "energy independence," OK? Exxon is a multinational, and I want everyone to be friends and not worry about where their oil comes from as long as it keeps coming.

Here's where Tillerson starts to gets interesting. Let's quote his original and then translate:

Ours is an industry that is built on technology, it's built on science, it's built on engineering, and because we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.

Translation: You thought those people out there sounding an alarm about climate change were scientists? Forget it. We here at Exxon, we're the scientists. And all those people with fancy degrees and titles who have been desperately trying to teach the U.S. public about global warming? They're illiterates! We're the clean guys in white coats; they're the dirty "manufacturers" of fear.

The fact that this sea creature looks exactly like a rock with guts is not even the weirdest thing about it. It's also completely immobile like a rock -- it eats by sucking in water and filtering out microorganisms -- and its clear blood mysteriously secretes a rare mineral called vanadium. Also, it's born male, becomes hermaphroditic at puberty, and reproduces by tossing clouds of sperm and eggs into the surrounding water and hoping they knock together. Nature, you are CRAZY.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court largely upheld Obama’s healthcare law -- perhaps you’ve heard? We asked some smart people what they think it means for sustainability, democracy, and America. Here follows our first batch of responses (and a second batch is here).

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and other books

Although Wall Street seems to be punishing the decision with a sell-off, the health-care sector has been buoyed by the Supreme Court. All stocks are up (except drug companies). Now that the insurance industry knows it'll have a multi-billion-dollar market of mandatory customers, the industry won't have to spend all that money to buy a different political decision, and it never has to worry about single-payer health care again. And that's the tragedy of the debate around the health-care plan. In all the noise around this ruling, we can't hear the voices demanding a cheaper, better system that dispenses with insurance corporations. The U.S. already spends more per capita than any other country for worse care. The ruling entrenches a bad system. The media circus drowns out discussion of a better one.

Photo by Matt Herbison.

You know what doesn't do a lot to help reduce unwanted births? Putting women in sole charge of contraception, then making it nigh-impossible for them to exercise any reproductive freedom. We could improve sex ed, affordability of birth control pills, and access to abortion -- but as long as there are Republicans around, we might be better off researching easy contraception for men. Which is why this new topical contraceptive gel, developed by researchers at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, could be a big deal.