The environmental movement’s challenge isn’t energy, it’s power.

Power is what prompts political change. Shifts in power, application of power. Not necessarily power on Capitol Hill, but at least enough power to force Capitol Hill to act. Environmentalists lack the power necessary to effect any major change because there are only a few environmental champions in positions of power in the United States: a few in the private sector, a few in Congress, a very few in the administration, almost no one in the media.

In order to make change, the movement needs to build political power. But instead it’s consumed with building energy in an already-energetic base.

As David Roberts notes here and as I’ve noted before, passion and energy are critical to change. Without passion and a desire to make the status quo snap, nothing happens. But that passion has to exist within the powerful. And right now it doesn’t.

Last weekend, tens of thousands of protestors met on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand that the president reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Organizers celebrated the turnout, hailing it as the largest climate rally in history.

That may be, but it’s certainly not the largest environmental rally in history. On the first Earth Day in 1970, an estimated 1 million people rallied just in New York City, and nearly 20 million across the country. In 2000, a large Earth Day rally in D.C. was mirrored throughout the country. While those were more broadly focused on the environment, they likely matched last weekend’s crowd in energy. And large swaths of every such crowd shared a similar message: Take action to protect the Earth. Only the specifics varied.

The environmental movement has been sparking passion in the U.S. for more than 40 years, and calling on the government to act. At one time the government did: President Nixon created the EPA the same year as those first rallies. Change was effected because that passion occurred among the powerful: A broad swath of voters in the 1970s supported improving the environment, Gallup notes; Congress passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Energy coupled with power made change.

What environmental organizations failed to do was institutionalize that power. Rallies and petitions sparked change, so rallies and petitions remained prominent strategies for decades. That power trickled away as the environment improved and core activists aged and the fossil fuel industry and other polluters increasingly wielded their own power. When the climate crisis burst into national consciousness with An Inconvenient Truth, environmental organizations knew how to file lawsuits against the EPA and hold rallies, but weren’t prepared to deal with the energy of new supporters. 350.org stepped into the vacuum, but without a plan for building political power, it, too, has seen limited success. American voters en masse are a powerful group, but their passion has dissipated.

Rallies like last Sunday’s won’t change that. Consider it from the point of view of a non-activist. Without political power and without powerful champions in the media, rally organizers were able to generate only limited awareness of the event. Democracy Now! covered the rally, but non-activists don’t watch Democracy Now! [Editor’s note: 350.org points out that Sunday’s rally got a fair bit of coverage from the mainstream media.] Had they watched it, they would have seen protestors, mostly young, carrying signs with pictures of the Earth and various slogans. In short: They would have seen little they hadn’t seen before. The rally may have whipped up some passion, but it was almost certainly among the already-passionate.

This is the media’s fault, yes. But the media only covers what it is convinced is important. There are two times the media has given widespread coverage to climate change lately. The first was when Sandy demolished the East Coast; the second, when President Obama raised the topic in his inauguration and State of the Union speeches. In the case of Sandy, we had a (frightening, deadly) aberration from the norm. In the case of Obama, he wields power. The rally last weekend had neither of those qualities. Fifty thousand people from various parts of the country may be a lot of people, but it’s not a lot of political power.

So how can the environmental movement make the passionate powerful — or how can it make the powerful passionate? Sandy prompted Obama to show passion on climate change. As time progresses, other disasters will likely spur other powerful entities to act. But if the goal is to prevent those disasters, there needs to be another strategy.

On Wednesday, Politico outlined political spending by PACs in January. ExxonMobil spent $51,000. BP spent $4,000. A Michigan utility spent $65,500. The National Mining Association spent $26,000. The League of Conservation Voters spent $1,300.

Spending money is not the only way to build political power. But building political power, in the form of building allies in Congress and in statehouses, does require investment. National environmental organizations have massive, inert, largely dispassionate memberships. There’s nascent power in that, but power that is largely uncoupled from energy.

