This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The slow-moving disaster being visited on the village of Newtok is a familiar one in Alaska. People are losing the ground beneath their feet, because of erosion.

Climate change has accelerated the normal process of erosion along Alaska’s rivers and coasts — especially near the shores of the Bering and Arctic seas.

Warmer temperatures melt the permafrost, or frozen sub-surface layers which helped bind together the soil. Heavier rains produce more floods, and swollen rivers which wash away the soil. Waves break higher, because of sea-level rise, clawing at beaches.

Meanwhile, the sea ice that provided a barrier against intense storms has thinned and retreated, exposing coastal areas to tsunami-sized waves and 100 mph winds that are not uncommon in storms coming off the Bering Sea.

Alaskans have already begun exploring how to find the way back to solid ground. Some small communities may be able to reinforce coastlines by building broad, sloping rock walls known as revetments. But bringing heavy equipment, building materials and skilled labour to remote locations is prohibitively expensive — three or four times more than a comparable project anywhere else. The construction season is also short, further adding to the cost.

“Coastal erosion is a really, really expensive problem to deal with in an engineering mode,” said Orson Smith, an engineering professor at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “It costs $10,000 to build one linear foot on a shoreline in a remote area, and you have thousands and thousands of feet of shoreline.”

Then there’s the matter of how the structures would stand up to the harsh Alaskan environment.

Shishmaref, a native Alaskan village located on a barrier island, has gone through an entire array of engineering projects — concrete blocks, wire mesh baskets, a broad sea wall made or gravel and rock. “A museum of erosion control,” Smith said.

Some of the early versions failed on deployment, and it’s not clear how the other structures will stand up over the years.

It’s also far from clear where Alaska will get the money for such ambitious engineering works, especially for small and remote communities.

Climate change is already adding billions to the bill every year just for maintaining existing infrastructure. A state government report estimated that erosion, flooding and other effects of climate change would add up to 20 percent to those costs over the next 20 years.

Then there is the issue of assigning priorities. About 90 percent of Alaska’s population lives within 20 kilometers of a coast, and the state’s most valuable resources — oil, fishing, minerals — are also in close proximity.

“There just isn’t enough money to go around to build a $50 or $100 million revetment for a village of a few hundred people that has other problems,” Smith said. “The money that is spent on those kinds of structures to save a village could be applied to move the families to somewhere else.”

There are other remedies for villages that want to protect against erosion. Communities are now looking at how to plan for a slow retreat to higher ground, gradually replacing old buildings by new raised structures, or moving buildings to higher elevations. But many communities have no higher ground or room to retreat.

Others, like Newtok, are situated on low-lying, wetlands that simply can not support the large engineering projects that would be needed to make them safe. They have no choice but to move.

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1, 2, and 3.

One afternoon in the waning days of winter, the most powerful man in Newtok, Alaska, hopped on a plane and flew 1,000 miles to plead for the survival of his village. Stanley Tom, Newtok’s administrator, had a clear purpose for his trip: find the money to move the village on the shores of the Bering Sea out of the way of an approaching disaster caused by climate change.

Newtok was rapidly losing ground to erosion. The land beneath the village was falling into the river. Tom needed money for bulldozers to begin preparing a new site for the village on higher ground. He needed funds for an airstrip. He came back from his meetings in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, with expressions of sympathy — but nothing in the way of the cash he desperately needed. “It’s really complicated,” he said. “There are a lot of obstacles.”

Those obstacles — financial, legal, and a supremely frustrating bureaucratic process — had slowed down the move for so long that some in Newtok, which is about 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the U.S. from Russia, feared they would be stuck as the village went down around them, houses swallowed up by the river.

“It’s really alarming,” said Tom, slumped in an armchair a few hours after his return to the village. “I have a hard time sleeping, and I’m getting up early in the morning. I am worried about it every day.”

The uncertainty was tearing the village apart. It also began to turn the village against Tom.

Over the winter, a large group of villagers decided that their administrator was not up to the job. By the time he returned from this particular trip, the dissidents had voted to replace the village council and to sack Tom — a vote that he ignored.

“The way I see it, we need someone who knows how to do the work,” said Katherine Charles, one of Tom’s most vocal critics. “I feel like we are being neglected. We are still standing here and we don’t know when we are going to move. For years now we have been frustrated. I have to ask myself: Why are we even still here?”

