Chris Hayes spins elaborate thoughts on complex issues into diagrammable sentences -- and makes that process look as easy as breathing.

Normally he performs this stunt on cable TV as MSNBC's weekend morning host. Recently he gave us an in-person demonstration at Grist HQ, where he paid a visit to talk about his new book, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy, and how its ideas relate to the political deadlock over climate change.

Hayes spoke for an hour with David Roberts and other Grist staffers about his analysis of the paralytic dysfunction of the American elite. He paints the 1% as an overcompensated tribe of hyper-competitors who jealously propagate their privileges yet cling to the delusion that they are self-made superpeople. "We are cursed," he says, "with an overclass convinced that they are scrappy underdogs."

Hayes' arguments on the state of media were especially fascinating to me, and I'll pick up their thread again soon in another post. But first, here are some excerpted and lightly edited highlights from Hayes' talk.

It's been three years since the U.S. Senate talked about the climate: three years in which the already solid scientific understanding of what all our carbon-burning is doing to the planet further strengthened. Three years in which our chances to change the dangerous vector we're on narrowed. Three years in which every single one of us got three years closer to the parched, scorched, desolate future we're barreling towards.

So when the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee finally held hearings on this subject yesterday, did it sound the alarm? Did it call for action? Did it put forth concrete proposals for change?

No, it did not. Watch:

Videos like this will make for bitterly, ruefully funny viewing a couple decades from now.

[Video courtesy our partners at the Climate Desk.]

Today we pull the (biodegradable) wrap off our new home page design here at Grist. Come on in! Sit! Coffee? We're glad you're here.

This overhaul is intended to be a substantial evolution in our design -- not a radical overhaul, but not a baby step, either. That means we're still lighting up your screen with a little splash of orange (think of it as beta-carotene!). We're still showing you one section for our features and another of our shorter, bloggier, newsier items. But we're bringing our front page look into line with the changes we introduced earlier this year on our article pages. Because, you know, ever since then the inconsistency has been bugging us. And we've been holding our breath. And that's just not healthy.

The first big change you'll notice is that we've put the old rotating carousel to rest. (It has earned its retirement, is grateful for the break, and was last seen feeding the slots at Vegas.) We'll use our lead-story spot to highlight one story that we think is crucial for you to read, or especially urgent, or perhaps splutteringly funny -- with, as often as we can, an image that makes you go "wow" or "sheesh" or "mmmm." Over on the left, you'll always see the latest posts from our tireless team of Gristmill news bloggers and Grist List curators. Down the page, you'll find a reverse-chronological listing of all of our recent feature articles and posts.

We've also reorganized our navigation bar and rearranged the top-of-the-page area. That row of highlighted stories next to the Grist logo is meant to feature recent posts of the Must. Click. Now. variety. If you've already stopped reading this because of them, they've done their job.

If you came to this post via our home page at grist.org you probably noticed the difference; if you didn't, go have a look around! And of course tell us what you think. Because we're not done. We're never done. We plan to use this revamp as the starting point for further change -- tiny tweaks and big experiments alike. So the feedback you give us -- in comments right here; on our contact form; on Facebook or Twitter; we'll even read your faxes if that thing in the corner still works -- really does make a difference.

Hot or not? McKibben and the Bieb, together at last.

In North America this summer, drought, fire, and heat are putting climate back in the headlines -- if not, yet, in the election-year political debate. At such moments, it's tempting for anyone who's been talking about the issue all along to pile on with the "see what we mean?"s and "we told you so"s. But it's far more important to use the moment to catalyze understanding and action.

Two articles this weekend set the moment's choices in deep relief. On the cover of Rolling Stone, sharing display space with Justin Bieber's come-hither pout and Eraserhead 'do, Bill McKibben sketches an arrestingly urgent map of our plight, using three numbers to explain why the fate of the planet comes down to fossil-fuel company finances. In the Sunday New York Times, David Leonhardt, the paper's Washington bureau chief, finds a "ray of hope on climate change" in global clean-energy trends.

Can the feds regulate sleeping dogs? (Photo by Blake Rea.)

For more than a century, the "commerce clause" of the U.S. Constitution -- the part that says the federal government has the power to regulate commerce "among the several States" -- has stood at the center of a legal tug-of-war. Liberals have grabbed it to extend Washington's laws and rules in many new directions; conservatives have pulled back in a struggle to limit its extent.

The commerce clause helped progressives at the turn of the 20th century begin to place limits on the predations of big business. It lay at the center of the debate over Roosevelt's New Deal in the '30s. In the '60s and '70s it got pulled into the fights over civil rights, environmental regulations, and more.

