If you want to know just how determined activists are to stop the proposed tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, listen to this:

Last Saturday morning, August 20th, more than 50 activists were arrested in front of the White House. They were handcuffed, stuffed into blistering-hot paddy wagons, and informed that they would spend two nights in a crowded, harsh DC jail. The U.S. Park Police – who have jurisdiction outside the White House — openly informed organizers of the police strategy: We’re going to go very, very hard on the first wave of protestors to discourage others from joining your planned 15-day action.

That action, organized by tarsandsaction.org, aims to get 50-plus people arrested at the White House each day, peacefully, day after day, till September 3rd. The goal is to pressure Obama to reject the 1700-mile tars sands pipeline, which is fully within the President’s power.

So did the police plan work? Hell no. Saturday night — as Bill McKibben, Gus Speth, and others were still packed 15-to-a-tiny-cell and eating baloney sandwiches – 45 new recruits were being trained at a local D.C. church to repeat the civil disobedience the very next morning. The second wave of volunteers, who came from all over America, fully understood that the police had gone hard core on the first group instead of offering the usual minor citation and fine for White House protesting. On Sunday morning August 21st at 11, right on schedule, the “Fantastic 45” sat down outside the White House fence. They too were handcuffed and led away to paddy wagons.

But that’s when the police gave up. They threw in the towel on the “hard way” approach. The Fantastic 45 were released by 3 pm Sunday and allowed to pay a $100 fine at the Park police station. No jail time.

Here’s what sources say happened:

The D.C. Metropolitan Police, tasked with actually housing arrestees turned over by the U.S. Park Police, said something like this to the Park cops on Saturday night: “What?!? What?!? You sent us 50-plus men and women environmentalists to be jailed on a Saturday night and there might be 50 more tomorrow and the next day and the next? We refuse!”

The DC police reportedly complained about this to the District Attorney’s office for D.C., which in turn told the Park Police late Saturday or early Sunday to stop it. The system can’t handle the number of arrestees who appear to be utterly determined to come to Obama’s House over the next two weeks nonstop. “Stop jailing all these people,” the message reportedly went from the D.A.’s office to the Park Police.

And so the jailing stopped Sunday.

Then, right on schedule Monday morning, another group of 52 protestors sat down at 11 at the White House and were handcuffed, fined, and released by 2 pm. Sixty more got arrested and fined Tuesday and another 56 Wednesday. That makes for a total of well over 250. The goal by September 3rd is to have close to 1,000 arrested over this disastrous and insane $7 billion tar sands pipeline proposal.

Who can name another environmental protest of this type and scale in U.S. history? Day after day. Wave after wave. It’s the first of its kind. That’s how big the tar sands issue is. And that’s why those arrested so far have all exited police custody with a similar message to supporters across the country: “We welcome your sympathy for what we’ve experienced here. But mostly we welcome your company. Please join us. Come to DC and be part of this history!” (www.tarsandsaction.org).

Again, special credit has to go to the “Fantastic 45” who got arrested Sunday despite the unusual threat of overnight jail time from the Park Police. (The vast majority of nonviolent civil disobedience protestors at the White House never spend a night in jail). The police strategy was completely dependent on the Sunday group giving up after the first Saturday jailings, thus causing the 15-day protest to crumble before it really got started. That threat – of a night or two on a metal bed with bologna and water and sleep deprivation crudely enforced by jail guards – is not a casual threat for protestors aged 18 to nearly 80.  But the Fantastic 45 vanquished the strategy.

Yet the biggest thanks of all goes to the “First 52”.  That’s the number of first-wave climate activists arrested Saturday morning – including McKibben, Speth, and former Army officer Dan Choi – who spent over 50 hours in custody. Even while refusing to incarcerate any more activists from Sunday morning forward, the police kept the First 52 until 3 pm MONDAY afternoon. More than two full days. And those people suffered. More will be written about this in the coming weeks, but it’s important to know that the hardships included enforced thirst, hunger, dangerous heat and poor ventilation in paddy wagons, and – for the women – a punishing concrete jail cell with cold temperatures. The arrestees finally staggered out of a DC courthouse Monday afternoon, squinting at the sun through red and fatigue-swollen eyes, many trembling from hunger.

These people did this for us!! They did this to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. They did this to stop runaway global warming and to show Obama the scale of grassroots passion still alive in America for justice and sane solutions.

One of those people was eighteen-year-old Lukas Burdick of Ithaca, NY. Just out of high school, having just stepped out of leg irons during the final minutes in police custody in the nation’s capital, a nearly faint Burdick said, “The purpose of life is to help other people. If that’s the result of what I just endured, then I have absolutely zero regrets.”

Said Mary Nicol of Chicago, who with 14 other women went 17 hours without food at one point and slept in the concrete cell with no bed at all or chairs or sheets: “It was really rough, but not nearly as rough as life will be for all people everywhere on the planet if Obama doesn’t stop this pipeline and halt radical climate change.”

Who on the planet right now is giving more to this cause than these protestors in DC? Please come to Washington right now! Come get peacefully arrested yourself any day through September 3rd. Come honor these brave people and this great struggle. Learn more at www.tarsandsaction.org. We need you!

– Mike Tidwell is a writer and activist based in Maryland. He was arrested and released last weekend as part of the tar sands protest. Contact him at mikewtidwell@gmail.com

“Never again.”

Those ought to be the words coming from the White House right now on global warming. Never again can we tolerate a year like 2009, where attempts to cap carbon pollution experience such profound stagnation. Already this month President Obama has confirmed two painful truths. First: Congress will not complete work on a global warming bill in 2009. And second, the corollary blow: There will be no international climate deal in Denmark next month, dashing years of international hopes.

So now Obama’s message ought to be “never again.” The planet just can’t endure another year of inaction. Obama should travel to the Copenhagen climate conference in December and guarantee dramatic action from the U.S. in 2010 even if it means blowing everything up in Congress and starting over. If a “cap and trade” bill won’t fly in the Senate in 2010, then let the Environmental Protection Agency explore maximum-strength carbon regulations while, legislatively, we switch back to Obama’s original presidential campaign plan: “cap and rebate.”

