“Tree coming down!”

Skyler Lofgren shouts above a din of buzzing chainsaws, leans into his own, and with a final heave topples another 40-foot Ponderosa pine. Lofgren, 27, a forest firefighting crew boss with the Flagstaff, Ariz., fire department, felled a dozen trees on Monday, overseeing an outdoor classroom for a new crop of seasonal recruits who will spend the summer patrolling the Coconino National Forest with three-foot chainsaws at the ready. The crew will fight wildfires when they come, but the vast majority of their time will be spent on prevention or, as Lofgren puts it, “working ourselves out of a job.”

In a stand of trees 10 minutes outside downtown Flagstaff — a tight cluster of low-slung brick buildings peppered with Route 66 paraphernalia — Lofgren and his fellow firefighters are hard at work on a new project that local officials say is the first of its kind in the nation. Funded by a $10 million bond that voters approved by a 3-to-1 margin in November, the program puts local tax dollars to work clearing trees and brush, and lighting carefully managed fires, in an effort to stave off the devastating, astronomically expensive megafires that have become increasingly common in the West. If successful, the project could also untether the community from a withering federal firefighting budget.

Last year saw the third-worst wildfire season in five decades; the Southern California fire that threatened thousands of homes earlier this month looks to be only the first flash of what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week will be an above-average season for much of the Southwest. But the sequester took a 7.5 percent bite out of the Forest Service’s budget, nearly half of which is spent fighting wildfires. That means there will be 500 fewer pairs of boots on the ground and 200,000 fewer acres treated to prevent fires; the agency’s next proposed budget cuts preventative spending by a further 24 percent. It’s all part of what fire ecologists, environmentalists, and firefighters interviewed by Climate Desk describe as an increasingly distorted federal budget that has apparently forgotten the old adage about an ounce of prevention: It pours billions ($2 billion in 2012) into fighting fires but skimps on cheap, proven methods for stopping megafires before they start.

“At this point we’re under-investing in the problem,” says Diane Vosick, a policy analyst at Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute. “The budget is going in the wrong direction.”

After years of offering (unheeded) advice to the White House’s budget makers, Vosick and her colleagues released a report [PDF] last week detailing the relative value of investing in fire prevention over firefighting. They found that the bulk of costs from megafires is borne not by the federal government but by local governments — and the federal budgeting process ignores those bills when weighing whether prevention saves money.

Take the Schultz Fire, a June 2010 scorcher that burned 15,000 acres outside Flagstaff. It cost $60 million to put out, but flood damage, lost property value, habitat loss, cleanup, and other post-fire costs more than doubled the bill to $146 million. That difference is largely carried by local agencies and residents. Spend that same $60 million on prevention, Vosick argues, and the other costs likely could have been avoided. If she’s right, Flagstaff’s $10 million bond is a great bargain for local taxpayers.

“[OMB] is just not doing a full-cost accounting,” she says. “When the feds under-invest, it cascades down the system.”

Office of Management and Budget spokesperson Jamal Brown wrote in an email that funding for prevention projects is focused on high-risk areas where development meets the forest, and pointed out that next year’s proposed budget includes a small earmark to study where investments are most effective. But the agency did not comment on whether it had received or read Vosick’s report.

An analysis of Forest Service budgets provided to Climate Desk by Chris Topik, who directs the Nature Conservancy’s forest restoration program and who has worked closely with OMB for much of his career, reveals that preventative funding as a proportion of the total fire budget dropped 3 percent between 2001 and 2012, from 15.7 percent to 12.9 percent. The proposed budget would shrink that proportion another 3 percent.

“What happens is that firefighting ends up trumping everything else. [OMB] finds it hard to invest in prevention even though we know it pays,” Topik says.

Chris Brehl, a veteran wildland firefighter overseeing Flagstaff’s prevention project, says his city can’t wait around for the feds to get it straight. He maneuvers his pickup truck up a rough, winding forest road, topping out on a high ridge with a breathtaking view of Humphreys Peak, Arizona’s tallest mountain, which saw unusually low snowfall last winter. A bad fire in this bone-dry area, the City of Flagstaff estimates, could cost it $500 million.

“It’s beautiful,” Brehl says. “But I get up here sometimes, and I’m scared. It’s gonna go, and it’s gonna go big.”