It’s been more than a decade since Tom took charge of running Newtok, and leading the village out of climate disaster to higher ground.

The ground beneath Newtok is disappearing. Natural erosion has accelerated due to climate change, with large areas of land lost to the Ninglick River each year. A study by the Army Corps of Engineers [PDF] found the highest point in the village would be below water level by 2017. The proximity of the threat to Newtok means that its villages are likely to be America’s first climate refugees.

Officials in Anchorage say Tom has worked tirelessly to move the village out of the way of a rampaging river. Among the relatively small circle of bureaucrats and lawyers who concern themselves with the problems of small and remote indigenous Alaskan villages, the Newtok administrator has a stellar reputation. He has won leadership awards from Native American groups in the rest of the country.

Tom said he hoped to make a big push this summer, acquiring heavy equipment that locals could use to begin moving some of the existing houses over to the new village site at Mertarvik nine miles to the south.

“It’s really happening right now. The village is sinking and flooding and eroding,” he said. He said he was planning to move his own belongings to the new village site this summer — and that villagers should start doing the same.

But Tom, despite his lobbying missions to Juneau and strong reputation with government officials, has failed to inject federal and state officials with that same sense of urgency.

Melting permafrost, sea-level rise, erosion — these are some of the worst consequences of climate change for Alaska. But none of those elements in Newtok’s slow destruction are recognized as disasters under existing legislation.

That means there is no designated pot of money set aside for those affected communities — unlike cities or towns destroyed by floods or tornadoes.

“We weren’t thinking of climate change when federal disaster relief legislation was passed,” said Robin Bronen, a human rights lawyer in Anchorage who has made a dozen visits to Newtok. “Our legal system is not set up. The institutions that we have created to respond to disasters are not up to the task of responding to climate change.”

In Bronen’s view, Congress needed to rewrite existing disaster legislation to take account of climate change. Communities needed to be able to access those disaster funds — if not to rebuild in place, which is not feasible in Newtok’s case, then to move.

The authorities also had responsibility under the treaty agreements with indigenous Alaskan tribes to guarantee the safety and well-being of indigenous communities, she argued.

“This is completely a human rights issue,” Bronen said. “When you are talking about a people who have done the least to contribute to our climate crisis facing such dramatic consequences as a result of climate change, we have a moral and legal responsibility to respond and provide the funding needed so that these communities are not in danger.”

Until then, however, it was up to Tom to find new ways to prize funds out of an unresponsive bureaucracy. It turned out that he had a knack for it.

Government officials praised Tom for finding other sources of funds, such as development grants, and putting them to use for building the new village site. But it has been a laborious process for the remote village to find its way through the different funding agencies and a maze of competing regulations.

As Tom found out, each agency had its own set of rules. The state government would not build a school for fewer than 10 children. The federal government would not build an airstrip at a village without a post office. But the rules, from Newtok’s vantage point, appeared to have at least one point in common. They seemed to conspire against the village ever getting its move off the ground.

In 2011, Alaska’s government published a timetable for Newtok’s move [PDF], setting out dates for building an emergency center, housing, an airstrip — all items on Tom’s list. Two years later, the plan is already behind schedule and the official who oversaw that original timetable said there was little chance of getting back on track.

“Newtok is something that is probably going to play out over several decades unless it reaches a dire point where something has to be done immediately to keep the people safe,” said Larry Hartig, who heads Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

Officially, the government of Alaska remains committed to helping Newtok and all the other indigenous Alaskan villages that are threatened by climate change.

Almost all of Alaska’s indigenous villages — more than 180 — are experiencing the effects of climate change, including severe flooding and erosion. Some may be able to hold back rivers and sea, but others will have to move. About half a dozen villages, including Newtok, face extreme risks.

“I am not going to tell any community that they are not going to survive. If the residents want to survive, we will help them,” said Mead Treadwell, the state’s lieutenant governor.

But the cost of relocating just one village — Newtok — could run as high as $130 million, according to an estimate by the Army Corps of Engineers [PDF]. That’s more than $350,000 per villager. Multiply that by half a dozen, or several more times, and the cost of protecting indigenous Alaskan villages from climate change soon soars into the billions.

So far, Newtok has received a total of about $12 million in state funds over the past four years, according to George Owletuck, a consultant hired by Tom to help with the move. Much of that has already gone, to build a barge landing, a few new homes, and an emergency evacuation center — in case the village does not manage to move in time.