What if environmental organizations pooled resources into a PAC that could target political races? What if those organizations asked their millions of members to get involved in politics? What if the unprecedented shift the Sierra Club took wasn’t its executive director spending an hour at a D.C. police station but was instead an insistence that the time for political apathy had ended? If that happened, if hundreds of thousands of members donated time and money and new bursts of energy to politics? Then we might see change.

Then we might get hard-green members of Congress, holding that body hostage to the demands of the future in the same way that no-tax extremists now hold it hostage to the past. There might be reason for the allies of fossil fuels to fear every other November, as this mega-PAC poured money and local volunteers into primary elections. There might be media coverage of this new entity shaking up American politics, leveraging the assets and passions of Americans to actually effect change.

This is not a quick strategy. It would be a deliberate, forceful tool for establishing a bulwark within the American political infrastructure. It would force the sort of conflict that needs to be forced — not between greens outside the White House gates and the Democratic president within, but between well-funded activists and the favored congressmembers of fossil fuel companies. It would require environmental organizations to put the environment over their own best interests, which is never easy for any institution.

But what activists are doing is what activists have always done, and it isn’t working. The question isn’t whether the Keystone XL pipeline is blocked, it’s whether the established power structure in the United States is willing to combat climate change. Even if the answer to the first is yes, the answer to the second is clearly no. That’s the problem that needs to be fixed.

There are people in Washington, D.C., right now scratching their heads and writing memos and trying to figure out how on earth we might possibly avoid budgetary doomsday, the sequestration that will lop some $1.2 trillion out of the federal budget over the next decade. Again, this is only happening because Congress tried to threaten itself. It’s like you threatening to rob yourself by holding a gun to your head and then trying to figure out how to keep from being robbed.

But while all of this is happening, something else is going on in Our Nation’s Capital™: Pipeline companies are getting an even larger tax break than expected. From Bloomberg:

A tax break used by oil and gas pipeline companies such as Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP (KMP) will cost the U.S. government $7 billion through 2016, about four times more than previously estimated, Congress’s tax scorekeepers said this month.

The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation quadrupled its cost estimate for exempting the fast-growing “master limited partnerships” from corporate income tax in the year ended in September to $1.2 billion from $300 million. The annual cost will rise to $1.6 billion by fiscal 2016, the committee said.

$7 billion. $1.6 billion a year. Tack on the estimated $4 billion in tax breaks the oil industry receives each year, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

Some people, new to American politics, think this pipeline tax break will become a political target. If it does, it will only be a target for as long as it takes for the American Petroleum Institute to do some overwrought hand-wringing about job creation. Then it will be ignored once again.

After all, with sequestration threatening to devastate funding for education, public safety, public health, child care programs, worker training, and the military, D.C.’s best minds are already occupied with problem-solving. And they’ll get the job done, no need to worry. In short order, they’ll figure out how to avoid those cuts to the military. That thief won’t steal all their money.

It is awards season, everyone! For cool people (well, cooler people than me) that means it’s time for the distribution of Grammys and Emmys and Oscars and Whatevers. For other people, it’s awards and accolades strewn upon Capitol Hill, meaning the various ratings of members of Congress by media entities and advocacy organizations.

It is, as I have analogized previously, like the trophies given out at the end of a season to kids in a youth basketball league, except some of the awards come from the coaches and others come from fawning parents. Like youth basketball awards, these accolades will sit on shelves in the corners of rooms for a few years and eventually be thrown out.

Anyway, here they are.

The League of Conservation Voters

Every year, the LCV ranks how members of the House and Senate vote on issues related to the environment. How did those august bodies fare this year, LCV?

From an environmental perspective, the best that can be said about the second session of the 112th Congress is that it is over. Indeed, the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives continued its war on the environment, public health, and clean energy throughout 2012, cementing its record as the most anti-environmental House in our nation’s history. …

The good news is that while the U.S. House voted against the environment with alarming frequency, both the U.S. Senate and the Obama administration stood firm against the vast majority of these attacks. There are 14 Senate votes included in the 2012 Scorecard, many of which served as a sharp rebuke of the House’s polluter-driven agenda.