It’s impossible to prevent all fires, Brehl says, and not even desirable: Fire ecologists increasingly embrace small, low-intensity fires as critical parts of a healthy forest. Instead, Brehl focuses on “thinning” the forest by removing so-called “ladder fuels,” small trees that can boost a ground fire up into the high canopy, where it can easily catch the wind and explode out of control. Signs of his project are everywhere: Thousands of “slash piles,” stacks of chopped-up trees and brush, litter the forest floor, ranging from waist-high mounds tossed together by Lofgren and his crew, to 15-foot towers of full trunks cut and stacked by massive logging machinery. Some of this detritus will be donated or sold as firewood; the rest will be burned in place when it’s padded by a safe buffer of snow in the winter.

To Brehl, the proof is in the pudding: He’s seen many fires flare up, then stop cold when they hit pre-treated areas (his department has done small-scale thinning for over a decade; the new bond will allow them to vastly expand their reach). Locals understand the benefits and have embraced the constant whir of chainsaws and occasional controlled burns, he says: One elderly lady even snuck up behind him during a burn near her house with a plate of milk and cookies.

“I had to say, ‘Thanks, but please get out of my burn zone,’” he recalls.

Back with the fire crew, Lofgren chews on a wad of sunflower seeds and shows greenhorn Jake Hess, 23, the thinned area behind them and the untreated area ahead: The untreated area is densely packed with shaggy undergrowth, while the treated area is clear enough to drive a truck through. It’s the difference, he says, “between fighting and backing off.” But if you really want to see prevention at work, Lofgren says, come back when this spot is ablaze.

“It’s a great feeling to come back to an area we’ve been through and be able to tell someone, ‘We can protect your house.’”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The collapse of an Interstate 5 bridge in Washington state Thursday night offered a wake-up call about the sorry state of disrepair in which we’ve left our country’s auto-centric transportation system. But all the talk about aging bridges and infrastructure drowns out a few larger questions — about how we plan to fund the massive road system we’ve built, and why, with existing roads crumbling, we keep dropping money on more.

The bridge that collapsed in Washington was built, like many major bridges in the U.S., during the rise of the interstate highway system, circa 1955. That means it had already exceeded by several years the 50-year lifespan typical of American bridges.

Ironically, the bridge in Washington, unlike nearly 70,000 bridges across the country, wasn’t rated “structurally deficient.” It had been inspected as recently as November 2012. But after a half a century, a bridge is likely to need major upgrades of some kind, and with the average bridge in this country now 43 years old, we’re looking at a huge roster of bridges due for repairs. According to the Federal Highway Administration, as of 2009, the backlog of deficient bridges required $70.9 billion to address — and that number has likely increased since then.

So what are states doing to tackle the problem? They’re funneling money to shiny new construction projects instead, natch. According to Transportation for America, a national coalition for transportation policy reform:

In recent years, most transportation agencies have delayed needed repairs and maintenance while focusing their energy on new construction. In 2008, all states combined spent more than $18 billion, or 30 percent of the federal transportation funds they received, to build new roads or add capacity to existing roads. In that same year, states spent $8.1 billion of federal funds on repair and rehabilitation of bridges, or about 13 percent of total funds. States currently have the ability to “flex” or transfer out up to 50 percent of their bridge repair money into other projects or programs. [emphasis theirs]

“The new stuff, the ribbon-cutting, always competes with maintenance,” says David Goldberg, communications director at Transportation for America, noting that Washington state’s most recent transportation package allocated surprisingly little money to repair and replace existing structures.

“Some [new] projects have merit and are important for economic development,” Goldberg adds. “But a lot of them have strong political backing. [Departments of Transportation] across the country know that bridges [like the one in Washington] need to be replaced [eventually]. But are they going to spend the money to replace a bridge that is still technically OK when they’re being tapped on the shoulder by politicians saying, ‘Hey, we really want you to spend the money on this shiny new mega-project?’”

Politicians advocating for such mega-projects get to throw around the magic word — jobs. But Transportation for America reports that “Repair work on roads and bridges generates 16 percent more jobs than construction of new bridges and roads,” and that over 25 years, deferring maintenance can end up costing three times as much as preventive repairs. And with public transit ridership at record highs despite constant fare hikes and service cuts, does pouring money into increased road capacity really make sense?

Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, doesn’t think so. “There’s no better example of being penny-wise and pound-foolish than the way Congress is refusing to adequately fund our transportation infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “Their legislative intransigence will lead to much greater expense down the road when too many people find it impossible to get to work or to shop, or to do any one of the many things people do that keep our economy moving.”

As Goldberg puts it: “If [a new project] shaves two minutes off a typical commute, and probably only for 10 years, is this a worthwhile project? With dwindling resources, it becomes more and more important to really prioritize. We need to make sure we’re doing key repairs first.”