Apologists, of course, are rushing to defend the president this week, explaining away the now-official climate failures of 2009. There was never enough time, they say, to fix in a few months all the global warming harm George Bush created in eight long years.

Maybe so. But we can’t blame Bush forever. What’s the plan for 2010? The only strategy the Democrats seem to have is borrowed from 2009: Get the Senate to finally pass the cap and trade bill. That would be the 1400-page bill narrowly approved by the House in June and loaded with subsidies for “clean coal” and likely big profits for Wall Street traders. It’s been stagnating in the Senate for most of the autumn. Centrist Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia — a vitally important vote — all but condemned the bill this week in a press conference. What if the bill simply never passes? What will Obama take to the international treaty talks in Germany in June 2010or Mexico next December?

As long as Obama sticks to a principle of “never again,” then Plan B should become relatively clear. Allow the EPA to move rapidly forward with its court-sanctioned ability to mandate carbon reductions across the economy under the Clean Air Act. This has always been the shotgun in the closet. No one really wants to proceed this way, unleashing messy regulations from a bureaucratic agency. But if the Senate won’t act, then the EPA must.

But while that closet door is opening, we should all ask why the Senate has had trouble acting. The most obvious — but least discussed — problem is the concept of “cap and trade” itself. The bill treats our life-giving global atmosphere as if it were the property of private corporations. Up to 85 percent of the pollution permits under the bill would given away free to polluters in addition to loopholes that allow, for example, coal companies in America to avoid carbon reductions by paying faraway Zambian farmers to stop tilling their fields. Two prominent EPA attorneys — both with extensive experience implementing federal pollution regulations — have recently asserted that the cap and trade measure before Congress simply won’t work and shouldn’t be tried.

So what will work? For starters, we must rightly view the atmosphere as a shared resource, belonging to all people, not as a commodity owned by polluters. Obama had this idea in mind when he campaigned for president. His global warming proposal then would have required all polluters to pay for emissions permits. And at least 80 percent of the money raised would be rebated to American households. The rest — over ten billion dollars per year — would be invested in clean energy projects.

By rebating almost all the permit money to American households, this policy approach robs Republicans of their cherished ability to call a carbon cap a “carbon tax.” And by making all polluters pay, the approach relieves many Democrats of their nervousness over corporate welfare. These features alone will provide afresh and popular boost to the climate debate should the cap and trade approach stall completely in 2010. A rebate approach — especially one that gives all Americans an equal refund every month — will also create the political space necessary for the kind of deep emissions cuts scientists say are needed to save the climate.

Unfortunately, after Obama’s election, thanks to big lobbying from Big Oil and Big Coal, Congress went down the dubious trading path that now finds the clock running out in 2009. But if Obama wants to succeed as a politician and truly earn his Nobel Peace Prize, he’ll embrace “never again” as a guide and prepare now to move the country toward his better, original instincts in 2010.

The much-discussed Waxman-Markey bill on global warming now proposes to give 35 percent of all carbon pollution permits to utilities for free. Another 45 percent will go free of charge to other carbon-intensive industries, but utilities are least deserving by far. Last year, America’s 48 largest utilities earned profits of $28 billion. And last month, in a study requested by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) himself, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that allowing utilities to pollute for free under a global warming bill would drive up the overall cost of the program and would hurt poor people the most.

But this is about more than social justice and corporate welfare. Free permits weaken the most important tool within the Waxman-Markey bill: the carbon cap. By giving away permits, the bill introduces complexity, potential gaming, and probable delay into a cap system. It thus reduces our ability to save the climate and avoid 20 feet of sea-level rise in places like downtown Washington, D.C.

A strong, workable cap is everything. Imagine a patient who has a curable form of cancer. Should you prescribe pain medication? Yes. A healthy diet and physical therapy? Yes. But the most important thing is treating the actual cancer with surgery or other means. The goal is to cure the disease.

With global warming, we can invest in “green jobs” and a ban on deforestation as well as improved levees for places like New Orleans. But unless we treat the core “disease” that’s driving climate change — i.e. unbridled fossil-fuel use — we will only be putting Band-Aids on symptoms. Without a strong cap on carbon, none of our other actions will really matter.

Waxman’s House committee — Energy and Commerce — has already committed itself to an intricate approach called “cap and trade.” This creates a system of tradable carbon permits that might be effective if properly structured. But given Wall Street’s recent demise via trading in complex mortgage derivatives, it’s no wonder many Americans are wary of talk of a specialized market in tradable carbon. Now, on top of this, utilities want their tradable pollution permits to be free, at least during the first decade or so. The utilities argue this is the best way to protect consumers from rising electricity prices under a cap. They promise to return the “value” of the pollution permits to ratepayers in the form of rate reductions, efficiency projects, and other “public benefit” programs administered by the electric companies themselves.

Really? Does anyone believe this is the best way to protect consumers? Why not auction all the pollution permits, cut out the middleman, and transfer the money directly to citizens? No freebies. The sky doesn’t belong to Virginia Dominion Power or Pacific Gas and Electric. It belongs to all Americans. If a company wants to pollute our sky, it should pay a fee just like a landfill fee, and that money should go to you.

This was the simple, fair solution President Obama campaigned on last fall: 100 percent carbon auction with most of the money rebated to taxpayers. Thankfully, the House Ways and Means committee now has jurisdictional power to fix the Waxman-Markey bill. Rangel should strip out all free permits to utilities and rebate the auction money to American citizens in the form of a monthly direct “dividend.” Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has already introduced a “cap and dividend” bill within Ways and Means. That bill should serve as a vital guide to Rangel and colleagues as they go to work in the coming weeks.

Again, the goal is to create the strongest possible carbon cap. To be strong, the cap must be simple and fair. Achieve these two features and voters will support it for the 50 years it takes to squeeze carbon out of our economy. Fail at these two features and the patient will remain tragically sick for many years to come.

Up to 2,000 other people from across the country will risk arrest, too. We’ll all be demanding strong federal action to phase out coal combustion and other fossil fuels nationwide that threaten our vulnerable climate.

This mass arrest might seem symbolic and radical to many Americans. Symbolic because it’s purposefully organized amid the iconic images of Washington, D.C. And radical because, well, isn’t getting locked up kind of out there? And isn’t global warming kind of vague and distant?

