I'm optimistic about this zippy little hand dryer Dyson's about to proudly roll out. It's actually attached to the faucet. So you put your hands under the faucet to wash, and then move them to the side to be greeted by cold air whooshing out at an amazing 430 miles an hour. (Dyson's big innovation with hand dryers is discovering that fast cold air works better than slow warm air, which you may already know based on its AirBlade dryers -- you know, those bottle-opener-looking things frequently seen mounted in restrooms under the paper towels that you use instead.)

In addition to cleverly attaching to the faucet and looking like a tiny windmill, this new dryer has a motor four times faster than other dryers -- it revs up to full power in under a second, which uses a lot less energy. It's so efficient that it can dry 15 people's hands for the cost of a paper towel. The only problem? It costs $1,200, which is as much as like 8,000 paper towels. So it only becomes cost-effective once you've dried your hands 500-plus times.

Meet your likely new secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell. Those of you who have been reading Grist since 2007 have met her already.

Jewell is the CEO of REI, which is a company that I will bet $2.6 million you are familiar with. But more relevantly, Jewell is also a recognized environmentalist. From The New York Times:

Ms. Jewell, a native of the Seattle area and a graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in mechanical engineering, has been a lifelong outdoors enthusiast. As a child she sailed in Puget Sound and camped throughout the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2005 profile in the Seattle Times. ...

She received the 2009 Rachel Carson Award for environmental conservation from the Audubon Society; the 2008 Nonprofit Director of the Year award from the National Association of Corporate Directors, and The Green Globe-Environmental Catalyst Award from King County, Wash., among others.

She is expected to face vigorous questioning during confirmation hearings about her approach to resource development on public lands.

Which reminds me. I should also mention what Jewell did before working at REI. She was a banker. And before that? Take it away, Politico.

There was a bit of buzz last week when the august scientific journal Nature endorsed the Keystone XL pipeline (ironically, in the course of pleading with Obama to do something about climate change). Despite the hubbub, it was not the first time the journal had done so. Back in September 2011, it boosted Keystone ... in the context of pleading with Obama do to something about climate change. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Neither editorial makes a fully fleshed-out case for Keystone, but together they advance three common arguments, all of which I find unconvincing.

1. The tar sands will get dug up anyway.

This is the most familiar argument on behalf of Keystone, though "we can't prevent this horrible thing so let's embrace it" is a peculiar form of endorsement.

I don't get it. The world is not a spreadsheet. It contains friction, physical and temporal limitations, politics and competing interests. Nothing is inevitable.

If activists can block Keystone, yeah, there are other possible routes to get the tar-sands oil out. So ... activists will fight those, too. Tar-sands producers want to ship the stuff west? Well, there's the small matter of a wall of First Nations opposition (and in Canada, unlike the U.S., indigenous tribes have real political power). They want to ship the tar sands east? Well, there's a coalition of enviro groups fighting that too, pulling together some impressively large rallies. They want to ship the tar sands by train, to avoid all these pipeline protests? Well, that's more expensive and more dangerous and there isn't nearly enough rail capacity right now to handle it.

"She's gone," the voice on the intercom said of my would-be landlady, the woman from whom I thought I’d rented an apartment for the next month. "You're too late."

I stood outside the building with my suitcase, so new to Buenos Aires, Argentina, that I had no idea of where the hell I even was. Two hours earlier, I'd arrived at the flat I’d arranged via the website Airbnb, which allows people to rent out their vacant guest rooms, living rooms, and apartments, and found the place locked and gated.

I hadn't known what to do until a man ran from the doorway of the next building, repeating my host's name and firing questions at me in a slurry of Argentine Spanish. I was overwhelmed from 30 hours of bus travel and could only nod as he stuffed an address into my hand and packed me into a quickly-hailed cab. I arrived at this mystery location, pressed the intercom button next to the door, and got a thorough dressing-down from the unseen stranger who, fortunately or unfortunately, spoke perfect English.

It would go down as one of the highlights (or is it lowlights?) of a three-month trek across South America in which I sampled all manner of websites and resources that facilitate sharing – and learned (often the hard way) the true value of human generosity.

The divestment campaign that 350.org began in late 2012 has grown up so quickly! It seemed like just yesterday that Bill McKibben et al were convincing colleges to pull their money out of the fossil fuel industry and in turn feel much better about their moral selves.

Now the movement's graduated and moved on to lobbying municipal governments to do the same. So far Seattle and San Francisco's city employee pension funds are both looking at divesting from fossil fuel companies.

From the Financial Times:

If the Seattle retirement scheme were to divest from such companies completely, it would be the first to take such a step, said Stephanie Pfeifer of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which represents some of Europe's largest pension funds and asset managers.

Mindy Lubber, president of the US-based Ceres investor advocacy group, agreed, saying the move underlined the mounting push for investors to acknowledge the long-term risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, as policies to curb climate change keep emerging.

"The divestment movement without question is re-raising the question of whether fossil fuel companies are the best investment and I think over time they're not going to be," she said.

Two of the most popular shows on cable television right now are about digging for gold. Exciting! Gold! One of these shows, the Discovery Channel's Bering Sea Gold, focuses on the human difficulties and dangers of digging for gold under the sea floor off the coast of Alaska.

This pursuit of material mineral riches seems like it might be a bad idea for these individuals, especially that dude with the bloody hand. But when the gold is even deeper under the sea, digging it up could be an even worse idea. And at today's inflated gold prices, digging up the ocean will be as lucrative as it could be destructive.