Why are resources dwindling? I’ll let Grist’s Greg Hanscom explain:

In the past, much of the transportation system has been paid for using federal and state gas taxes … But cars are becoming more efficient, meaning we’re burning less fuel and paying less in gas taxes, and while the cost of maintaining our roads has risen steadily, the federal gas tax [rate] has remained the same since 1993. To make matters worse, thanks to a drowsy economy, Americans are driving less and buying less stuff that needs to be shipped cross-country.

Gas taxes go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is quickly running dry, despite emergency refills from the general fund. Governing magazine reports that Congress would have to either cut transportation funding by 92 percent (!) or raise the gas tax by at least 50 percent in order to save the fund.

Raising the gas tax is a politically touchy subject, especially when gas prices are already high. But a report from last year found that 58 percent of Americans would support a 10-cent increase in the gas tax, if they knew it would go toward maintenance of existing roads and highways. Incidents like this latest bridge collapse — to say nothing of the tragic 2007 collapse of a Minneapolis bridge that killed 13 people — could certainly bolster that support.

Goldberg predicts a gas-tax hike could be a feasible short-term solution to bolster the fund’s revenue. But, he said, “we need to be looking longer-term and planning for a transition to other sources. … so that [the fund] incorporates other sources of energy that fuel the next generation of vehicles.”

Goldberg also argues we need a “true comprehensive transportation trust fund, not just a highway trust fund,” and I would agree. Our transportation policy ought to look beyond cars and roads and consider all the diverse and creative ways in which we’re now getting around. And with more money directed to public transit, rail, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure, we wouldn’t be so dependent on ever-growing roads in the first place.

Once again, Colorado’s fracking boom has residents wondering if there’s something in the water — carcinogenic benzene, in this case. A plant for fracked natural gas processor Williams Energy, near Parachute, Colo., spilled an estimated 241 barrels of mixed natural gas liquid into the ground, some of which eventually washed as benzene into Parachute Creek.

More than two months after the spill was discovered, neighbors of the plant are wondering why the energy company is being put in charge of the cleanup — and why the state has failed to issue any fines.

Benzene levels in Parachute Creek rose above a safe-to-drink 5 parts per billion following the spill, which was caused by a faulty pressure gauge on a four-inch pipeline.

The safety limit for benzene in Coloradoan drinking water sources is 5 parts per billion. But the state doesn’t define the creek as a source of drinking water, and the limit for such water bodies is 5,300 parts per billion. Less than two miles downstream from the Williams Energy plant, headgates that control the flow of water from Parachute Creek into an irrigation reservoir have been closed since the spill was discovered.

From the Glenwood Springs Post Independent:

“I’d like to say they’ve cleaned it up,” said [downstream rancher Sidney] Lindauer on Wednesday, referring to the combined efforts of Williams Midstream and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE).

But he said he is skeptical about the wisdom of leaving the cleanup in the hands of the company that owns the facilities from which the liquids leaked.

“We need an independent agency that isn’t associated with the industry, or any industry, to monitor that creek,” he said on Wednesday, lamenting that “they [the CDPHE] pretty much leave it up to Williams.”

He said he has seen unexplained layers of dingy, brownish foam on the creek’s surface in recent weeks, something he has occasionally seen in the past but in masses that were less dense than those he has spotted recently.

“Sometimes that creek is cloudy and off color, so you know something’s going on,” he concluded, explaining that he gets water for his horses and his pastures from the creek, though his domestic drinking water is from the Town of Parachute’s water system.

Following the spill, Colorado lawmakers were shocked to discover that state penalties for such accidents had been capped at $10,000 for the last half century. So they passed legislation [PDF], which was signed by the governor [PDF] earlier this month, that increases possible state fines for such incidents. But that all matters little so far: The state has yet to fine Williams Energy a penny.

From a May 16 article in the Denver Business Journal:

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is launching into negotiations with Williams Cos. Inc. (NYSE: WMB) and subsidiary Bargath LLC for a “consent order” outlining the cleanup of an estimated 241 barrels of natural gas liquids that spilled near Parachute Creek in western Colorado. …

There are no plans at this time for that consent order, expected to be signed within a month, to include fines and penalties on the companies, Chris Urbina, executive director of the CDPHE, said Thursday.

However, he said, fines could be levied if Williams or Bargath, Williams’ pipeline subsidiary, fails to follow the department’s consent order for the cleanup.

Also, Urbina said, “We’re considering other fines and penalties associated with this spill. We take this very seriously.”