Officially, federal and state government agencies have spent some $27 million getting Mertarvik ready, although a considerable share of that figure, some $6 million, did not go directly to the relocation, said Sally Russell Cox, the state official overseeing the move. And there is still no major infrastructure completed at Mertarvik.

Would the government of Alaska commit to picking up the rest of the tab for Newtok and the other villages?

Alaska’s oil revenues have fallen off over the years. In 2012, the state slipped into second place for oil production behind North Dakota. Treadwell admitted the state government would not cover the entire cost of fortifying or moving all of the villages threatened by climate change.

“On the question of is there money to help them with one check? That is something there clearly is not,” he said.

Treadwell suggested some of the at-risk villages could raise funds by setting themselves up as hubs for oil companies hoping to drill in Arctic waters.

However, a number of oil companies have put their Arctic drilling plans on hold for 2013 and 2014. Treadwell admitted there was as yet no comprehensive climate change plan for Newtok and other villages. “I think it’s going to be piece by piece with each community and many different pots of money,” he said.

In the case of Newtok, Owletuck, the consultant, had big ideas for financing the move: growing fruit and vegetables hydroponically in greenhouses, or testing the possibilities of producing biofuels from algae.

He let it be known the village may even have found a mysterious benefactor. Owletuck said he’d had an approach from private individuals, whom he declined to name, wanting to donate $22 million to the move.

None of those propositions have materialized, however. And after more than a decade of uncertainty about the future under climate change, the basic infrastructure of Newtok is coming apart.

Snow covers up a lot of Newtok’s flaws: the open sewage pits, the broken boardwalk over mudflats, some of the abandoned snowmobile wrecks.

Newtok has for years been considered a “distressed village,” with average income of $16,000, well below the rest of the state. Fewer than half of adults in the village have paid work. But even within those dismal measures, conditions have sharply deteriorated in the years since the village has been planning to move.

Aside from the clinic and the school, most buildings are in a state of advanced dilapidation. The floor in the community hall sags like an old mattress. The community laundry is out of order.

In the cramped offices of the traditional council, where Tom works, the furniture dates from the 1970s or 1980s, mid-brown vinyl chairs where the casing has split open, revealing the dirty foam inside. It’s not unheard of to find families of 10 or 12 children living in houses of less than 800 square feet — and none of those homes have flush toilets or running water.

Early mornings find the men of the household trudging out of their homes with five-gallon buckets of waste, which get dumped at various spots on the edges of the village, including a small stream.

The diesel-powered generator was nearing the end of its life span. The water treatment plant was shut down last October after people began getting sick. Tom said there was contamination from leaking jet fuel at the airport.

For now, villagers are drawing water from the school, which had a separate system. But the school principal said he would have to cut that off in May to preserve the system for the schoolchildren.

Tom said there was nothing he could do. Government agencies would not fund improvements at the current village site, because of the plan to move. “There is no money to improve our community,” he said. “We are suspended from federal and state agencies and there is no way of improving our lives over here. The agencies do not want to work on both villages at once.”

By last October, frustration with the stalled move and conditions in the village exploded. Villagers accused their own council of failing to hold regular elections, and raised a petition to throw out the leaders and replace Tom.

Some accused him of presiding over a dictatorship in the village. Others speculated that he and the paid consultant, Owletuck, were plotting to rob the relocation funds.

One of the dissidents, a relative newcomer to the village, posted ferocious criticism of Tom on Facebook calling for rebellion.

The dissidents organized elections, voted out the old council, and installed their own leaders. Tom ignored the result. “Let them cry all they want,” he said. “I don’t care. They are not going to help my community. I am way ahead of these guys.”

The upheavals in Newtok are sadly familiar to those who have worked with indigenous Alaskan villages confronting climate change. “I don’t think you would find one community that says they are happy with the pace that’s gone on,” said Patricia Cochran, director of the Alaska Native Science Commission.

“To be honest with you, I think the state and the feds have done a terrible job, not only in assessing the conditions that communities are living within but in responding to them,” she said. “Because these communities are listed as threatened and may potentially be relocated, they are not able to get any funds now for infrastructure that is being damaged right now.”

That leaves communities stuck in a limbo that can carry for years or even decades.