But I live five subway stops from the U.S. Capitol. My home is right here. There’s nothing symbolic — for me — about trying to keep the tidal Potomac River out of my living room and off the National Mall where my son takes school trips. There’s nothing symbolic about fighting for homeowner’s insurance in a region where Allstate and other insurers have already begun to pull out due to bigger Atlantic hurricanes. And what’s vague about the local plant species like deadnettles and Bluebells that now bloom four to six weeks earlier in D.C.-area gardens thanks to dramatic warming.

For citizens like me who live amid the symbolic trappings of D.C., we stand as proof that climate change is everywhere, right now, and no one is immune, not even the citizens and leaders of the world’s most powerful city. (No wonder nearly 1 in 10 protestors on March 2 will be members of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network).

And radical? Actually civil disobedience is no more radical than our belief that extreme energy changes are possible now — not just in far-off China or liberal Oregon, but in the city of Washington, D.C. itself. Like a growing number of Metro D.C. residents, my home in Takoma Park is completely solarized. I heat my home with locally grown, organically fertilized corn that saves me money. And beginning this summer in much of Maryland, energy from wind farms will be cheaper than coal-fired electricity from Pepco, the state’s mega-utility. Meanwhile, as a region, the D.C. area uses twice as much electricity per capita as California or New York State. Clearly, there is low-hanging “efficiency fruit” everywhere you look in the nation’s capital. Washington could cut its power use in half and still have every comfort and abundance: bright lights for the Kennedy Center, heating and cooling for the museums, fast computers for every hall of Congress. No trade-offs.

We just need national legislation to move things along as fast as the climate is changing, which is to say right now! Congress must pass — in 2009 — a cap on carbon pollution that matches the goals of Japan and the European nations under the current international climate talks. Then Obama must go to Copenhagen in December to negotiate a strong successor to the Kyoto protocol.

Otherwise, Washington, D.C. is screwed. Not just in a political and diplomatic sense. But screwed as an actual place. On the last day in office, the Bush administration released a study showing the U.S. Atlantic coast would soon see sea-level rise much worse than previously estimated. Another study in the journal Science this month showed that ice reduction in Antarctica is actually leading to planetary gravitational changes that will further cause the Atlantic to bulge and swell, leading to still more rise. Who knew? University of Maryland professor Court Stephenson already believes a billion-dollar flood gate on the Potomac River just south of D.C. is the only thing that can save Washington from future mega-storms. No wonder in nearby New York city, mayor Michael Bloomburg is already planning to move to higher ground the pumps that keep the New York subway dry.

But adaptation measures will never protect us without a simultaneous turn to clean energy. Which is why I’m getting arrested March 2 with thousands of others two blocks from the Capitol. President Barack Obama and Congress have already done a lot for the climate in the last six weeks alone, and I hear the voice of those who say, “Why push so hard now?”

But I’m reminded of the labor leaders who visited Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. After hours of talks they persuaded the President to support a pro-union proposition. But FDR then surprised them. “Okay you’ve convinced me,” he said. “Now go out and pressure me.” That’s kind of the weird way politics works. Obama and Congress need this pressure to help them keep doing what, for the most part, they already want to do.

All politics is local, as they say, so in the end I’m just looking after my street corner. My corner just happens to be in the D.C. area. I have a son here, and the scientists have spoken: there’s nowhere to hide from global warming. Nowhere. So I want an end to coal combustion in my region. I want to live surrounded by wind mills, not flood levees. For this, I’ll even get arrested, knowing all along that the reverse is true too: If the actual citizens of Washington, D.C. are safe from global warming, then everyone else in the world is safe too.

I’m not sure what’s more shocking: the news that the Maryland State Police wrongfully spied on me for months as a “suspected terrorist,” or that, despite surveillance of me, officers apparently wouldn’t recognize me if I walked into their police headquarters tomorrow.

I’m a former Peace Corps volunteer, an Eagle Scout, church member, youth baseball coach, and dedicated father. I also happen to be director of one of the largest environmental groups in Maryland, a nonprofit that promotes windmills and solar panels in the fight against global warming. So imagine my shock to get a police letter last month saying I was one of 53 Maryland activists on a terrorist watch list that has been discontinued because — can you believe it? — there’s “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime.”

Matters turned especially Soviet-esque on Oct. 14 when I called the police requesting a full copy of my surveillance file. A spokeswoman told me I could visually inspect the file, but I couldn’t make photocopies, I couldn’t bring an attorney, and the police would be destroying the entire file after I read it.

And bring a valid photo ID, she said, to make sure you’re who you say you are.

A what? Really? You spied on me, for God’s sake.

The mess all began last summer when astonishing evidence surfaced revealing that the Maryland State Police — under former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich — posed as activists and infiltrated an anti-death-penalty group, attending the organization’s meetings and taking secret notes to send back to HQ. But what were they doing to me and my organization — the Chesapeake Climate Action Network — during this surveillance program in 2005 and 2006? Bugging our phones? Reading our emails? Monitoring me as I walked my kid to the bus stop?

I still don’t know for sure. Yielding to public pressure, the police finally gave me a printed copy of my “file” on Oct. 29. It raised more questions than it answered. Seven of the 12 pages were withheld without full explanation. And of the pages I did receive, at least half the words were redacted — blacked out with a marker.

There was a photo of me on the last page, lifted from my website. And on the first page, there were these words: “Crime: Terrorism, environmental extremists.”

What terrorism would that be? My file — what little of it I have — makes reference to a morning speech given in Bethesda, Md., by then-governor Robert Ehrlich on Nov. 17, 2005. A small audience of invited guests and journalists attended inside a classroom at Walt Whitman High School. Ehrlich wasn’t doing enough to fight global warming, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network believed, and several of my staff arrived to peacefully demonstrate and hold up signs that said things like, “It’s Getting Hot in Here, Gov!” But troopers with the governor’s “Executive Protection Division” believed this was extreme, according to my file. For example, CCAN staffers invited high school students to hold up protest signs during the governor’s speech. Pretty extreme, huh?

There was no civil disobedience at this event. No one was arrested. No county, state, or federal laws were breached. The entire affair was utterly peaceful, above board, and appropriate. Political demonstrations exactly like this happen a thousand times a day in America. There were no media reports of anything unusual.