Very, very surprising, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The LCV also made little maps, so you can see which states hate the Earth the most. Here’s the House, which really hates the Earth a lot.

And the Senate, which hates it a little less.

You can see at the bottom there the average vote for each body: The House voted the right way on environmentally important legislation 42 percent of the time; the Senate did 56 percent. Nice work, everyone. You can also see how that compares to other congresses in this graph.

The terrible House has gotten terribler recently which, again, is completely unsurprising.

But no one cares how each team did. People want to know about the players. Who was the most environmentally friendly member of the House? Was it Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio)? Was it Rep. Paul Ryan (R-VP)? No, it was not either of those guys! Eight House members had perfect scores: Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Woolsey (D-Calif.), Stark (D-Calif.), Honda (D-Calif.), Capps (D-Calif.), Polis (D-Col.), Quigley (D-Ill.), Markey (D-Mass.). Nice work, everyone. Here is a small trophy to put in your district office.

Here’s the full scorecard [PDF], which should be used for betting purposes.

The National Journal and some conservative group

Remember how this article was about awards season? Yes, it’s still about that.

The Huffington Post runs down (in both senses) these other accolades.

Every year, the National Journal determines the ideological standouts from within the Democratic and Republican caucuses in the House and Senate. It takes the “roll-call votes in the second session of the 112th Congress,” and sorts through them until it has identified the ones that put the ideological differences between the parties in the sharpest relief. The Journal checks who voted for what on those occasions, subjects those votes to statistical analysis, assigns weights “based on the degree to which it correlated with other votes in the same issue area,” and factors in the various absences and abstentions. Finally, they cut the head off the duck and watch the duck’s dying torso stagger around a Ouija board while listening to Enya. Ha, just kidding, I made up the part that actually sounds like it might have been fun!

At any rate, after all is said and done, the Journal arrives at results. And so, without further ado, your 2012 winners:

– Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) is the most conservative senator.

– Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tied for the most liberal senator.

– Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) is the most conservative member of the House (like you couldn’t have guessed that).

– And a whole mess of Democratic representatives have tied for the most liberal member of the House. They are Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), Pete Stark (D-Calif.), Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), John Olver (D-Mass.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), John Lewis (D-Ga.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Mike Honda (D-Calif.), Donna Edwards (D-Md.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), and I promise you that is it.

And some conservative group gave awards!

Those who score 100 percent on the [that group's] scale get recognized as a “Defender of Liberty.” This year, the senators earning that distinction are: Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

The similarly honored House members are Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Mike Conaway (R-Texas), Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), John Fleming (R-La.), Bill Flores (R-Texas), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), Tom Graves (R-Ga.), Wally Herger (R-Calif.), Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Jeff Landry (R-La.), Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), Pete Olson (R-Texas), Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Tom Price (R-Ga.), Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), Ed Royce (R-Calif.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).

The LCV rankings for the senators were 35. In sum. Cumulatively. I didn’t bother to add up those for the House, but it was probably the same grand total.

My personal rankings

Everyone got a 100 percent and a pizza party.

As Hurricane Katrina approached, many Americans for the first time learned about New Orleans’ precarious, below-sea-level orientation. The city is described as “bowl-like,” rimmed by levees and natural structures that might not hold back surging storm water — and might make drying out nearly impossible. It turned out that the analogy was imperfect. New Orleans is more like a TV dinner tray, and only the Ninth Ward ended up flooded.

After Katrina, anyway — a category 3 storm when it hit. But as sea levels continue to rise, and warming promises bigger storms, New Orleans’ complete submersion may be inevitable. From The Lens:

Stunning new data not yet publicly released shows Louisiana losing its battle with rising seas much more quickly than even the most pessimistic studies have predicted to date. …

Southeast Louisiana — with an average elevation just three feet above sea level — has long been considered one of the landscapes most threatened by global warming. That’s because the delta it’s built on — starved of river sediment and sliced by canals — is sinking at the same time that oceans are rising. The combination of those two forces is called relative sea-level rise, and its impact can be dramatic.

