Even in New York City, your average rat home isn't particularly fancy -- a sewer, a trash can, maybe at best a trash can in a nice park. But after Hurricane Sandy drove rats from their normal haunts, in sewers and along the coastline, they found out that there's a whole, big city out there, just full of abandoned Starbucks muffins and fancy trash for them to feast on. The New York Times reports:

Rodent specialists predicted that many rats would drown in submerged subway tunnels, but also that survivors would feast on the buffet of garbage strewed in the streets. Now, several exterminators say they know exactly what happened to the rats: Driven from shorelines, the rodents came inland, in droves ... and once the rats were resettled, they grew accustomed to their surroundings, feasting on the garbage created by the hurricane as well as by the normal churn of the winter holidays.

The rats have moved into cars, schools, businesses, and luxury apartment buildings.

Eve Ensler made it OK to say the word vagina out loud. Could she now inspire more of us to say climate change too?

Ensler, the artist and activist behind The Vagina Monologues, is currently making a big push to promote One Billion Rising, a global event planned for this coming Valentine's Day, aka V-Day. She's calling for people everywhere to "dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence against women." The campaign was inspired by a U.N. estimate that one in every three women will experience violence during her lifetime, meaning well over a billion of us.

And Ensler's activism extends beyond this critical issue. She has recently been drawing connections between the violence that men perpetrate against women and the violence that fossil-fuel companies perpetrate against the climate and all of us who depend on it. She talked to Grist recently about how these topics tie together and her hopes for her new campaign.

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Q. I was interested to read a piece you published in The Guardian last month comparing climate change and violence against women. You wrote, "Like climate change, only the patriarchs with power seem to be blind to the magnitude of the horrors," and you wrote about "the raping of the Earth through ecological destruction by the corporate powerful." Can you talk more about those common threads?

The USDA seems a little conflicted about what it wants you to eat, kids. A year ago, it put out new rules intended to make school lunches healthier. Then in December, it backed away from restrictions on servings of meat and grains. Now the agency says it wants to crack down on greasy 'n' sweet snacks sold both in vending machines and in school lunches. From the Associated Press:

Under the new rules the Agriculture Department proposed Friday, foods like fatty chips, snack cakes, nachos and mozzarella sticks would be taken out of lunch lines and vending machines. In their place would be foods like baked chips, trail mix, diet sodas, lower-calorie sports drinks and low-fat hamburgers. ...

Under the proposal, the Agriculture Department would set fat, calorie, sugar and sodium limits on almost all foods sold in schools. Current standards already regulate the nutritional content of school breakfasts and lunches that are subsidized by the federal government, but most lunchrooms also have "a la carte" lines that sell other foods. Food sold through vending machines and in other ways outside the lunchroom has never before been federally regulated.

Climate change will absolutely devastate American agriculture and forests. Don't believe me? Ask the feds.

The Department of Agriculture released a new analysis of cropland and climate, showing that bets are off after the next 25ish years. From USA Today:

"We're going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production," said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA's Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. "In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought." ...

Farmers will be able to minimize the impact of global warming on their crops by changing the timing of farming practices and utilizing specialized crop varieties more resilient to drought, disease and heat, among other practices, the report found. ...

By the middle of the century and beyond, adaptation becomes more difficult and costly as plants and animals that have adapted to warming climate conditions will have to do so even more -- making the productivity of crops and livestock increasingly more unpredictable. Temperature increases and more extreme swings in precipitation could lead to a drop in yield for major U.S. crops and reduce the profitability of many agriculture operations.

Warmer weather, the USDA predicts, will also help weeds grow, potentially stunting grains and soybeans.

Last year, American farmers saw the worst drought in more than half a century. At the same time, some disaster aid programs went unfunded. Why? Blame the expired Farm Bill, of course.

Crop insurance and emergency disaster loans are still available to farmers and ranchers, but other relief programs designed to help during times of drought and other disasters saw their funding end more than a year ago.

But now Congress is considering a bill to reinstate that aid “until” a new farm bill happens. (Hahaha [weep].) From the Governing blog:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is sponsoring legislation that would retroactively restore those disaster relief programs for 2012 fiscal year as well as the rest of the 2013 fiscal year while Congress works on creating another long-term farm bill.

"These livestock disaster programs expired in September 2011, leaving our livestock producers with no safety net," Baucus said in introducing his bill. "For over a year and a half, through one of the worst droughts in recent memory, our producers have been left to fend for themselves."

Which state is valiant and insane enough to lead the fight against the United Nations' blueprint for a more sustainable world, i.e. those vile and dangerous plans for global social control community gardens and bike paths known as Agenda 21? Yes, it's wild, libertarian, sprawly, water-importing Arizona!