Yet Ehrlich’s security team considered this “aggressive protesting.” Afterward, the troopers contacted the Maryland State Police’s Homeland Security and Investigation Bureau. The result was creation of intelligence files on me and three of my staff under the crime category of “terrorism, environmental extremists.” The real motivation, however, appears to be political spying. We were opponents of the governor’s policies. We were organized and vocal about it. We wound up on an intelligence list along with dozens of other innocent, nonviolent opponents of the governor’s policies.

Ironically, I wasn’t even present at the protest in question. I’ve never been to Walt Whitman High School. But a case file was launched on me nonetheless, on Nov. 28, 2005, with my name, photo, job title, “no SMTs” (scars, marks, or tattoos), and the declaration that no charges had been brought against me. Strangely, according to the police papers, there’s no record of any intelligence-gathering related to me after the file was created, just a narrative describing my staff’s protest at the Ehrlich speech.

Meanwhile, the state police say they’ve released everything to me that’s relevant to me, but I don’t believe them. Since July, the state police have made numerous public statements related to this spying controversy that have proved to be factually untrue. They initially said, for example, that the entire surveillance program was limited to anti-death-penalty activists. But we now know activists for peace, immigration, and the environment were spied on too. I believe more of the spying story is yet to come out, however. With the help of a heroic Maryland attorney, David Rocah of the American Civil Liberties Union, and an equally heroic Maryland state senator, Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, I believe all the facts will soon surface and we’ll see legislation in the state General Assembly in 2009 specifically banning police abuses like this.

The final tragedy here, of course, is how much this whole episode has been a distraction to the public. The real threat of terror to Maryland and the nation is the prospect of up to 23 feet of sea-level rise as the Greenland ice sheet continues to implode from rapid global warming. The violent activity behind this threat is our astonishing over-reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal, to power our economy while suicidally saturating the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. For all our declarations of “never again,” the ground-zero site of the World Trade Center will itself be literally under water from sea-level rise if we don’t switch quickly to 100-mile-per-gallon cars and clean electricity from wind power.

But you can’t have strong and lasting environmental protections without a strong democracy. Most of the transformative, positive change experienced in American history has happened only after significant citizen engagement at a noisy grassroots level. That’s why, ultimately, the objective of almost all environmental groups — from the more liberal Greenpeace to the more conservative Nature Conservancy — is inspiring average citizens to care enough to take action, to make their desires known, to get involved in the system.

But who’s going to get involved and get noisy — in Maryland or elsewhere — if citizens fear that the police are secretly attending the same rallies and meetings, secretly watching and taking notes and keeping lists? Thank God that outraged Marylanders from Ocean City to Cumberland continue to demand full disclosure and reform in the face of this tawdry police spying affair.

The national economy is tanking, we’re bogged down in two wars, and the accelerating impacts of global warming could soon get so severe that Pentagon planners already anticipate security challenges worldwide from the inevitable social unrest spawned by biblical droughts, floods, wildfires, and the rest. History shows that it is precisely during times of war and want that governments tend to overreach and trample liberties. And it’s only in resisting these temptations that certain kinds of governments — democracies — grow stronger.

With a climate disaster looming, I’ve worked very hard for many years to promote clean, renewable energy. But perhaps the greatest contribution I’ll ever make to this cause is the action I’m taking right now: standing up and working hard to keep government itself clean.

But on the biggest issues of our time — clean energy and climate change — here’s the question: Will these “New South” Democrats repeat the same huge mistake Gov. Kaine has already made? Namely, will they take the votes from Northern Virginia without actually listening to the voters?

I’ll cut to the chase: Tim Kaine would almost certainly be Vice President-elect of the United States of America right now if not for one huge issue: coal. Kaine’s consistent support for more mining and more burning of coal in Virginia has wrecked his national political career. Kaine is one of five Southern governors — three of them are Republicans — who’s actually building a new coal-fired power plant in his state. None of the plants being built will capture and “sequester” a single pound of global warming pollution. Kaine’s 585 megawatt plant in Wise County, Virginia — belching 5 million tons annually of CO2 in an era of massive Arctic ice melt — was the major reason Obama did not pick him as VP. That’s my firm belief.

For starters, this coal plant — which will use coal from mountaintop removal mining — puts Kaine totally out of step with Northern Virginia voters. A Zogby poll, taken Nov. 4, showed that 78 percent of voters nationwide consider investments in clean energy as vital to the U.S. economy. One can only assume this percentage is still higher in the California-esque political region of NoVa.

Just look around. Citizens in Alexandria, Va., with the support of the mayor and city council, have been fighting furiously to shut down a filthy coal plant there for years. And last March, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (i.e. county council) passed a resolution openly critical of the massive Wise County coal plant that Dominion Power is now building with the Governor’s blessing. And all across Northern Virginia, residents are fighting a new power transmission line that Dominion wants to build to make it easier for coal-fired electricity to reach the region from the west.

But on the coal issue, Gov. Kaine doesn’t behave as if he understands who cast the votes that put him, ultimately, in office. He behaves more like the man who’s received a quarter million dollars in corporate contributions from Dominion Power since 2001. It’s a good thing the governorship is term-limited.

Other Virginia candidates subject to statewide re-election — i.e. Webb and Warner — should more carefully consider the demographics of NoVa before siding with coal. Not only is the region overwhelmingly Democratic, but it’s also by far the best-educated, highest-income, and “highest-tech” region of the state. Fairfax County has a higher percentage of non-government high-tech workers than Silicon Valley. Does anyone really think that more mountaintop removal and more coal combustion and more global warming are winning political issues in this region?

But enough with the state politics. Where Kaine really sold his soul to coal and torched his political career is on the national stage. Just moments before the Democratic national convention, Kaine was on the short-short-short list of VP candidates. It was coal, I’m convinced, that finally cost him the nod from Obama. Nothing else makes sense. Kaine was a loyal, early Obama supporter and a close personal friend. Why didn’t he get the job? Inexperience? Pu-leeze. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush were one-term governors before running for President. No, Kaine was a very attractive candidate: a great campaigner and the governor of a critically important swing state. The only real black spot was coal. How could a presidential candidate — Obama — who said global warming was a top priority and who was striving to be better than George Bush on energy, possibly choose a running mate who was at that very moment building a dinosaur coal plant? Obama had to be reading polling data that showed this would hurt nationally.

