Remember this?

This was Glenn Beck's worst nightmare. Sustainable planned communities were going to destroy our future, he feared.

But over the past few weeks, Beck seems to have had a change of heart. He's now promoting his own Independence, USA, a "city-theme park hybrid" to be located somewhere in Texas with abundant "craftmen and artisan" small businesses and stores, a working ranch "where visitors can learn how to farm and work the land," an innovation center, and dedicated mixed-income housing.

Hold on to your hats, though, folks, because Beck is not alone. The dense green community idea is catching on among the right-wing crowd, and these people even use some of Beck's dreaded key words.

Two updates in our ongoing series on North Dakota (which I like to call North Frackota in an ongoing, futile attempt to get that evocative phrase into the lexicon). The most recent entries in said series, in case you missed them: the massive growth of fracking in the western part of the state is straining its healthcare infrastructure, and the glut of oilmen producing that glut of oil is leading to an increase in inappropriate and illegal sexual behavior. North Frackota: It is now and has always been a paradise.™ (This is a motto I suggest the state adopt.)

Update one: The Minneapolis Star Tribune offers another good look at how the state is being transformed.

Pickups and semis jam long stretches of two-lane highways. Backhoes claw the ground even in frozen January. Recreational vehicles occupy former farm fields next to row upon row of box-like modular living pods.

In Williston, the epicenter of the growth, the local hospital opened a new birthing center, workers are building a giant new rec center and students are overflowing in a school that once sat empty. Civic leaders have been approving building permits and hiring police and teachers and nearly every kind of government worker. …

Lines at restaurants and stores are often frustratingly long, with few workers willing to take service jobs when more lucrative oil industry work is available. Rents have skyrocketed. With mostly men flooding into town to work, women hesitate to go out alone at night. There are more bar fights. Young parents can't find day care for their kids.

In other words, the wealth and growth are unevenly spread and slow to flow outward. The first beneficiaries of the wealth are those industries that deal with flush workers directly. Like realtors.

The coal industry is far more effective at preserving its political and economic power than it is at innovating cheap ways of getting coal out of the ground. In its push for continued relevance, the industry takes no prisoners in the mines or on Capitol Hill.

Consider the case of Reuben Shemwell, as told by Huffington Post:

Shemwell's troubles started in September 2011. After his year and a half as a welder at mining properties in Western Kentucky, [Armstrong Coal] management fired the 32-year-old for what supervisors deemed "excessive cell phone use" on the job -- an allegation Shemwell denied. Furthermore, Shemwell argued that the cell phone charge was merely a pretext for his firing. In subsequent court filings, he claimed the real reason he was canned was that he'd complained about safety problems at his worksite.

According to Shemwell's filings with the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal agency responsible for protecting miners, Shemwell had refused to work in confined spaces where he'd been overcome by fumes, and he'd complained to a superior that the respirators provided to welders were inadequate. Shortly before Shemwell was fired, he and a colleague also refused to work on an excavator while it was in operation, according to filings.

Not long after Shemwell filed his discrimination complaint, MSHA officials tried to inspect the site where he'd been working. According to court documents, Armstrong chose to shut the site down rather than subject it to MSHA oversight, which management said would be too costly. Ten workers were laid off.

The government decided not to hear a discrimination complaint Shemwell filed, which should have ended things -- albeit unhappily for Shemwell. It didn't.

Ever since climate change entered U.S. public consciousness -- let's date it to James Hansen's 1988 testimony to Congress -- one objection to national climate legislation has remained steady: It will hurt our country without benefiting the climate. If we raise the price of fossil-fuel energy, carbon-intensive industries will simply migrate to other countries, possibly even emitting more carbon there. We'll hobble ourselves economically for no net reduction in carbon. "It's called global warming, not American warming!" (A related argument is sometimes made about investing money in cleantech RD&D: Other countries will enjoy the benefits -- the "spillover" effects -- of our investments without any of the costs.)

This objection was the substance of the famed Byrd-Hagel Resolution, signed by 95 U.S. senators, which said that the U.S. would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol as long as developing countries were exempt from carbon targets. It has been a reliable go-to for those fighting off climate legislation ever since.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, Harvard law professor (and former head of Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) Cass Sunstein has rebranded this old chestnut the "sophisticated objection" to climate action. Now that science rejectionism has become the baseline position on climate in the GOP, I guess anything short of outright obscurantism counts as sophisticated.

Sunstein's arguments against it (he believes the U.S. should act unilaterally on climate if necessary) are also fairly familiar: first, that American action is a necessary precursor to international action; second, that regulation spurs cleantech innovation; and third, that many actions we could take unilaterally already pass a cost-benefit analysis based on the widely accepted social cost of carbon.