Scientists have come up with four scenarios of sea-level rise, ranging from .2 meters (8 inches) to 2 meters (about 6.5 feet). They’re using the mid-range figure, about 4.5 feet, to make local projections of relative sea-level rise.

For example, tide-gauge measurements at Grand Isle, about 50 miles south of New Orleans, have shown an average annual sea-level rise over the past few decades of 9.24 millimeters (about one-third of an inch) while those at Key West, which has very little subsidence, read only 2.24 millimeters.

For decades coastal planners used that Grand Isle gauge as the benchmark for the worst case of local sea-level rise because it was one of the highest in the world. But as surveying crews began using more advanced instruments, they made a troubling discovery.

Readings at a distance inland were even worse than at Grand Isle. “For example,” Osborne said, “we have rates of 11.2 millimeters along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain — the metro New Orleans area. And inside the city we have places with almost [a half-inch] per year.

The Lens article includes this graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

Orleans parish, the one expected to be 85.3 percent under sea level by 2100, is home to the city of New Orleans.

Of course, as noted above, New Orleans is also more than half below sea level already. It’s like taking one of those cafeteria trays with the separate triangular sections and pushing it down into a bathtub. The more you push — or the more the water in the tub rises — the more it encroaches around the rim, surface tension holding it back. Eventually, as happened in 2005, it will give.

The only way to prevent that from happening is to build a larger lip around the outside, requiring a generous outlay of money and a great deal of urgency.

[NOAA’s Tim Osborne said,] “Based on the frequency of storms over the last century, we know we can expect 30 to 40 hurricanes or tropical storms to hit this area by the end of this century. Think of Isaac — not of Katrina — and add up the cost of that kind of destruction 30 or 40 times.

“During Isaac, Louisiana [Highway] 1 to Grand Isle was almost impassable. It will be impassable in a few decades unless something is done. Look at what happened to Plaquemines Parish from Category 1 Isaac. More and worse will happen in the next few decades.”

Osborne stressed the new figures mean the state’s Master Plan should be adjusted to meet the larger, faster-approaching threat.

“People are already questioning the wisdom of spending huge sums to protect Louisiana,” he said. “The state needs to make sure they’re proposing plans that will last more than a few decades, that they aren’t asking for billions to build things that might be ineffective before they are even finished being built.”

In 2009, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) openly opposed efforts to curb climate change. By 2100, of course, he’ll no longer be in office and his name will likely be forgotten. After all, can you name the governor of Atlantis?

Everyone is excited about rumors that President Obama will name Ernest Moniz to run the Department of Energy. Reactions range from “Who is Ernest Moniz?” to “What happened to the other guy?” to “Who was the other guy?”

Well, we are here to answer those questions! (The first one, anyway; we’ve answered the other two before.) Since you live a fast-paced lifestyle, always on the go, we’ve broken it up into bite-sized pieces, one bit of info at a time. You are welcome in advance.

Who is Ernest Moniz?

Well, he might be the next secretary of energy — if Obama nominates him and if the Senate approves him. It is possible that in two months time he will be of very little interest to you, having not been confirmed. Or he will be of very little interest to you because he was confirmed, but you, like most Americans, are fairly indifferent to the office of secretary of energy.

But you knew that. So here’s who he is, as articulated by Reuters, which appears to have been first with rumors of his imminent nomination.

Moniz, a former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative, a research group that gets funding from industry heavyweights including BP, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco for academic work on projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.

Ha ha. Sounds great! We will come back to this part, obviously.

At MIT, Moniz led intensive studies about the future of coal, nuclear energy and natural gas, and he helped attract funding and research momentum to energy projects on campus.