Sen. Joe Biden, meanwhile, was from a vote-irrelevant state. He had more governing experience, yes, but he also came coal-free. Indeed, Biden had actively championed an offshore wind farm in Delaware as an alternative to coal to meet his state’s growing energy needs. Was this the deciding factor for Biden? Probably not. But was coal the deciding factor against Kaine? I’m betting yes, yes, and again yes.

And what of Obama? He got over 360 electoral votes without the coal states of West Virginia and Kentucky. I think he can promote, without political fear, the proven alternatives to coal like efficiency, wind power, and solar. And I believe he will. Indeed, in the last few weeks of his Virginia campaign, in rallies across the state, Obama never even mentioned the word coal a single time while, conversely, talking tons about the need for “green jobs” in the wind and solar industry.

As for Sens. Webb and Warner, much is made of their sensitivity to the economy of the coal region of Southwest Virginia. Neither elected official, for example, has opposed the construction of the appalling Wise County plant. But surely these Senators noticed that Southwest Virginians gave a majority of their votes to McCain in numbers higher than even what George Bush drew in 2004. Meanwhile, Northern Virginia, with more than six times the total population of “coal country” Virginia, broke for Obama at California levels.

Frankly, it’s time the politicians of Virginia caught up with the politics of Virginia. There will be major legislation in Congress in 2009 aimed at finally solving the climate crisis by phasing out coal and systematically re-training America’s coal miners to enter the “green economy” of renewable energy. Senators Webb and Warner, assuming they want to get re-elected, should work closely with Obama to make this happen.

As for Kaine, his time has come and gone. His chance to work really closely with Obama went up in smoke, forever, with the coal of southwest Virginia. His sacrifice is a valuable lesson to us all.

No wonder the presidential candidates can’t seem to stay away from the area. Despite perennial traffic congestion, “NoVa” has that certain gleam of 21st century life, from the glitzy high-rises of Rosslyn to the corporate campuses around the Dulles airport to the performing arts stage at a place called Wolf Trap. Fairfax County alone, the heart of the region, has a higher percentage of high-tech workers than Silicon Valley.

So, as the election approaches, here’s the surprising question for every Northern Virginia voter: Why is this high-tech region, so dedicated to a “knowledge-based” economy, utterly dependent on an energy system as old as the Confederate States of America? Northern Virginia gets the lion’s share of its electric power not from wind turbines or solar farms, but from coal. A shocking 1,180,400 tons of raw coal each year, nearly half of the area’s total load. And it’s not “clean coal” or “high-tech” coal. Just black, sooty, rip-it-from-the-ground-and-set-it-on-fire coal.

You’d think it would be different. You’d think Northern Virginia would be a leader in developing clean, sustainable energy at a level equal to its high-tech, high-education status.

You’d think. But two roadblocks stand in the way: Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) and mega-utility Dominion Power. Both Kaine and Dominion are implacably wedded to coal. Forever, apparently. No matter what the economic and ecological cost. Indeed, while the equally high-tech suburbs of Denver build new wind-turbine factories and the outer-D.C. suburb of Frederick County, Maryland, is expanding a major solar-panel plant (owned by British Petroleum), Dominion Power just broke ground on a new coal-fired power plant it says is necessary because of rising energy demand throughout Virginia. Where is demand rising fastest, according to Dominion? Northern Virginia. And the threat is explicit, Dominion says. Unless the new 585-megawatt plant, using mountaintop-removal coal and totally lacking any equipment to capture global-warming pollution, is built, there will be rolling blackouts and brownouts across Virginia soon.

Did you know that, Northern Virginia? Did you know Dominion is building a massive coal-burning energy complex essentially in your name? In addition to emitting more than 5 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, the coal plant in southwest Virginia will dump 5.4 pounds of mercury into local streams and lakes annually.

But perhaps the biggest tragedy is Gov. Kaine’s argument that the plant will actually create jobs. The state’s own official analysis, performed by the State Corporation Commission, concluded otherwise. It determined that the high price tag of the plant — a whopping $1.8 billion — would actually raise ratepayers’ rates so much as to cause the entire Virginia economy to shrink by 1,400 jobs. The plant would hurt, not help, working families in the state.

If you want jobs, look at what Xcel power is doing in Colorado. Until recently, Xcel was a coal-at-all-costs company like Dominion. But the firm has now seen the truth: In a world of rapid global warming and rising fossil-fuel costs, the future lies in wind and solar. As you read this, Xcel is preparing to voluntarily shut down two old coal plants. It is simultaneously investing heavily in wind power and solar; construction of two new turbine manufacturing plants near Denver was just announced, creating 1,350 new jobs in the state. Doesn’t that sound like an approach more befitting of Virginia’s high-tech corridor?

Ironically, Gov. Kaine was just in Denver for the Democratic convention. Did the Governor tour the new Xcel wind-turbine factory sites? Did he meet with company officials to see how they do it? No. Instead, he was a guest of honor at a fancy convention party thrown by, yep, Dominion Power. The same company building the coal plant in Virginia. The same company that’s given Kaine nearly a quarter million dollars in campaign contributions since 2001. Hmmm.

The truth is this: Virginia doesn’t need more power in the future. Virginia uses too much power in the present. The state is one of the most energy inefficient states in America, ranking 32nd in terms of utility and state government investment in efficiency programs. Its people use more electricity every day than 75 percent of the rest of America. Surely we could do much, much better.

Just switching to high-efficiency light bulbs will save energy equal to half of what the proposed new coal plant will create. Installing “Smart Meters” in homes and offering rebates for high-efficiency refrigerators would save several times more power, making the new coal plant and the alleged threats of blackouts utterly impossible. And consumers will save money not lose jobs in the process. Then add a couple of large offshore wind farms along the Virginia coast, and suddenly Virginia is a clean energy leader, not laggard.

If it’s true that Obama and McCain are listening to the wishes of Northern Virginia voters more than ever, then it’s time for the wealthiest, best-educated, and most high-tech people in this region to finally speak with a loud voice: Coal was for yesterday. Clean energy is for today. It’s time to choose.

