Standing amidst the bounty of the Santa Monica Farmers Market, a raggedly dressed man with a tired face holds up a tattered cardboard sign: “Hungry, please help.”

Just half a block south is Step Up on Second, one of three local social service agencies that could offer him fresh produce from the market, brought in just that day.

On this particular winter Wednesday, 26 labeled boxes containing 554 pounds of apples, citrus, salad greens, kale, squash, garlic, turnips, cucumbers, and radishes have been collected by friendly volunteers wearing hats and aprons that say “Food Forward.”

They’re members of “Glean Teams” representing the four-year-old nonprofit organization Food Forward, whose new Farmers Market Recovery Program collects fresh produce donated by the farmers at the end of the market day. [Full disclosure: I'm a member of Food Forward's advisory board.] Here in Santa Monica, it’s distributed to Step Up on Second, The Clare Foundation, and St. Joseph Center in Venice, Calif. Some of their clients are homeless, have a mental illness, or an addiction to drugs or alcohol -- many times all three.

Santa Monica’s Wednesday and Sunday markets are two of four area markets participating in this new venture, which is on track to serve nine markets by its one-year anniversary in August. Collections at Mar Vista Farmers Markets begin March 3.

Glean Teams extend the group’s mission: helping to prevent hunger by recovering food that might otherwise go to waste, and donating 100 percent of it to agencies serving those in need.

Today’s Glean Team includes Christine Kwon, who glided up the sidewalk on skates (she recently joined a roller derby team). She’s joined by Kat Thomas, a food blogger and burlesque-dancing aerialist just back from performing at Sundance; and Alex Melinkoff, who runs a landscape business, riding in from Woodland Hills, Calif.

Herding this eclectic crew and a few others is Mary Baldwin, Food Forward’s Farmers Market Recovery Program manager, who joined the organization in August of 2012 and launched the program just two weeks later at the Santa Monica Farmers Market.

“We had to create -- and along the way refine -- the collection tracking system,” Baldwin says as she hands out collection kits to the volunteers.

“We needed to put together the infrastructure, reach out to the receiving agencies, find the volunteers, and get acquainted with the farmers,” Baldwin says. “[Santa Monica] Farmers Market Manager Laura Avery introduced us to each of the farmers so we could explain the program. ... At the end of the market, we distribute Food Forward boxes so they don’t have to use their own. If they have extra unsold produce, they’ll fill our box with anything they have to give, and we take care of the picking up, weighing, distributing, and providing tax receipts for their donations."

“As a matter of fact,” Baldwin says, “on that first day, we expected maybe 300 pounds of food, but ended up with more than 1,300!”

“The agencies couldn’t fit it all in their vans,” Avery says with a laugh. “So Food Forward’s Managing Director Meg Glasser, superstar volunteer Anne Burmeister, and Mary put the rest in Meg’s car and drove it to the Downtown Women’s Center. Food had to go to the people who needed it and they were going to make it happen!”

Renewable energy is clean, sustainable, non-polluting, reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, improves the health of communities surrounding power plants, and protects the natural environment. Who could be against it?

Answer: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbying group that is active in drafting and advocating controversial state legislation. It's not just interested in energy: In recent years ALEC has supported Arizona’s restrictive immigration legislation, the “Stand Your Ground” gun laws associated with the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and voter identification laws proposed in many states. ALEC’s priorities for 2013 [PDF] include making it harder to bring product liability suits against manufacturers of defective products, ending traditional pension plans for public employees, promoting the diversion of public education funds into private schools and online education schemes, and supporting resistance to “Obamacare” health policies.

When it comes to energy, ALEC wants to speed up the permitting process for mines, oil and gas wells, and power plants -- and to eliminate all state requirements for the use of renewable energy. The latter goal is packaged as the “Electricity Freedom Act.” In numerous states, ALEC has used studies by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) to claim that the “Electricity Freedom Act” will free ratepayers from the allegedly immense costs and job losses of renewable energy standards.

In a recent study for the Civil Society Institute, my colleagues and I at Synapse Energy Economics analyzed the ALEC studies of the costs of renewable energy. Our report [PDF] found fundamental flaws in both the energy data and the economic modeling used by BHI.

The ALEC/BHI energy analysis begins with wild overstatement of the costs of wind energy.

Civic-minded hacktivists, you best brush off those keyboards and pick out a cute outfit, because tomorrow is International Open Data Day.

Cities around the world will be hosting hackathons to turn government data dumps into useful interactive applications for citizen engagement. Check the map for info on a 'thon near you.

For this special holiday occasion, San Francisco's Climate Corporation is hosting EcoHack. "EcoHack is about using technology to improve and better understand our natural environment," say the event's organizers. "Based on the hacking model of quick, clever solutions to problems, EcoHack is an opportunity to make a difference while having fun!" Woo, nerds!

Hey, so, about that layer of long-frozen soil covering almost a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's land surface? You know, the stuff that's started melting and freaking out climate scientists but often isn't calculated into global warming metrics?

Yeah, so, uh, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science, that may be melting way faster than we thought. From Climate Central:

If global average temperature were to rise another 2.5°F (1.5°C), say earth scientist Anton Vaks of Oxford University, and an international team of collaborators, permafrost across much of northern Canada and Siberia could start to weaken and decay. And since climate scientists project at least that much warming by the middle of the 21st century, global warming could begin to accelerate as a result, in what’s known as a feedback mechanism. ...

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.

It's more cold comfort for drought-stricken farmers this week, and I don't mean the snow.

USDA chief economist Joe Glauber was all sunshine this Thursday in announcing that normal spring weather is expected to improve corn and soybean yields by huge percentages over last year's tiny drought-stricken crops. Bigger yields mean tinier prices -- Glauber said corn would be down about a third from last year, soy would drop more than a quarter, and wheat would be down about 11 percent.

From the South Dakota Argus Leader:

The recovery should send prices for most oilseeds and grains sharply lower, providing a much-needed reprieve for livestock, dairy and poultry producers struggling with high feed costs, and relief down the road for consumers who have paid more for food at their local grocery store. ...

“The critical factor that people will be following is weather,” Glauber said at the department’s annual outlook forum. “While the outlook for 2013 remains bright, there are many uncertainties.”

Way to bury the lede, Glauber. No matter how many times Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says "American agriculture is quite resilient," there still remains the fact that American agriculture is also in crisis, and forecasters are expecting more hot and dry weather this year.

If this past Sunday's Forward on Climate rally showed a lot of love for President Obama, it showed even more for the nonviolent direct action going down in East Texas. Throughout the day, activists blockading construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline received big support from even the most law-abiding demonstrators.

But though their civil disobedience might seem mainstream within the climate movement, the blockaders are taking some seriously big risks out there, and a new documentary shows just how big. The nearly hour-long film by Garrett Graham was produced in collaboration with the blockaders and includes footage they shot themselves, from some places where journalists might fear to tread lest, you know, pepper-spray, choke-holds, etc.

You can watch the whole thing right here:

If you weren't seriously, seriously in need of this after the week you've just had, then fuck you and your perfect life. The rest of us will be under our desks, drinking from flasks and watching Jess the awesomely named English springer spaniel feed an orphaned baby lamb.

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.

For a brief shining moment, if you went to the URL posted on this New York bus kiosk, you'd get a surprise ride to your destination -- from a fancy sports car, a circus bus, or a sled pulled by huskies. The marketing stunt was advertising some kind of mobile something something, but we don't care because SLED DOGS.