People familiar with Moniz’s work said, if chosen, he would bring his own energy and pragmatism to the job. …

Moniz earned kudos for a pragmatic approach toward using research to find ways to reduce carbon pollution from fossil fuels and transition to cleaner forms of energy.

We’ll come back to this, too.

What does he look like?

Well, he looks like this:

But more evocatively, he kind of looks like a Founding Father who teaches high-school English in New Hampshire.

Has he ever been in any movies?

No. According to IMDB, he’s only ever been on Frontline. Put those autograph books away!

What’s his actual, non-summarized background?

Here’s part of his bio at MIT:

Professor Moniz received a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude in physics from Boston College, a doctorate in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Athens, the University of Erlangen-Nurenburg, and Michigan State University. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Saclay, France, and at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Moniz is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Humboldt Foundation, and the American Physical Society and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received the 1998 Seymour Cray HPCC Industry Recognition Award for vision and leadership in advancing scientific simulation and, in 2008, the Grand Cross of the Order of Makarios III for contributions to development of research, technology and education in Cyprus and the wider region.

(Honestly, “the Grand Cross of the Order of Makarios III” sounds made up.)

I would like to hear him in his own words, please.

Fine. Here you go, via Switch Energy Project, as pointed out to us by D. Ray Long.

How do environmental groups feel about his possible nomination?

A charitable way to describe how they feel would be: mixed.

As noted above, his program at MIT receives a lot of money from fossil fuel interests. And Moniz has been unabashed in his advocacy of the use of natural gas as a “bridge” fuel and even for some expansion of nuclear power. (You can read his thoughts on the latter here.)

The Hill has a small collection of quotes from disaffected greens, but the better overview comes from Inside Climate News, which has a good article on Moniz’s background. It starts with his thoughts on natural gas.

In December, while speaking at the University of Texas at Austin, Moniz warned that while natural gas could reduce carbon emissions by displacing coal-fired electricity, its increasing use could also slow growth in the clean energy sector.

“When it comes to carbon, [natural] gas is part of our solution at least for some time,” said Moniz, who served as undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration. “And we should take advantage of the time to innovate and bring down the cost of renewables. The worst thing w[ould] be is to get time and not use it. And that I’m afraid is where we are.”

This isn’t incorrect, mind you — natural gas has spurred a drop in carbon emissions and is certainly going to be part of the mix. But it’s not something that most environmental organizations are currently championing, especially given the process usually used to extract that gas: fracking.

Moniz has accepted fracking as a necessary-but-unnecessarily-polluting evil. In 2011, Moniz presented a report from his MIT group to the Senate, saying:

“Regulation of shale (and other oil and gas) activity is generally controlled at the state level, meaning that acceptable practices can vary between shale plays,” Moniz wrote in his prepared testimony. “The MIT study recommends that in order to minimize environmental impacts, current best practice regulation and oversight should be applied uniformly to all shales.”

Moniz didn’t elaborate on how to standardize regulations and oversight …

“Prior to carrying out our analysis, we had an open mind as to whether natural gas would indeed be a ‘bridge’ to a low-carbon future,” he told the committee. “In broad terms, we find that, given the large amounts of natural gas available in the U.S. at moderate cost … natural gas can indeed play an important role over the next couple of decades (together with demand management) in economically advancing a clean energy system.”

At the same time, however, the report projected that natural gas will “eventually become too carbon intensive” and should be phased out around 2050.

Moniz’s record also demonstrates commitment to renewable energy development.

As a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he helped write a 2010 report that recommended a federal investment of $16 billion per year for clean energy innovation — about triple the 2010 investment. Some of that money could come from the private sector, the report said. For example, “we use about 200 billion gallons of transportation fuel annually, so a two cents per gallon charge would … generate about $4 billion per year.” It said the same amount of money could be raised by charging a fee for the electricity used nationwide — a suggestion Moniz reiterated at the Texas conference.

Expect this to come up during confirmation hearings.