Then imagine your surprise, in visiting the park, to see a huge Marlboro cigarettes ad plastered across the left field fence. Imagine another Marlboro ad behind home plate so TV viewers can’t look away. Imagine, finally, being asked to stand and sing Take Me Out To the Ball Game during the “Marlboro Cigarettes 7th Inning Stretch.”

Sounds absurd, right? Well, welcome to Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., for an inconceivable variation on this theme. With public alarm over global warming at an all-time high, team owners of the Nationals baseball team spent millions for a “healthy Earth” park, with environmental features like low-flow plumbing and energy-efficient lighting. The new park has been officially declared a “green facility” by the National Green Building Council, the first of its kind in American sports.

But visiting fans know the rest: Strike Marlboro cigarettes and substitute “ExxonMobil” and you have the astonishing reality at Nationals Park. Oil giant ExxonMobil, the biggest contributor to global warming of any company in the world, has its name splashed across the left field fence and, intermittently, behind home plate. ExxonMobil, which invests almost nothing in clean energy while gasoline goes to $4 per gallon, is the feel-good sponsor of the 7th-inning stretch, so your child can happily sing about peanuts and Cracker Jacks while the company logo sparkles on the biggest scoreboard in baseball.

No wonder a coalition of concerned groups — ranging from faith leaders to college students to environmentalists — announced Friday it would protest outside all Nationals home games until Exxon stops its ads.

Their message to the Nationals is this: Thanks for the fluorescent bulbs, but you can’t be a “green” building if your number one underwriter is wrecking the planet. The climate crisis needs more than half measures and half loaves. It needs a full commitment from all of us, especially institutions like baseball that speak so powerfully to our children.

The comparison to cigarettes is more than symbolic, of course. Exxon has done more than any oil company to cast false doubt on the avalanche of science connecting fossil-fuel combustion to the planetary cancer of global warming. The company has spent millions funding quack “scientists” and front groups reminiscent of J.R. Reynolds in the 1960s. Even now CEO Rex Tillerson says there’s too much uncertainty over the cause of global warming to take national or international action.

What uncertainty? Right now, Allstate Insurance company will not issue new homeowners policies in coastal Maryland, Virginia and six other states because of projected sea-level rise and bigger storms. This is not politics or spin. Allstate is not a Republican corporation. It’s not a Democratic firm. It’s a private independent company with its own capital at risk and it is retreating from the U.S. East Coast because, it says, oceans are rising and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent.

Indeed, just last month, the National Wildlife Federation released a study showing nearly two-thirds of the coastal beaches in the Chesapeake region will be lost to global-warming-induced sea level rise unless we take strong action soon. The Anacostia River, in fact, on whose bank the new Nationals Park rests, is itself a tidal river vulnerable to sea level rise. If the Greenland ice sheet melts as many scientists say is now possible, we’ll get 23-feet of Potomac-Anacostia River rise in downtown D.C.! Ironically, the playing field at Nationals Park is already several feet below sea level. So the Exxon ad in left field could itself be under water due to our continued use of the advertiser’s product!

No wonder the mass media and average citizens have been so concerned about these issues of late, with the “go green” mantra a staple of national discussion. So hats off to Lerner family, owners of the Nationals, for their pioneering greenness. Among its features, Nationals Park includes copious bike racks, its own in-house recycling facility, and easy access to the D.C. subway. On June 4th, the team asked fans to wear green clothing to a game to show their support for the environment.

Too bad those same fans had to see all the Exxon ads and sit through the Exxon “7th inning stretch.” And too bad Exxon, outside the park, continues to make a mockery of everything the Nationals try to do. In total contradiction of scientific facts, Exxon recently helped fund a campaign to encourage one million American Christians to write Congress questioning the role human beings play in driving global warming.

This, again, is the moral equivalent of denying the role cigarettes play in lung cancer. It is utterly unacceptable. The Nationals’ owners are harming their reputation, their community, and indeed our nation with their blatant association with the world’s biggest environmental abuser.

If Marlboro cigarette ads were plastered all over Nationals Park, there’d be a social uproar. We’d complain and keep our kids away and we’d demand change. It’s now time to do all the above with Exxon.

I’m a huge baseball fan and a full-on Nationals nut. But I’m also the father of an 11-year-old boy. Is my love of Major League baseball so great that I’d do the equivalent of offering my son a smoke?

What do you think, Washington Nationals?

To learn more and get involved with the campaign, visit Strike Out Exxon.

Here’s the good news: The Army Corps of Engineers is “racing” to complete a comprehensive levee system for metropolitan New Orleans by 2011 that actually takes into account global warming, at least in terms of sea-level rise.

Here’s the bad news: the levee system under development is wildly insufficient to the growing climate problem, according to many informed critics.

That’s because the vast and flat Louisiana coastal area — sometimes called the “Bangladesh of America” because it could disappear due to sea-level rise alone — cannot be saved just by building levees. It’s the one area of America which, to survive the rising water and bigger hurricanes of a warming world, must develop human-made barrier islands and coastal marshes as an additional emergency defense. These landforms, which can be crafted using the voluminous sediments of the Mississippi River itself, would create a vital buffer that complements the levees, according to a wide range of engineers.

“It all comes down to this: You simply can’t build the levees high enough under any scenario in Louisiana,” said Clifford Smith, a member of the prestigious Mississippi River Commission, a seven-member panel created by Congress to advise the corps on works projects. “That the corps still doesn’t act on this fact, doesn’t commit to building wetlands and barrier islands immediately, leaves me so depressed you can’t imagine it. I’m in depression over this.”

Ironically, many Americans still point to Hurricane Katrina as the event that finally got their attention on global warming. It’s impossible to definitively prove or disprove the connection of any single weather event to global warming. But it was Katrina and the record hurricane season of 2005 that left many folks wondering what was up with the weather. Nearly three years later, global warming practically dominates the daily news in dozens of different ways. Author Bill McKibben describes the change in our national awareness this way: “Katrina opened the door and Al Gore walked through it.”

Oliver Houck.

Photo: tulane.edu

But even after a Nobel Prize last fall for Gore, who shared it with the world’s leading climate scientists, and even after new studies showing hurricanes are getting bigger and more frequent due to warming oceans, the Army Corps can’t seem to commit to a protection plan that matches the global climate reality as it pertains to New Orleans.