National Geographic’s feature story on deep-sea mineral mining sets up a scary proposition for the Solwara 1 site in Papua New Guinea especially, where one company hopes to blaze a path into the deep with new mining technologies that could allow for the scooping up of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of deep-sea minerals.

[A] fledgling deep-sea mining industry faces a host of challenges before it can claim the precious minerals, from the need for new mining technology and serious capital to the concerns of conservationists, fishers, and coastal residents.

The roadblocks are coming into view in the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea, where the seafloor contains copper, zinc, and gold deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars and where one company, Nautilus Minerals, hopes to launch the world's first deep-sea mining operation ...

Samantha Smith, Nautilus's vice president for corporate social responsibility, says that ocean floor mining is safer, cleaner, and more environmentally friendly than its terrestrial counterpart.

"There are no mountains that need to be removed to get to the ore body," she says. "There's a potential to have a lot less waste ... No people need to be displaced. Shouldn't we as a society consider such an option?"

Over the last 20 years, a third of the forest cover on the Indonesian island of Sumatra -- home to endangered tigers and orangutans -- was destroyed. The clear-cutting of the rainforest helped make Indonesia the world's fourth-biggest carbon emitter. And much of it was done in the name of paper -- Asia Pulp & Paper, to be exact. But not anymore. From The Washington Post:

Asia Pulp & Paper, the third-largest pulp and paper company in the world, announced Tuesday that it is halting operations in Indonesia’s natural rain forests, a victory for advocates who have been negotiating with the company for the past year.

The Singapore-based company, which controls logging concessions spanning nearly 6.4 million acres in Indonesia, said it also has agreed to protect forested peatland, which stores massive amounts of carbon, and to work with indigenous communities to protect their native land. ...

Aida Greenbury, the firm’s managing director for sustainability, said that a coalition of environmentalists, customers and some of the firm’s own employees had pushed for an end to native forest logging.

“We heard very loud and clear what they want us to do,” she said. “It is an investment for the sustainability of our business, not only an investment in the environment and the social impact we’re creating.”

Here's more from the righteous rabble-rousers at Greenpeace, who worked with the World Wildlife Fund and the Rainforest Action Network to shove APP's clear-cutters out of the forests:

In 2011, American industry produced the equivalent of 3.3 billion tons of CO2 emissions -- 10.5 tons for every resident of these United States. Two-thirds of those emissions were from power plants, by which we of course mean fossil fuel power plants.

That's the topline summary of the EPA's new report on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions -- the second time the agency has completed such a survey. The good news is that the GHG emission number from power plants is going down. From The Hill:

In all, 8,000 facilities across nine industry sectors put 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions into the air in 2011. Power plants accounted for about 2.2 billion of those tons.

EPA said that was a 4.6 percent decrease from power plants compared with 2010, which it attributed to growing reliance on natural gas and renewable energy for electricity generation.

Those emissions could drop even more in the future, as low natural gas prices, expanded renewable electricity generation and an abnormally warm winter last year curbed coal-fired generation. …

EPA released its first report from the program last year, when it considered 2010 emissions from 29 sources. Emissions from those sources fell 3 percent in 2011.

Petroleum and natural gas systems were the second greatest emitters, clocking in at 225 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. Refineries ranked third, at 182 million tons.

What's really cool is the EPA's interactive map, which lets you zoom in to regions and see what polluters are in any given neighborhood. You can also see where certain types of polluters are more common. Here is pollution from refineries, by state:

I so wish I had been there the day a KFC exec, having spearheaded distribution of enough hideously disgusting food in his own country, said to his partners, "Hey guys! Perhaps the people of Japan would enjoy a food item comprised of ketchup-flavored rice, sandwiched by fried chicken, with some mayonnaise in it. We will call it the Kentucky Chicken Rice, and, based on the success of the KFC Double Down, which also inexplicably uses chicken for bread, I think it will be a hit." And his boss was like, "Wow, that's a good idea, Brian/Brandon/Brent! Japanese people love rice, and all people everywhere love fried chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches. Let's charge five bucks for it. Job well done. When it takes off I look forward to giving you and your family a free trip to Atlantis."

And lo, it came to pass that the people of Japan will be able to get one of these things on Feb. 7. In the meantime, they will have to make do with their amazing and ancient cuisine, one of the finest -- and healthiest -- in the world.

Two stories flagged by our Gristmill bloggers yesterday got me thinking. There's this one, about San Francisco's "managed retreat" from rising sea levels, and this one, about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) planning to allow some coastal communities to "return to nature."

Both mean the same thing: Shit is getting real. Coastal cities are facing decisions about how to plan for higher seas and more frequent floods, about which lands to abandon and which to "up armor" with levies and seawalls. These are present-day decisions, not something for the distant future. Whether or not the particular plans in SF and NYC go through -- they are expensive, and will face much local resistance -- they are only the beginning. And it's not just the coasts. Decisions of a similar spirit will face places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which exist only by virtue of a steady supply of outside water. What will happen in 10, 20, 30 years, when there are more droughts and less rain? What can be sustained and what must be abandoned?

As I've said before, long-term adaptive planning is going to be a ubiquitous necessity in the coming century. There will be many more "managed retreats" -- at least, if we're lucky they'll be managed.

So, when these decisions are made, who benefits? Who gets protected when the weather comes? Who gets made whole after the weather has done its damage? If a community needs to be abandoned to nature, how is it compensated and where are its people put?