That’s what has become of Newtok. The effects are devastating, said Charles. Beyond all her anger she admitted was an all-enveloping fear. “Sometimes I get scared. I’m scared for my own family. How will I take care of them if the relocation doesn’t start right away?”

She had been waiting for years to see the beginnings of any new settlement in rural Alaska rising up on the rocky hill of Mertarvik: the airport, the barge landing, the school, the houses. None of it was there yet, and Charles said she was coming close to despair.

“It’s been going on for I don’t know how long, and I am beginning to lose hope.”

Next: How climate change eats the Alaskan coast

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In this video for the Nature Conservancy, rapper Macklemore explains how municipal green space in his home city of Seattle influenced his career: He and his friends didn’t want to kick it at their parents’ houses, so they went and freestyled in parks. (Side note: Do people really still say “kick it,” or is Macklemore even older than I am?) We knew, of course, that Macklemore was into creative reuse, but who knew he had so many ideas about urban infrastructure? 

The moral here is clear: Want more rappers? Make more parks. It’s just science.

One California food company has a novel plan for dealing with food waste and cutting down the power bill: Feed it to bacteria. The Kroger Co. plans to chuck all food gone past its sell-by date into an industrial silo, where microbes will break it down to release methane. That methane will in turn be burned to generate electricity.

Kroger’s new food-to-energy plant is designed to make the most of the vast amount of food that spoils before it can be sold to customers, while reducing the company’s electricity bills. Sludge left over from the new energy plant will be used as agricultural compost. The L.A. Times describes the operation, which was built in a Compton, Calif., distribution center that serves hundreds of Ralphs and Food 4 Less stores:

Several chest-high trash bins containing a feast of limp waffles, wilting flowers, bruised mangoes and plastic-wrapped steak sat in an airy space laced with piping. Stores send food unable to be donated or sold to the facility, where it is dumped into a massive grinder — cardboard and plastic packaging included.

After being pulverized, the mass is sent to a pulping machine, which filters out inorganic materials such as glass and metal and mixes in hot wastewater from a nearby dairy creamery to create a sludgy substance.

Mike Vriens, Ralphs vice president of industrial engineering, describes the goop as a “juicy milkshake” of trash.

From there, the mulch is piped into a 250,000-gallon staging tank before being steadily fed into a 2-million-gallon silo. The contraption essentially functions as a multi-story stomach.

Inside, devoid of oxygen, bacteria munch away on the liquid refuse, naturally converting it into methane gas. The gas, which floats to the top of the tank, is siphoned out to power three on-site turbine engines.

The amount of food that we waste is enough to cause indigestion. With this system in place, the anaerobic digestion of some of the rotting waste will happen in a controlled facility, instead of moldering in a landfill somewhere, where released gases will warm up the globe even more.

Farewell, great lakes of ice and frozen rivers.

Scientists used satellite images and gravity measurements to peer more closely than ever before at the torturous drip-drip-drip from the world’s glaciers. What they discovered is not really much of a surprise: Ice Age glaciers have been methodically chiseled away by the warming effects of fossil fuel burning.

Global warming and black carbon are working fast: Glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are collectively losing an estimated 571 trillion pounds worth of ice annually, the researchers reported in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

Glaciers? Icesheets? Potatoes, potatoes, you say. Here’s the difference: The world’s ice sheets cover vast swaths in Greenland and Antarctica. Meanwhile, glaciers are rivers and lakes of slow-moving ice. You can find them at high altitudes in alpine regions around the world, and you’ll find them in lower elevations (including on and around ice sheets) as you approach the poles.

Although these glaciers contain just 1 percent of land ice reserves, they contribute about as much to the rising seas as the melting ice sheets. The individual contributions of glaciers to the rising seas may be relatively small, but the cumulative impacts of their melts are substantial.

The researchers concluded that melting glaciers are causing the oceans to surge by 0.03 inches yearly, which works out to 30 percent of the total annual rise in recorded sea levels.

From a press release by NASA, which provided the data to the researchers from its Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE):

Current estimates predict all the glaciers in the world contain enough water to raise sea level by as much as 24 inches (about 60 centimeters). In comparison, the entire Greenland ice sheet has the potential to contribute about 20 feet (about 6 meters) to sea level rise and the Antarctic ice sheet just less than 200 feet (about 60 meters).

“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said study co-author Tad Pfeffer, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise.”

