“Tree coming down!”

Skyler Lofgren shouts above a din of buzzing chainsaws, leans into his own, and with a final heave topples another 40-foot Ponderosa pine. Lofgren, 27, a forest firefighting crew boss with the Flagstaff, Ariz., fire department, felled a dozen trees on Monday, overseeing an outdoor classroom for a new crop of seasonal recruits who will spend the summer patrolling the Coconino National Forest with three-foot chainsaws at the ready. The crew will fight wildfires when they come, but the vast majority of their time will be spent on prevention or, as Lofgren puts it, “working ourselves out of a job.”

In a stand of trees 10 minutes outside downtown Flagstaff -- a tight cluster of low-slung brick buildings peppered with Route 66 paraphernalia -- Lofgren and his fellow firefighters are hard at work on a new project that local officials say is the first of its kind in the nation. Funded by a $10 million bond that voters approved by a 3-to-1 margin in November, the program puts local tax dollars to work clearing trees and brush, and lighting carefully managed fires, in an effort to stave off the devastating, astronomically expensive megafires that have become increasingly common in the West. If successful, the project could also untether the community from a withering federal firefighting budget.

Last year saw the third-worst wildfire season in five decades; the Southern California fire that threatened thousands of homes earlier this month looks to be only the first flash of what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week will be an above-average season for much of the Southwest. But the sequester took a 7.5 percent bite out of the Forest Service’s budget, nearly half of which is spent fighting wildfires. That means there will be 500 fewer pairs of boots on the ground and 200,000 fewer acres treated to prevent fires; the agency’s next proposed budget cuts preventative spending by a further 24 percent. It’s all part of what fire ecologists, environmentalists, and firefighters interviewed by Climate Desk describe as an increasingly distorted federal budget that has apparently forgotten the old adage about an ounce of prevention: It pours billions ($2 billion in 2012) into fighting fires but skimps on cheap, proven methods for stopping megafires before they start.

The collapse of an Interstate 5 bridge in Washington state Thursday night offered a wake-up call about the sorry state of disrepair in which we’ve left our country's auto-centric transportation system. But all the talk about aging bridges and infrastructure drowns out a few larger questions -- about how we plan to fund the massive road system we've built, and why, with existing roads crumbling, we keep dropping money on more.

The bridge that collapsed in Washington was built, like many major bridges in the U.S., during the rise of the interstate highway system, circa 1955. That means it had already exceeded by several years the 50-year lifespan typical of American bridges.

Ironically, the bridge in Washington, unlike nearly 70,000 bridges across the country, wasn’t rated “structurally deficient.” It had been inspected as recently as November 2012. But after a half a century, a bridge is likely to need major upgrades of some kind, and with the average bridge in this country now 43 years old, we’re looking at a huge roster of bridges due for repairs. According to the Federal Highway Administration, as of 2009, the backlog of deficient bridges required $70.9 billion to address -- and that number has likely increased since then.

So what are states doing to tackle the problem? They're funneling money to shiny new construction projects instead, natch.

By now you’ve probably seen the time-lapse of the funnel cloud raging through Moore, Okla., donated to the Red Cross, and thought to yourself, “Ohmygod, I am so glad I don’t live someplace where there are tornadoes.” Or maybe you do live someplace where there are tornadoes, and you’re wondering why God and/or the climate decided that your community should be blessed with this particular terror. Well, we wondered too.

Natural disasters are both devastating and frustrating, but particularly so when no one else in the world seems to get them. Seventy-five percent of all tornadoes on Earth occur in the United States [PDF]. To which we say, “Dammit America, why do you do this to us?”

Cue insightful map from the Weather Underground:

It’s possible the number of non-U.S. tornadoes could be much higher. Every continent except for Antarctica has reported tornadoes, but the numbers are sketchy. Some places, like Australia, are suspected of having lots of tornadoes, but many occur in less populated areas, so they are left to spin out uncounted and unnoticed. Other places, like the U.K., have lots of tornadoes (the most tornadoes per area, actually), but British tornadoes don’t have nearly the same magnitude.

From the good folks at PBS:

Pick 100 Americans at random and line them up. Ask those who think the country shouldn't do a damned thing to rein in its greenhouse emissions to please step forward.