Last May, less insane heads managed to prevail in the Grand Canyon State, shooting down a bill that would have prohibited state and local governments from adopting anything even a little bit related to sustainability and Agenda 21. But the idea has crawled out of the grave in the form of SB 1403 [PDF], a new bill that would prohibit any local government in Arizona from implementing any "creed, doctrine, principles or any tenet" of Agenda 21.

"Any way you want to describe it, Agenda 21 is a direct attack on the middle class and the working poor," the bill's sponsor Sen. Judy Burges said during a hearing on it in 2012. "The primary goal of Agenda 21 is to create social engineering of our citizens and it will impact every aspect of our daily lives."

Or not at all. In fact, Agenda 21 calls for helping poor people and the environment both. Too bad it's been sitting around gathering dust for 20ish years!

But speaking of social engineering, Arizona is also looking at a bill that would allow teachers to tell kids that climate change is but a fairy tale! Suddenly I'm not so worried about their bike lanes.

So what does it mean when America’s premier sports event goes dark for 34 minutes? Was Beyoncé just too electrifying? Or does the Super Bowl blackout signify deeper problems with electrical infrastructure?

First, we now know Beyoncé is off the hook. The halftime show used its own generator. So was the utility to blame? Entergy says a monitoring device detected a power surge in the system, and automatically shut down a feeder to half the stadium. That was to prevent any problems from spreading. Ironically, while the event spurred calls, such as this one at The Daily Beast, for a smart grid, that was a pretty smart piece of grid automation at work. Utility officials, in fact, place the problem within the Superdome’s own power system, giving the poster child for Katrina’s humanitarian crisis a new source of notoriety.

While the particulars are a bit blurred, the blackout does make the case for a different shape of power-grid architecture that is indeed an advanced form of smart grid. The vision is one of a network of smart microgrids served by distributed energy sources.

One of the primary concerns about expanded oil drilling in the Arctic is that the Arctic is far away from everything. Until very, very recently, no one lived anywhere near the Arctic; even today, it's pretty sparsely populated. As we've noted before, an oil spill a few hundred miles from New Orleans in 2010 took months to stop. How long will it take to cap a broken well in icy water thousands of miles from any resources?

To that end, governments interested in exploring resource extraction in the Arctic came together to develop a plan for just such a contingency. And as Greenpeace notes, the plan sucks. From the BBC:

In 2011 The Arctic Council members [Ed. - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, U.S.] signed the Nuuk Declaration that committed them to develop an international agreement on how to respond to oil pollution in the northern seas. …

The plan says that "each party shall maintain a national system for responding promptly and effectively to oil pollution incidents" without requiring any clear details on the number of ships or personnel that would be needed to cope with a spillage.

Seriously. Greenpeace has a copy of the full draft document [PDF]. It can be summed up in three bullet points:

1. Here are the countries making this agreement and here is what "oil" means.
2. If anything happens, we agree to deal with it.
3. Here is everyone's emergency contact information.

Think I'm oversimplifying? Go look. This took them two years.

Once upon a time, like, last August, in a town in Kent, England, Lauren Gooch opened a package of pork and chive bangers (British for "sausages"), intending to make sausage rolls for a birthday party. (Are sausage rolls a big birthday party food? This is perhaps a conversation for another time). As you would expect, Gooch did find sausage inside the package, but she found something additional and, more importantly, disgusting: a human tooth. And not just a human tooth, but a human tooth with a filling in it. Yeah.

Teeth are just gross in general and this is a particularly gross tooth, what with having a filling and showing up randomly in bangers. Gooch reportedly couldn't eat sausage for a month. Wow. Maybe this is the boost I need for my adventures in vegetarianism. Anybody have a spare tooth?

The most worrisome energy trend in the world, by a wide margin, is rising coal consumption in China:

The figures are pretty stunning: Chinese coal demand has been rising at about 9 percent a year for the last 12 years. By comparison, coal demand in the rest of the world has been rising at about 1 percent annually. China now burns almost half the world's coal.

Cheap coal power has been a boon to China, an engine pulling millions and millions of people out of poverty. But it has also brought nightmarish local pollution problems -- which are not remaining local -- and it of course threatens to tip the climate into chaos, which will do more damage to the Chinese people, over the long term, than the last decade of growth has done good. It is, as China expert James Fallows says, an "environmental emergency" that threatens to stop China from ever catching up to the developed world.

Most projections [PDF] have coal use in China continuing to increase for decades to come. But there are reasons to think those projections overstate demand -- that China's appetite for coal may peak sooner than expected. For one thing, the Chinese government is signaling that the country's coal consumption will peak by 2015, at 4 billion tonnes.