The largest glacial losses during the study period from 2003 to 2009 were recorded from Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes, and high-mountain Asia. That’s pretty much all the major glacial regions, the exception being in Antarctica, where loss was minor.

So, there’s some good news for Antarcticans: Glacial melt is not as bad there as everywhere else.

A team of scientists at Harvard have discovered how to make crazy, beautiful, very tightly controlled shapes that are so tiny they’re invisible to the naked eye. Just by making simple changes in the environment in which salt and silicon crystals grow, they’ve made gardens of flower-like structures. Wim Noorduin, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, grew a variety of these “flowers,” recently featured in the journal Science.

The process starts with a solution of salt and and silicon. By altering the acidity, alkalinity, and temperature of the solution, Noorduin discovered he could make his structures grow outward or inward. In other words, he could control the way the petals on his flowers are furled or unfurled. The thickness of the flowers’ petals is determined by how much carbon dioxide is introduced to the compounds. Combining various steps allowed him tighter control to manipulate the shape. He once created an entire field of these flowers on a penny, picturesquely planted along the base of the Lincoln Memorial. Noorduin, who is Dutch, also grew a tulip, because Dutch people are obsessed with tulips, even microscopic ones.

To be clear, Harvard’s main goal here was not to make teeny tiny beautiful flowers. That was just something that sort of happened as the researchers went about the very serious business of making “industrial applications.” The reason the flowers are significant is they demonstrate how precisely scientists can control shapes, even at this scale. But I bet a lot of people will just settle for the flowers.

Clothing retailers don’t have it easy. It’s very hard to keep up with what’s in style. And what’s in style now? Fracking! Which means flame-retardant clothing for when shit gets out of hand.

Last year in the United States, sales of flame-retardant clothing rose from $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion. By 2017, sales for protective clothing are expected to reach $2.3 billion. To this end, companies like Carhartt and Cabela’s are sending people out into the field to check out what’s new in the world of flame-retardant clothes. They’re looking to make stuff that’s hard to set on fire, but also, well, cute. Which is to say that although the motivation is safety, workers also want clothing that they can perhaps wear outside of the job site. So manufacturers are looking to make clothing that does the job but is lighter and cooler than the usual flame-retardant clothing.

The reason for this fashion trend? An abundance of fires, not just at fracking sites but at drilling sites and refineries. It’s a hazardous world, and you can’t just wear a T-shirt and jeans to work at a place where there’s stuff that catches on fire. I suppose you could move the country towards a less mortally dangerous fuel source, but I dunno, that sounds hard.

Now, of course, just as America started wearing Levi’s even though they were originally made for gold miners, will we start wearing flame-retardant clothing just for fun? Will we wear it, like, to clubs and stuff? Not only am I betting yes, I am betting that Chris Brown will tweet about his flame-retardant jeans before the end of 2014. Anyone willing to take that bet?

For everyone who was hoping the Obama administration’s proposed new rules for natural gas drilling on public lands would make a difference, the just-released new draft amounts to a big “frack you.”

Federal rules governing fracking on public lands are being updated, ostensibly to help manage the boom that’s polluting America’s groundwater and shaking free vast volumes of cheap natural gas. Environmentalists were disappointed a year ago when the Department of Interior released a fracker-friendly draft of the new rules. But they submitted reams of comments and had hoped that the proposed regulations would be tightened up in this draft.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Bowing to industry pressure and disregarding concerns about environmental and health impacts, the department actually watered down the draft regulations during the past year. The latest proposal gives frackers virtual carte blanche to wreck the environment, and they don’t even need to tell America which chemicals they’re wrecking it with.

Perhaps this should come as little surprise. It’s Obama’s positions on fracking that endear the president to the far right.

Under the draft proposal, frackers won’t be required to tell the public what chemicals they are injecting into their land. They won’t need to demonstrate that all of their wells are safe — just one well in each field will do. Toxic wastewater will be allowed to sit in open pits. And frackers will be allowed to work near homes, schools, and on environmentally sensitive land.

From the Washington Post:

“These rules protect industry, not people,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are riddled with gaping holes that endanger clean, safe drinking water supplies for millions of Americans nationwide.” She added that “this draft is a blueprint for business-as-usual industrialization of our landscapes.”