Here we are again. It's looking more and more like the American political and legal system will spend the next several years arguing over just how far the Supreme Court's healthcare decision went in curtailing the power of the national state to impose its will in virtually every area that matters, including energy, transportation, environmental protection, health care, education, and so on.

Yesterday -- while the rest of us were focused on "individual mandates," Obamacare, and the fate of the known universe as determined by nine robed elders -- the fossil-fuel cash machine took a discreet turn of its crankshaft. A little deal went down in D.C., one that David Roberts wrote about here in Grist a few days ago.

In a nutshell: the federal government sold rights to 721 million tons of coal in Wyoming's Powder River Basin -- coal that is the collective property of the American people -- to a private company, Peabody Energy; at a price that is, well, rock-bottom; under terms drawn up by that company; in an auction with only one bidder. (Joe Smyth explains the process here.)

Coal trucks in the Powder River Basin. (Photo by KimonBerlin.)

Such a deal! (How good a deal? Roberts broke that down for you last month.) And just the sort of thing that is sadly routine in the realm of federal land management, where the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) presides over a process that's far more about padding energy companies' profit margins than protecting resources, getting a good deal for the American people, or even just plain old "managing" land.

The market understands how good a deal this is for Peabody Energy. Its stock price is up.

Now, maybe you could justify letting coal companies rip us off if there were some public good attached to their activities. The government does and should subsidize all sorts of efforts that we hope will leave our communities more prosperous and cleaner and healthier.

In this case, of course, we're blasting the landscape in order to haul toxic materials around the world so we can burn them, pollute the air, and wreck the climate. So forget that.

Something tells me the folks at Peabody and the folks at BLM were both quite happy to have conducted their business on the day that the punditocracy was otherwise engaged in parsing how many individual mandates can dance on the head of the constitution.

On the bright side, at least we'll have some federal help as we try to pay our medical bills in a climate-changed, coal-dark world.

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

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

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

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

ExxonMobil's Rex Tillerson: We can adapt!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CNN had a Dewey-defeats-Truman moment with this erroneous headline. (Photo by C.W. Anderson.)

It rarely feels this good to write about how wrong I was, but there it is.

As you might have heard in the last nanosecond, the Supreme Court has upheld both the overall Obamacare health package and specifically the "individual mandate" part of the law.

Yesterday I made a (nearly worthless, as I admitted at the time) prediction that the conservatives on the court would go for broke and strike the whole thing down.

I'm very glad they didn't, as Chief Justice Roberts sided with the court's liberal wing. Instead of pursuing a Shermanesque total-war strategy, he apparently opted for a longer-term plan of chipping away at the government's commerce-clause powers in narrowing the scope of the federal ability to control how states spend their Medicare dollars.

Now, nobody's even read this whole decision yet, so there's a lot more analysis to be done. But for the moment, we know that the Obama administration didn't waste the last four years, and the real decision about healthcare reform will be made where it should be, at the polls in November.

So maybe there's some steam left in the old "Americans banding together to solve real problems" engine!

(As you can see from the above image, CNN's editors apparently made the same wrong bet I did -- but they actually went live with the headline, even though it was entirely wrong.)

UPDATE: As today progresses, we'll have reactions to the healthcare decision over in Gristmill from a variety of people who are thinking broadly about sustainability.

Photo by Envios.

Political America waits on tenterhooks for the next 24 hours to learn how the Supreme Court will rule on the Obama healthcare reforms.

Why should we care? It's summer!

But really: There are plenty of pragmatic, historical, and political reasons to care. What happens tomorrow will likely affect whether you and your relatives can get, or afford, health insurance. It may well determine the outcome of the election in November. It will shape the next round of the debate over how Americans pay for the kind of society they want. And it will tell us how far the Supreme Court is willing to go down the road of what James Fallows -- not a rash man -- has called a "long-term coup."

But the biggest reason we should care about tomorrow's ruling is a psychological one. The Obama health plan -- for all its compromises and limitations -- represents an increasingly endangered species. It's a large-scale effort to solve a major social problem with (mostly) smart, (mostly) efficient policies -- a law that leverages the power of the American people, working through the government they elect, to make their world better. This is now such a rarity in American politics that if you're under 40, you've basically never witnessed it.

In other words, the survival of the Obama health reforms isn't only about the particulars of the health insurance debate. It's about whether we have any hope of working together to tackle all the other vast problems that we know we aren't going to solve through individual action alone. That includes pretty much everything we write about here at Grist, from bringing down climate-change-driving carbon emissions; to rethinking our industrial food system; to expanding our transportation options and revamping our energy grid; and on and on.