“The number one thing protecting New Orleans right now is not the corps, it’s chance,” says Tulane University law professor and coastal protection activist Oliver Houck. “The historical odds show Katrina doesn’t come every day. That’s all that’s really protecting us right now. The odds.”

A Closer Look at Task Force Hope

To the corps’ credit, its massive “Task Force Hope” levee construction project, costing nearly $15 billion and slated for completion by 2011, will anticipate sea-level rise from global warming roughly equal to what has already been observed in recent decades. The plan also anticipates the natural sinking of the fragile Louisiana coast. Both factors affect how high a hurricane surge tide will be as it moves onto land. The levees, in theory, will also be built wide enough to allow engineers to add at least marginally to their height later on, creating so-called “lifts,” according to several spokespeople at the corps.

Dr. Lewis “Ed” Link.

Photo: usace.army.mil

“We know we have warming, and the corps is taking that in as a factor,” says Dr. Lewis “Ed” Link, former director of Research and Development at the corps and a chief contributor to the risk assessment modeling underlying the planned levee improvements. “Different [levee] segments will have different improvements based on land contours, but the range is 12 to 15 percent higher levees being planned for.”

The problem, according to a growing number of concerned observers, is that past warming rates and impacts are almost certainly no indication of the future now that NASA satellite imagery shows a rapidly deteriorating Greenland ice sheet.

How high will sea level go? Two feet by 2100? Ten feet? How big will hurricanes get? How frequently will they come? It’s uncertain, of course, but the observed trends and scientific forecasts keep getting worse. And if there’s one region of America that should plan for something akin to “the worst,” it’s the flat alluvial region of south Louisiana, home to one-third of America’s domestic seafood catch, lots and lots of oil and gas infrastructure, and the critically important port of New Orleans.

Both the deepening risks of climate change as well as the range of possible impacts argue for the abandonment of a de facto “levees only” approach, say Houck and others. What’s needed with an urgency and commitment equal to the levee plan is a program to build “nature’s levees,” also known as barrier islands and coastal marshes. These landforms have historically served to greatly lessen the impacts of past hurricanes on New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana coast. But it’s the Army Corps’ efforts to control Mississippi River flooding over the past century and a half that have caused these very land forms to erode and vanish.

Corps employees scope out damage caused by Hurricane Rita, a month after Katrina.

Photo: usace.army.mil

More than a million acres of land has turned to water in coastal Louisiana just since World War II. And if the coast has any hope of surviving the next Katrina (whose astonishing surge tide was up to 30 feet as she hit land in Louisiana), then much of this protective coastal terrain must be rebuilt — literally turning water back to land — and at a rate that outpaces sea-level rise and the expected growth in storm intensity.

Here’s where the planning truly breaks down within the Army Corps process, according to Smith and others. Ambitious initiatives to build new barrier islands and wetlands were expected to emerge from the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration bill passed by Congress in 2006. It called on the corps to present a comprehensive protection plan for coastal Louisiana — i.e., more than just levees — by December 2007. The corps missed the deadline, but now expects to deliver the plan this fall.

Unfortunately, no one privy to deliberations within the corps believes an adequate commitment to rapid land building will be forthcoming, no matter how clear the need.

“The problem is it’s not in the corps’ nature to ask Congress for new problems to solve,” said Mark Davis, recent past director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “This is an organization that historically has been a levee-building organization. That’s what it knows how to do. Using levees alone now is like asking a Revolutionary War soldier to fight in Iraq. You don’t have the right weapons.”

Building a Legacy

The missing weapon, according to Davis and others, is the Mississippi River itself. Carefully diverting part of the river’s muddy water away from the main stem and toward rapidly eroding coastal areas would allow sediments to build up and create land in the ancient delta-forming fashion. Special pipelines and canals could be used to surgically deliver the sediment-rich water to exactly the spots where land is needed most to protect against hurricane surges made worse by sea-level rise. With sufficient planning and funding — at least $28 billion — and a willingness to relocate at least some of the coastal population, there’s little doubt among engineers and coastal geologists that the process will succeed in making land.

“We could build entire barrier islands in 12 months or less,” says Davis, who now directs Tulane’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy.

There’s just no sign so far that the corps is ready to commit to the process. Without it, however, most serious observers view New Orleans as flat-out doomed.

The ultimate problem, according to Davis, is that the corps takes its orders directly from Congress, a body that has only recently begun to discuss climate change seriously, much less act on it. Congress has told the corps to build bigger and better levees as a result of Katrina, and it’s obeying. But there have been no direct orders pertaining to global warming. Indeed, just last May, a Senate bill that would require the corps to consider the impact of climate change in designing all its water resources projects nationwide fell nine votes short of the 60 needed to beat a filibuster. In that context, the corps’ decision to plan for even modest future sea-level rise in New Orleans might seem a minor miracle.

Will a new U.S. president and larger Democratic majorities in Congress change the nation’s approach to saving coastal Louisiana? Maybe. But what’s really needed is a realization among a majority of American voters that life without New Orleans will be one of the biggest and most painful — and perhaps earliest — casualties of global warming.

And if we can’t save New Orleans, is there really any hope for Miami, Charleston, New York, Annapolis, and all the other low-lying coastal cities in the queue?

Culturally, politically, and spiritually, what country in the world is most like the United States? It’s not Canada and it’s sure not Great Britain. The answer is Australia. Ask anyone who’s been there. It just feels like America there, from the sprawling suburbs to the cars people drive, from the obsession with sports to their unit of currency: the Australian dollar. Add these factors too: both countries were British colonies, both wiped out indigenous peoples, both have big cities in the east and vast frontiers to the west, both have huge coal deposits and per capita greenhouse-gas emissions that lead most of the world, and, in the last several years, both have had conservative national governments that basically deny the reality of global warming. The Aussies R Us!

So how, then, did Australia just complete a national election where the issue of climate change played a central role and may have determined the outcome? How did a country so steeped in America’s brand of fierce self-reliance, consumerism, and fossil-fuel addiction throw out a “climate skeptic” prime minister and hand a landslide victory to a Labor candidate who talked persistently about ratifying Kyoto? And most important, if they can do it Down Under, is there still hope for America?