You would imagine that the oil and gas industry would be showering Obama with love and extolling his greatness right now, given that they are getting their way on virtually everything. But you would be wrong. For them, anything resembling regulation is too much regulation. More from the Washington Post:

Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute criticized the department for not simply leaving regulation to state agencies. “While changes to the proposed rule attempt to better acknowledge the state role, BLM has yet to answer the question why BLM is moving forward with these requirements in the first place,” said Erik Milito, API’s director of upstream operations.

In a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who as a petroleum engineer used hydraulic fracturing while drilling oil and gas wells in the 1970s, called the proposals “common-sense updates” of regulations that “date back to the Sony Walkman and Atari video game.” She called fracking “an essential tool” but said it should not be left to a “patchwork” of state regulations.

For a detailed look at the latest proposal and for a dissection of its environmental shortcomings, head over to Matthew McFeeley’s NRDC blog. The draft rule isn’t final yet — there is a 30-day public comment period. Let’s see if the regulators listen to the people this time.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) stopped throwing a temper tantrum and took a deep breath for long enough Thursday to allow the Senate to unanimously confirm Ernest Moniz as secretary of energy.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and fossil fuel-industry fan was confirmed with a 97-0 vote. The vote had been delayed more than three weeks by Graham in protest over $200 million of planned nuclear energy budget cuts in his state.

Moniz served as an energy undersecretary in the Clinton administration and he is replacing Steven Chu, also a physicist, who is stepping down from the department’s top job.

From the AP, via the Washington Post:

Obama hailed Moniz as “a world-class scientist with expertise in a range of energy sources and a leader with a proven record of bringing prominent thinkers and innovators together to advance new energy solutions.”

Moniz shares his belief that “the United States must lead the world in developing more sustainable sources of energy that create new jobs and new industries, and in responding to the threat of global climate change,” Obama said in a statement.

Environmentalists have warned that Moniz could place energy industry interests ahead of environmental protections. We told you in March about his links to BP, General Electric, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, and the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center. Big Oil likes him, but so, too, does the cleantech sector, which straddles the energy industry and the climate movement. From a statement issued by Solar Energy Industries Association President Rhone Resch:

Ernest Moniz will be an outstanding Secretary of Energy.  As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor, an expert in energy issues and a veteran of Washington politics, he is uniquely qualified to tackle the many policy challenges facing our nation and the world.  In today’s combative political environment, his unanimous selection in the Senate stands as a testament to his abilities, as well as to the respect he brings to his new position.  We look forward to working with Secretary Moniz on policies and opportunities which will create new American jobs, expand the U.S. economy and provide energy security for our nation.

Oh, and about that three-week delay in the confirmation vote? Graham insists it was nothing personal. Just politics, ya know? From the AP again:

Graham made clear Thursday he had nothing against Moniz, calling him a “fine fellow.” Graham said he has other “leverage points” to continue putting pressure on the Obama administration to fully fund the Savannah River project.

Also Thursday, the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee cleared Obama’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency by a 10-8 vote along partisan lines. The full Senate will now consider Gina McCarthy’s nomination, though more trouble is brewing.

The committee vote was delayed last week by a different Republican tantrum, this one over claims that the EPA hasn’t answered all of the questions put to it by senators. And despite Thursday’s vote, Republicans are threatening to filibuster McCarthy’s nomination over the same complaint once the nomination reaches the Senate floor, The New York Times reported.

Don’t freak out, but there’s a problem with green roofs: They’re not necessarily greener than ordinary roofs. Soooooo kind of a major problem. With a little extra effort, though, green roofs can be efficient AND locally sourced — you just can’t take the easy way out.

Scientific American reports:

[R]ooftop vegetation has to be able to survive the high winds, prolonged UV radiation and unpredictable fluctuations in water availability. To resist these harsh environments, a majority of green roofs are planted with sedum, a non-native species that can survive wind and long periods without rainfall. A roof planted with sedum, however, is no greener, from the standpoint of sustainability, than is ordinary tar or asphalt.

Sedum, it turns out, absorbs sunlight, just like a tar roof would, and isn’t particularly good at absorbing water. Planting your green roof with sedum is like hiring employees based on how long they can physically sit in an office chair instead of how good they are at doing the work. Sedum plants are hardy, but they don’t do anything: “They’re just there,” one scientist studying the plants told SciAm.

But, hey, there’s another way of doing this: Plant diverse groups of native species. Only problem with that is that it might take a little bit of effort to keep them thriving. Someone might have to visit the green roof of the corporate office building every once in a while. Sounds terrible.