So, will he be confirmed by the Senate?

Well, given the drawn-out, ridiculous path Republican Chuck Hagel has been forced to crawl in his bid to be secretary of defense, God only knows. Granted, defense is a more high-profile Cabinet position, but it seems clear that his nomination happened under the belief that confirmation would be easier than it has been.

And, of course, Moniz would first have to be nominated.

OK. So, will he be nominated?

As before: God only knows. Well, God and Obama.

Encana is a Canadian oil and gas company that’s seen its share of troubles in recent years, as oil and gas companies are wont to do. One of its wells in Colorado exploded last August, killing a worker. In 2009, the EPA found evidence that its fracking fluid was contaminating water in Wyoming. In December, we learned that Encana has a permit from the EPA to do a little aquifer polluting, prompting a bit of blowback for both company and agency.

Encana executives, therefore, will be forgiven for feeling a little frustrated. They’re just trying to drill up oil and gas and sell it at a profit while letting your lungs and the atmosphere incur the cost of the pollution, is that so wrong? So when a reporter asked executives a question they found insulting, one responded more colorfully than would be generally recommended. From Reuters:

Encana Corp, Canada’s largest natural gas producer, apologized on Thursday because one of its executives cursed after an analyst asked about whether new Canadian investment rules would prohibit its takeover by foreign state-owned entities.

When asked the question by Canaccord Genuity analyst Phil Skolnick, interim CEO Clayton Woitas said: “The answer would be no.” Then, in a whispered comment that was clearly audible on a replay of the call, someone can be heard saying, “fucking asshole.”

The good folks at Boing Boing got ahold of audio of the comment in question.

Clearly the company is obsessed with gas-filled orifices.

Of course, oil company executives being what they are, Encana is now trying to have the clip removed from the internet. From The Globe and Mail:

Encana, in its request, says:

“Encana is the copyright owner of the Recording. It was expressly stated at the outset of the Conference Call that ‘this conference call may not be recorded or rebroadcast without the express consent of Encana Corporation’,” the letter states.

“The Recording has been posted without Encana’s consent. The unauthorized use of this Recording clearly constitutes copyright infringement. … Encana views this matter extremely seriously and requests that you respond to the undersigned on or before the close of business on Friday, February 22, 2013, failing which, Encana will have no other recourse but to take all actions as may be available to it to protect its proprietary rights.”

Ha ha, oh, Encana. Clearly modern technology is not your strong suit. Demanding a clip be removed from the internet is basically equivalent to standing on top of a mountain and screaming HEY INTERNET, LISTEN TO THIS. So: Hey, internet! Listen to this audio clip, conveniently embedded above!

And, in fact, that request is basically the only reason we wrote this post. You know what members of the media are like, after all. Fucking assholes.

Mosquitoes are, at best, horrible annoyances. At worst? They are genocidal maniacs, responsible for more than half a million deaths a year, transmitting malaria and other diseases. Were causing extinction subject to popular vote, mosquitoes would win in a landslide.

All of that, relative to the moment, is the good news. Now, the bad.

Mosquitoes laugh at your so-called repellant.

Well, they don’t laugh, as such, lacking the capacity for forced expulsion of air from their probosci and, likewise, any sense of humor. Point is, the most common chemical used to repel the little idiots is losing its effectiveness. From Smithsonian.com:

A group of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered that three hours after an exposure to DEET, many Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were immune to the chemical, ignoring its typically noxious smell and attempting to land on irresistible human skin. …

So why did the mosquitoes, as a whole, overcome their dislike of DEET? Previous studies by this group and others have found particular mosquitoes with a genetic mutation that made them innately immune to DEET, but they say that this case is different, because they didn’t demonstrate this ability from the start.

They suspect, instead, that the insects’ antennae became less chemically sensitive to DEET over time, as evidenced by electroantennography on the mosquitoes’ odor receptors after each of the tests — a phenomenon not unlike a person getting used to the smell of, say, the ocean or a manufacturing plant near his or her house.