Over at National Review Online, Reihan Salam has rounded up (and written) some interesting responses to Sunstein. Kudos to Salam, by the way, for being the rare conservative to take climate seriously. I hope he prompts some internal NRO discussions.

The first is from Oren Cass (er, no relation to the other Cass), one of Mitt Romney's top domestic policy advisers in the 2012 campaign. In it, he addresses Sunstein's third argument. He says:

This argument doesn’t answer the Sophisticated Objection, it ignores the Objection altogether. If carbon emissions actually had a quantifiable, linear, ton-by-ton cost then the Sophisticated Objection would make no sense because the value of action at home could be measured independent of what action was or was not taken abroad. If we gain the same benefit every time we reduce emissions by another ton, why would we care what China does? But of course, as Sunstein acknowledges by taking the Objection seriously in the first place, this is not how climate change works.

The entire premise of the Objection is that climate dynamics are extraordinarily non-linear and that the climate change threat is not susceptible to mitigation at the margin. The best science available today attempts to estimate the amount of warming associated with a given level of carbon in the atmosphere, and to determine the thresholds at which such warming is likely to trigger severe and irreversible effects on climate systems. On their current trajectory, global emissions blow through these thresholds; blowing through them by a little bit less does not have much value.

Cass is onto something important here. Many of the damages scientists fear most from climate change are nonlinear -- that is, pressure on an biophysical system builds and builds until it "snaps" suddenly into a new steady state ("suddenly" relative to geological time, that is). Cass is right: If one of those "tipping points" is going to be triggered at, say, 550 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, there's no value at all in a policy that hits 560 instead of 580. If you tip, you tip; irreversible is irreversible.

I guess we owe an apology to Gareth Morgan, the New Zealand economist with the campaign to ban cats. We made fun of him a tiny bit for suggesting that you should get rid of your cat because it's a ruthless killer of birds and an enormous threat to biodiversity. But it turns out that ... well, your cat is a ruthless killer of birds and an enormous threat to biodiversity. Science says so. Sorry.

According to a paper in Nature Communications, cats are one of the major threats to U.S. wildlife, killing up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals every year (far more than previous studies had realized). To be fair, it's mostly feral cats doing the damage, but Fluffy is getting in on the action too, make no mistake. Domestic cats have been blamed for the extinction of 33 species worldwide -- though feral cats kill three times as many critters, according to the new paper, which is a review of previously published research.

There's no real mystery why this thing is called a "bleeding tooth fungus." It is ... alarming. Although I guess that if you kind of step back and squint, you can convince yourself that it looks like strawberry yogurt? That somebody bled on.

Raaaaaaaay!

That collective urbanist cry burst forth on the internet this morning when Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced he would not be staying on for Obama's second term. In recent weeks, there was speculation that LaHood might remain in his post at the president's urging, but it was not to be.

@raylahood :(

— Natalie M-P (@mzbitca) January 29, 2013

Japanese researchers put cameras on the backs of adorable Adelie penguins and sent them out to hunt. Generally, if you are interested in continuing to think an omnivorous animal is cute, you don't want to do this, and these penguins are no exception. It turns out they are ruthless, efficient killers.

I mean, the penguins just eat krill. But, as Reuters reports, they murder these tiny crustaceans with heartless speed:

"The krill wiggle their bodies about, they clearly make an attempt to swim off at full speed and escape," Watanabe said of his findings, published in the U.S.-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

"But that doesn't make the slightest difference to the penguins. They just gobble up the krill that are trying to get away and swallow them whole."

In the past researchers thought that perhaps penguins ate krill almost accidentally, as they hunted other prey. But no.

Midnight tonight marks the three-month anniversary of Hurricane Sandy making landfall in New Jersey. To celebrate, Congress finally cleared the aid package for victims of the storm. You'll forgive the East Coast if it doesn't send a thank-you note.

From The New York Times:

By a 62-to-36 vote, the Senate approved the measure, with 9 Republicans joining 53 Democrats to support it. The House recently passed the bill, 241 to 180, after initially refusing to act on it amid objections from fiscal conservatives over its size and its impact on the federal deficit.

The newly adopted aid package comes on top of nearly $10 billion that Congress approved this month to support the recovery efforts in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other states that were battered by the hurricane in late October.

The money will provide aid to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed, as well as to business owners who had heavy losses. It will also pay for replenishing shorelines, repairing subway and commuter rail systems, fixing bridges and tunnels, and reimbursing local governments for emergency spending.

Obama pledged to sign the bill as soon as it gets to him.

Speaking of air pollution in China, here's a disconcerting graph from the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

The EIA explains:

Coal consumption in China grew more than 9% in 2011, continuing its upward trend for the 12th consecutive year, according to newly released international data. China's coal use grew by 325 million tons in 2011, accounting for 87% of the 374 million ton global increase in coal use.

China now uses 47 percent of the world's coal. It's an almost unfathomable figure.