Guess how many would do so?

Six.

Just six out of every 100 Americans believe there is absolutely no need for the U.S. to take action to reduce its emissions to help combat climate change.

That's according to the latest survey result from an ongoing project that tracks public attitudes towards climate change. The project is run by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Momentous change doesn't always leave visual cues. A 2008 Obama looks much the same as a 2012 Obama (minus a few gray hairs and Benghazi wrinkles). In some ways, climate change is similar; we can't exactly see villainous clouds of CO2 strangling the sky. But when it comes to glaciers, climate change leaves marks that can be seen from space.

Our friends at GlacierWorks hope to document those scars. Respected mountaineer and GlacierWorks Executive Director David Breashears retraced the steps of past photographers from the Royal Geographical Society to reshoot photos of famous Himalayan glaciers affected by climate change. Thanks to their hard work and internet magic, we can now compare the severity of ice recession by combining the historic and modern images.

On the left is a photo taken by Major E. O. Wheeler in 1921 on the North slope of 26,906-foot Cho Oyu; on the right is a photo taken by Breashears from a similar perspective  in 2009. Drag the slider to check out the changes China's Kyetrak Glacier experienced.

Now compare the Main Rongbuk Glacier (near Mt. Everest) in a 1921 photo by George Mallory to Breashears'  2007 image:

The Washington Post’s publication of an outrageously misleading, climate change-denying editorial by- of all people- the chair of the House Science Committee serves as another reminder of the lamentable state of our climate discourse. Few public officials are willing to confront stark climate realities, and little more than lip service is given as humanity blazes past ominous milestones like the highest atmospheric concentration of carbon in 5 million years. Even as New Jersey struggles to recover from the fossil-fueled devastation of Superstorm Sandy, Governor Chris Christie dismissed the notion that his state should prepare for future climate impacts, rejecting the …

Monsanto’s Bt corn was supposed to reduce pesticide use. The Environmental Protection Agency said as much when the corn, which is genetically modified to resist the crop-ravaging rootworm, debuted in 2003. Sure enough, as more farmers sowed their fields with Bt corn, fewer of them needed to spray pesticides to protect their crops. The share of U.S. corn acreage treated with insecticides fell from 25 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010.

But now, Bt corn has become, basically, too successful: Rootworms are starting to develop immunity to this prevalent crop, driving farmers to return to insecticide use. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Syngenta, one of the world's largest pesticide makers, reported that sales of its major soil insecticide for corn, which is applied at planting time, more than doubled in 2012. Chief Financial Officer John Ramsay attributed the growth to "increased grower awareness" of rootworm resistance in the U.S. Insecticide sales in the first quarter climbed 5% to $480 million.

http://ecowatch.com/2013/lobster-boat-vs-coal-ship/ EcoWatch story of our effort to blockade coal ship delivery at Brayton Point in Somerset, Massachusetts last week, in our 32' lobster boat the Henry David T. 

Electric utilities! They are to me what sideboobs are to Huffington Post -- I just can't stop writing about them.

A couple of days ago I posted a brief introduction to utilities and the way they currently work. The take-home lesson is that current regulations give utilities every incentive to build more infrastructure and sell more power, but very little incentive to cut costs or innovate.

The situation is no longer working for us. We need rapid, large-scale innovation in low-carbon electricity systems, and we need it now. It's time to fundamentally rethink the utility business model.

I hope you'll indulge me just one more scene-setting post before I finally get to the long-awaited post on solutions. Today we're going to take a look at the way electricity has typically gotten from generator to customer, the electricity "value chain," so we can better understand which parts need to change. This is a complicated topic, to say the least, but I'll do my best to break it down in the simplest terms I can, with the proviso that I'm glossing over lots and lots of important details.

The electricity value chain

OK. Think of the electricity value chain as having three basic links:

A few days ago I met the Dalai Lama.  He held my hand and embraced me.  Then I drove past the broken body of a person who had just killed himself by jumping off a building. Two days earlier I sat in a packed auditorium for the opening day of the Dalai Lama’s Spirituality and the Environment conference.  That was the same day that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose above 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. The contrast between His Holiness’ message of compassion and the damage we are inflicting on ourselves and the earth …