In other words, all picnics should now be scheduled for two hours, 55 minutes in length.

That point about genetic mutation is an interesting one, worth pulling out. After all, one strategy used in Key West last year called for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that would deplete the region’s supply of blood-suckers by greatly decreasing the bugs’ lifespans. The proposal prompted some concern, quite understandably: Regular mosquitoes are bad enough. But mutants?

It’s not clear what the repercussions of mutated mosquitoes might be.

In a very good, thoughtful article that will appear in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the unintended consequences of tweaking skeeters. After noting how mosquitoes are adapting to mosquito nets (feeding more often during the day), Koerth-Baker considers the consequences of proposed plans to modify the insects or the malaria virus to reduce the damage each can do.

[A]ll solutions, whether as simple as a net or as complicated as splicing genes, come with risks. For instance, Aedes aegypti is the species primarily responsible for spreading dengue. It’s present around the world, but outside North Africa, it’s an invasive species. If scientists use flightless female modifications against A. aegypti and succeed in decreasing its presence in, say, Mexico City, then what will fill its ecological niche there? (What is its ecological niche anyway? One entomologist told me that we don’t even have a great understanding of mosquitoes’ place in our ecosystem, because we have focused our efforts on killing them rather than observing them.)

Even curing a disease poses risks, because in all likelihood it won’t stay cured forever. If G.M. mosquitoes completely neutered the malaria parasite’s threat, even in one part of the world, it would be an incredible success story. But what happens if the parasite adapts to circumvent the tools we’ve used to fight it? Today we know how to take precautions to prevent malaria transmissions and fight the disease with antimalarial drugs. But in the future, some version of malaria could surge through a population of humans without the cultural knowledge or pharmaceuticals necessary to defend themselves against it.

So, to summarize: Using repellant deters mosquitoes for a few hours. Genetically modifying them bears unknown risks. Oh, and as the world gets warmer, the insects’ range and seasons of activity expand, as we saw last year in Alaska.

But don’t worry. It’s winter. It will be weeks before mosquitoes are hovering over stagnant pools of water, attuned to your exhaled breath and ready to suck your blood. Make the most of it.

“Americans’ Priorities,” the graph is labelled. Underneath, four issues, and the extent to which Americans feel they require urgent action, as suggested to Pew Research. And so:

The most important issue for Congress to address this year, supported by 70 percent of Americans? The long-term deficit. Least urgent of the four? Climate change. Incorrect, America.

From USA Today:

There is bipartisan agreement on this: Dealing with the budget deficit is urgent.

That’s a change. When Obama took office in 2009, during a cascading financial crisis, Americans put deficit reduction in the middle of a list of policy goals in a Pew poll. Now it has risen near the top. Seven of 10 Americans (including not only 81% of Republicans but also 65% of Democrats) say it is essential for the president and Congress to enact major deficit legislation this year. …

When asked which of four issues was most pressing — the deficit, guns, immigration or climate change — 51% chose the deficit, three times that of any other issue. However, there were some significant differences by race and ethnicity. Hispanics were inclined to choose immigration as the most critical issue; African Americans chose guns.

Here’s the breakdown on the urgency question by political party (compared to “everyone”, which represents the entire pool of respondents).

Even most Democrats don’t see an urgent need for action on climate change — fewer than half say it’s a priority for this year. That’s astonishing.

When Pew asked about specific climate policies, the results were a bit more heartening. (You can read Pew’s summary of the data here.)

For example, people were asked which energy policy is more important: developing alternative energy sources or expanding fossil fuel production. Fifty-four percent of respondents said alternative source development was more important; 34 percent (including a majority of Republicans) said fossil fuel exploration was.

Pew also notes that this is a shift in the recent trend. Support for alternative energy had declined from 2011 to 2012. Now, it’s shot back up.

In part, it’s a function of strong support among young people — which, of course, also correlates to political party.

