Grist finally got around to having its holiday party last night. Consequently, I am rather hungover and haggard, which is unfortunate, since the moment I arrived at my computer this morning I was besieged by bad news. Here’s an annotated list of awful things that have happened this week:

1. Filibuster reform collapses.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) came to an agreement [PDF] on the filibuster today. Joining hands in the spirit of bipartisan comity, they agreed to do nothing. It's pathetic, worse even than I expected, and I generally expect the worst from the Senate. Even the most egregious filibuster abuse -- filibustering the motion to proceed with a bill -- will remain in place. Reid will still need McConnell's permission to bring anything to the floor.

Why did Reid punk out? Because he supports the 60-vote supermajority threshold, as do many of his Democratic colleagues. In the thick air of the Senate they have bought the "world's most deliberative body" mythology wholesale, losing track of the distinction between deliberative and dysfunctional. They view Senate tradition as a fragile treasure and the clubby, insular atmosphere as an advantage. When the hero of filibuster reform, Sen. Jeff Merkley, called out Democratic reform opponents by name, Reid scolded him. They don't want to go on record as opposing reform. But they don't want to lose their individual leverage either.

And so the Senate will remain the only legislative body among advanced democracies (or U.S. states) to give the minority absolute veto power over legislation. It is so frightened of democracy it won't even allow itself to be ruled democratically. So nothing will pass, certainly nothing bold or effective, on climate or anything else. And those who speak most solemnly about Senate tradition will continue to render the institution a laughingstock.

2. The Washington Post humps for Keystone.

Trees! Everyone loves trees. They soak up carbon, make stuff pretty, and have been shown to keep crime down in cities. It's pretty clear our fates are tied to the trees'. Sooo, what happens when they all die? Uhh, so do we.

Millions of ash trees in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. are being chomped to bits by a beetle called the emerald ash borer. But those beetles aren't just hurting trees. From Discovery:

[I]n the neighborhoods hit by the beetle that kills ash trees, researchers noticed a stark rise in human mortality from cardiovascular and lower respiratory disease: there were 15,000 more deaths from cardiovascular disease, or 16.7 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults, and 6,000 more deaths from lower respiratory disease than in unaffected areas, or 6.8 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults.

Ken Schmier is a Bay Area transit guru. He's essentially responsible for the limitless Muni Fast Pass in San Francisco, and created the NextBus application in the 2000s to help people catch those ever-elusive city buses. But now Schmier is thinking transit may not be all it's cracked up to be.

“Frankly,” the Bay Area attorney and businessman told Next City, “I think transit agencies are obsolete.”

Blame that damn sharing economy.

Schmier is now all about what he calls “Micro-Transit” -- in other words, ride-sharing, or turning regular cars into taxis.

The Bay Area already has Casual Car Pool, a long-standing ride-share project that relies on a vintage website and message board instead of the smartphones and big money of new ride-sharing ventures. It’s kind of an organized form of hitchhiking, and it really works.

Schmier wants to make this general idea more efficient, scalable, and tech-savvy. From Next City:

This guy! We haven't seen Robert Murray since around election time and, to be honest, we missed him. He's the closest thing we've got in the 21st century to an evil 19th-century coal baron, hellbent on profit and laughing heartily at the misfortunes of the poor. He's retro. That's always fun.

Last time we heard from Murray was when he sent a prayer to his local West Virginia paper lamenting how the reelection of Barack Obama meant he had to fire a bunch of his staff. (Was it the staff that he docked a day's pay to appear in a Romney ad? Was it the staff he forced to contribute to his political action fund? We may never know.) So, wiping away big fucking crocodile tears, Murray wrote these powerful words:

The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance. ...

Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.

Then: boom, pink slips, because Obama is killing coal and hates white people, probably. Boo-fucking-hoo, Robert Murray is so sad.

The Department of Energy has a brilliant plan for the 14,000 tons of potentially radioactive scrap metal it will be excavating from taking apart government nuclear sites. They want to sell it for scrap. The pros: Recycling is good, plus also incidentally it could net them $10-40 million a year. The cons: This could mean you end up with radioactive material in your eyeglasses, artificial hips, or belt buckles.

Jason Box speaks the language of Manhattans. Not the drink -- the measuring unit.

As an expert on Greenland who has traveled 23 times to the massive, mile-thick northern ice sheet, Box has shown an uncanny ability to predict major melts and breakoffs of Manhattan-sized ice chunks. A few years back, he foretold the release of a “4x Manhattans” piece of ice from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, one so big that once afloat it was dubbed an “ice island.” In a scientific paper [PDF] published in February of 2012, Box further predicted “100% melt area over the ice sheet” within another decade of global warming. As it happened, the ice sheet’s surface almost completely melted just a month later in July -- an event that, in Box’s words, “signals the beginning of the end for the ice sheet.”

Box, who will speak at next week’s Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., pulls no punches when it comes to attributing all of this to humans and their fossil fuels. “Those who claim it’s all cycles just don’t understand that humans are driving the cycle right now, and for the foreseeable future,” he says. And the coastal consequences of allowing Greenland to continue its melting -- and pour 23 feet worth of sea level into the ocean over the coming centuries -- are just staggering. “If you’re the mayor of Hamburg, or Shanghai, or Philadelphia, I think it’s in your job description that you think forward a century,” says Box. “They’re completely inundated by the year 2200.”

Unless, that is, something big changes -- something big enough to start Greenland cooling, shifting its “mass balance” from ice loss to ice gain once again. But that would require us to reverse global climate change, in an ever-dwindling time frame for doing so.

Right now on Capitol Hill, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is being grilled by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as it considers his nomination to be secretary of state. Well, not grilled exactly. Smiled at, mostly. So far, the most contentious issue has been the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, in part because the Republican members who failed to unsettle Hillary Clinton on the topic yesterday are trying to save face.

The next secretary of state -- who will 100 percent certainly be Kerry unless he suddenly moves to Canada or is photographed giving nuclear waste to terrorists and even then the odds only drop to 80 percent -- will be responsible for signing off on the permit that will allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The topic has come up during today's confirmation hearing. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) raised it, as did Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.). Each time, Kerry punted, suggesting that he needed to study the issue more. This is probably the most we're going to hear on the issue during this hearing.

But Kerry went long on climate change and clean energy in response to another question from Barrasso. Here's the exchange:

In South Africa, flooding has swelled the Limpopo River, which has been bad for people and great for the 15,000 crocodiles who escaped from a crocodile farm to freeeeeeeeedom.

As the storm surged into the Rakwena Crocodile Farm, its owners opened the floodgates in order to save their land, the Guardian reports. And, as would anyone, all the crocs living there in captivity swam right the hell out of dodge, rather than waiting around to be turned into handbags and crocodile burgers.

According to the owners, a few thousand of the crocs have been recaptured, leaving only maybe 13,000 running around loose. Totally doable!

On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart laid out an important scientific principle: Global warming is a hoax, and that's proven fact, because "it's cold, today, where I live."

Important job opportunity, everyone. From Craigslist:

Our firm needs 100 volunteers to attend and participate in a rally in front of the British Consulate/Embassy in Midtown Manhattan on the East Side on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 12 noon. The event is being held in order to protest wind turbines that are being built in Scotland and England. Your participation will be to ONLY stand next to or behind the speakers and elected officials/celebrities that will be speaking at the rally.

"Volunteers" will each get $20. That's the going rate in New York City for a closely held political principle.