Feeling the heat

Several factors help explain how a “global-warming candidate,” Labor’s Kevin Rudd, unseated incumbent John Howard after 11 years of conservative rule. But first among them is probably the nation’s nightmarish drought. Beginning in 2002, the drought conditions intensified each year until a staggering 25 percent of all food production was lost in 2007. Emaciated livestock now roam a vast landscape of dry riverbeds. Rice production and wine grapes have been devastated. Food prices have soared and up to 1 percent of the nation’s entire GDP has been lost, according to credible estimates.

With drinking water now in danger of running out in much of the country, and multiple scientific reports linking the dryness to global warming, Australians registered growing concern in opinion polls prior to the Nov. 24 election. But incumbent John Howard vigorously denied any climate connection for years and told voters to simply pray for rain and, if so inclined, change their light bulbs. Labor’s Rudd, however, openly connected the drought to global warming during the campaign and called for clean, efficient energy as a path to preserving public health and the nation’s agricultural heritage.

But drought alone did not push global warming from background noise to a top issue in a country long tolerant of a do-nothing government. Australian journalist Wilson Da Silva, a former president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, says that — ironically — developments in far-off America played a role too. The first was Hurricane Katrina. Among U.S. cities, New Orleans has always been a favorite among Australians, and to watch the horrors of 2005 just as new scientific studies showed a connection between warmer oceans and bigger storms, made a big impression.

Then came “Hurricane Gore.” An Inconvenient Truth was proportionally twice as big a box-office hit Down Under than even in America, and Gore made several high profile trips to the country in its aftermath. “It changed the way many Australians see the world and themselves in it,” says Da Silva.

Aussie business leaders demanded climate action

Also key to the electorate’s changing mood was the fact that major Australian business leaders broke ranks with the Howard government over global warming prior to the vote. American Cathy Zoi, a Gore confidant who spent 12 years in Australia working on energy issues, says beginning in 2006 top businesses began calling for national legislation to cap carbon emissions. Why? “Because Australia is heavily dependent on foreign trade, and leaders could see the inevitable carbon constraints coming through Kyoto or subsequent agreements, and they wanted some certainty and process and predictability to prepare,” says Zoi. “It was the smart business move.”

But even with Katrina and Gore and business support for action on greenhouse gases, it’s unlikely global warming would have been such a driving force in the national election if not for the daily backdrop of brutal, unprecedented drought, says Da Silva. “The drought set the table for all the other pieces,” he says. “So many voters went to the polls with climate at least somewhere on their minds, I think.”

Many Australians are particularly alarmed by climate data suggesting this could be the “new normal.” To paraphrase one noted climate scientist: When there’s a genuine climate shift, you no longer call it drought. We don’t say the Sahara Desert is suffering from drought.

Voters went to the polls wondering if talk of massive and costly desalinization plants along the coastlines, with water then trucked to interior cities, was about to become the unthinkable future.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to quantify the precise impact global warming had on the final vote in Australia. Two other issues — education and the economy — were prime campaign issues too. But the size of the Labor victory has left most observers pointing to climate as a big factor. Labor’s 6 percent rise in the popular vote over the last election was the second-highest rise since WWII. Labor was left with an 86-61 majority in Parliament, and astonishingly, John Howard not only lost the PM slot, he was booted out of office altogether, losing his Parliamentary seat from the Sydney suburbs, the first time that had happened since 1929.

Can it happen in America?

So here’s the big question: can an election like this happen in America? Given all the historic and contemporary parallels between us and the Aussies, can we, too, push climate change from a middle-of-the-pack political issue to the place it belongs: at the urgent center of the current presidential campaign? Again, the eerie parallels suggest it’s feasible. After all, for Americans, Hurricane Katrina not only happened, it happened to us, on our shores. And Al Gore not only happened, he’s bloody one of us. And we’ve suffered long and fitfully under a do-nothing right-winger. And U.S. businesses are starting to call for reasonable action on global warming. Perhaps all we’re missing is a really, really big drought. Oh, wait, we have that, too. Perhaps not as bad as in Australia, but what about those 1 million Californians displaced by wildfires this fall? And the appalling prospect of Atlanta running out of drinking water within months? These drought-driven events are pushing us steadily toward new extremes of suffering and climate consciousness.

So what is it? What’s wrong? Why aren’t we already moving like the Australians? On closer examination I think the answer is obvious. What we’re missing is Kevin Rudd. To his credit, the Labor candidate surprised many political observers when he made climate change one of his core issues. It had never been done before. But Rudd stuck with it, speaking prominently about global warming wherever he went. He ran numerous, expensive radio and TV ads just on climate change. He repeatedly attacked Howard on the matter saying, “there is no more important difference between us than on climate change.” In the process, Rudd more than matched minds with average voters, and he was rewarded handsomely.

Of course John McCain and most of the Democrats running for the White House have great plans to fight global warming, too. But the issue is just one of many for them. And as climate blogger Joe Romm points out, you can’t run effectively on ten issues. You have to pick the two or three that are most important and you communicate those over and over again. None of the Democrats are doing this on climate change like Kevin Rudd did. Even Gore didn’t make it a top issue in 2000. Kerry didn’t in 2004. And now Hillary Clinton, to name one contender, only briefly mentions it during most events.

Yet Clinton complains to global-warming activists that, on the campaign trail, she doesn’t see as much enthusiasm for the climate issue as for other issues. But perhaps if she had more enthusiasm for the issue, it would be mirrored back to her because, make no mistake, Americans have never cared more about the issue or been more educated thanks to near nonstop media coverage of everything from glaciers to sea-level rise.

America needs a climate leader

Bottom line: Americans, like Australians, are ready to be led on global warming. They just need a leader. Wilson Da Silva describes the recent election Down Under as a “perfect storm.” Everything came together: the drought, an incumbent government horrible on global warming, voters restless for action, and a challenger bold enough to make it a core issue. Then, finally, victory. Rudd’s first official act as prime minister was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, committing his country to mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our very own Kevin Rudd burst forth from the presidential primary pack, allowing us to complete the long list of parallels and finally, on the most important issue of our time, become just like the Australians?