Pew’s final climate-related question was whether or not respondents support stricter limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants, one of the few things Obama can do unilaterally (even if he’s shown no inclination to do so).

Surprisingly, over 60 percent of respondents favor such action — and Republicans were nearly split, 42 percent in favor compared to 48 percent against.

What does all of this mean? Not a lot. Obama has support to act on developing alternative energy and regulating carbon dioxide emissions — at least until the full weight of opposition and Fox News punditry bears down. If there’s one thing this data suggests, it’s that the views of Americans, typically disinterested in the fine mechanics of government, are shaped by pundits and media focus. There’s absolutely no reason for Americans to consider the deficit more important than gun control or immigration, and especially no reason for them to consider the deficit more urgent than climate change, a problem that grows worse by the minute. But that’s not what is discussed on the news and on news websites. And so that’s not what’s reflected in this poll.

We all know the next step. This poll, blurred by insider priorities, will be held aloft by insiders as proof they were right. And some time, hopefully in the next few years, Obama and Congress will actually take steps to fight climate change.

Last week, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced that they will soon introduce comprehensive climate change legislation. It would make for an interesting debate in the Senate; it would be light years better than policy that exists currently. It also has literally no chance of passing either chamber.

Which has prompted the American Petroleum Institute’s Jack Gerard to dig the bill a grave for the purposes of offering a dancefloor. From The Hill:

American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard said he did not expect the Senate to vote on the bill …

“I think no, it will not get to the floor, and I think the reason it won’t get to the floor is the dynamics surrounding carbon has changed,” Gerard told E&E TV.

Specifically, Gerard cited increased use of natural gas, which has helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. over the past several years. However, don’t worry: Gerard is still spectacularly wrong.

The reason the bill may not/probably won’t get to the Senate floor is that the “dynamics surrounding carbon” haven’t changed one fucking bit. There’s still no political will to act on the issue, just as there has been no will to act on the issue for years. And that is solely a function of the work done by people like Jack Gerard, the Wayne LaPierre of oil production, who has built his empire on the back of the status quo. Gerard’s reason for existence, the reason he earned a reported $6.4 million in 2010, is to keep the dynamics surrounding carbon exactly where they are.

If the dynamics surrounding carbon pollution had actually changed, so would policies affecting carbon pollution. This bill is doomed to failure not because the climate problem has been solved; it’s because the political problem hasn’t been. Which is exactly how Jack Gerard wants it.

Here’s what gas prices have done over the last month:

This isn’t an unprecedented rise; prices went up last February, too.

What’s odd, though, is that the recent rise isn’t tied to rising crude oil prices, the traditional reason prices fluctuate.

So what’s happening? The Washington Post dug into it, noting concerns over Middle East stability, lower production by OPEC, and the continuing high price of oil — though crude prices dropped significantly yesterday.

One key factor is limited refinery capacity.

[S]ome analysts … pointed to refinery issues. Several refineries have been shut down for routine maintenance, and in the eastern United States, several refineries simply went out of business in the past year.

“Atlantic Basin capacity closures have improved refining fundamentals,” the nation’s biggest refiner, Valero, said in a slide presentation at a Credit Suisse conference this month. It estimated that refineries have closed nearly 1 million barrels a day of capacity on the East Coast or in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the past two years, which Valero said allowed it to increase profit margins.

Refinery constraints were a key factor in California’s huge gas price spike last summer. Let’s go back to the law of supply and demand. Less supply means increased demand, which means more profits. Valero’s suggestion that reducing refinery capacity increased profit margins falls squarely in line with that: Less crude oil refined into gasoline means less gasoline, which means a higher price per gallon. Granted, these refineries didn’t all close this month, but combined with other factors, the closures appear to be playing a role — and may help explain why the price of gas is going up independent of the price of crude oil.

Let that be consolation to you next time you go to fill up. It’s just basic supply and demand, manipulated by oil companies. As it always has and always will, the system works.