Why no fines? That’s one of the many questions neighbors have been asking. The answer is in the Business Times story:

The consent order won’t have a fine associated with it “as the release was not due to negligence but to accidental equipment failure,” the department said.

An accident, you say? Oh, well in that case. So sorry to have disturbed you, fracking company. Carry on.

Though it carries major supervillain cred, placing a scientific research station atop an Arctic ice floe in an era of global warming is a dicey proposition — even for the Russians.

North Pole 40, a Russian science station that monitors pollution and conducts meteorological research, began operating in October on an Arctic ice floe. The Russians have been deploying research stations to drifting ice floes for more than 70 years, and North Pole 40 is their 40th such station.

But they don’t make ice floes like they used to. After just seven months of research, the ice floe that supports North Pole 40 started disintegrating. So Russia is scrambling an ice breaker out to the site to relocate the station and rescue the 16 scientists aboard.

From the AFP, via The Australian:

“The ice floe has crumbled into six pieces,” said Arkady Soshnikov, spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.

“The people are not at risk but it is not possible to work in these conditions. The ice may disintegrate so a decision has been taken to evacuate” the station, he told AFP.

The station was located at 81 degrees North and 135 degrees West as of early morning on Wednesday. …

The UN weather agency said this month the Arctic’s sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record.

Vladimir Sokolov, who oversees the floating station at the Saint Petersburg-based Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, said the ice was disintegrating due to climate change.

“This has made the Arctic research significantly harder – the ice has become thinner and the weather conditions more difficult,” he told AFP.

The BBC reports that the research station will be relocated to Bolshevik Island, which is composed of solid ground covered with glaciers. (Borrowed time at best, since those are also melting quickly.)

With the Arctic expected to become ice-free during future summers, we’re certainly in the waning days for Russian ice-floe research stations — bad news for Russian scientists (and James Bond).

Up close to the Canadian border, on the New York side of Lake Champlain, Pedal Power Engineering is building “dynapods” — off-the-grid, pedal-powered machines that can power just about any gadget you might want to use around the house or farm. It can run a computer (via an electric generator), a grain mill, a water pump, a blade sharpener, a blender, or a log splitter.

Of course, you have to do the work of pedaling. PPE writes:

An average adult can pedal it to generate 100 watts of electricity, pump 5 gallons of water per minute, grind a variety of grains, operate an air compressor, a hydraulic pump, most any hand-cranked machine, and a variety of small shop tools. It has been found to be particularly suitable for small scale agricultural applications such as cracking grains, churning butter, and pumping water.

The company’s founder, Andy Wekin, is apparently “an artist who had gone back to school to be an engineer.” Essex, N.Y., where PPE is based, is in farming country, so it’s not surprising he’s been figuring out pedal-powered applications that appeal to homesteaders. We wish we had a use for a pedal-powered log splitter, but the bike-to-computer track is more our speed.

Americans have a long tradition of dreaming up radical ideas for uber-healthy diets and trying to convince other people that their lives and bodies will be transformed if they just change what they’re putting in their mouth. The country’s first raw food restaurant opened in Los Angeles in 1917 and stayed open for 25 years. There were certainly some people who promoted these ideas potential profit, like Julian P. Thomas, M.D.:

But there were also people who had a more missionary zeal for their discoveries, like Eugene and Mollie Griswold Christian, the authors of Uncooked Foods & How to Use Them: A Treatise on How to Get the Highest Form of Animal Energy From Food. The book was originally published in 1904 by New York’s Health & Culture Company, and a fifth-edition copy is currently available from the rare-books dealer Rabelais. There’s “a bit of spotting to the publisher’s gilt stamped dark blue boards,” but the book, which is going for $90, is “otherwise near fine.” Check it out:

Also, it’s incredibly fun to read.

The Christians make a lot of the same arguments for healthy living and raw food that you hear today. Only they make them in turn-of-the-century style. Raw food, for instance, is good because God made it that way:

They have been finished by nature, by some supreme intelligence, and sown with prodigal hand over the face of the earth, and man has become the beneficiary thereof. And none of his work and puny efforts can possibly improve them.

Or, here’s their argument against coffee, tea, and tobacco:

A being who subsists upon clean, elementary foods would have no more desire for stimulants and narcotics than a horse or a dog would have for a Manhattan cocktail.

But there are also wonderful differences between a 1904 raw food treatise and one you might read today. For instance, one of the main arguments they make for a raw food diet is that it liberates women from the drudgery of housework:

When … the woman who has dreamed a true home is settled therein, it gradually dawns upon her that instead of being a queen, she is an imprisoned vassal. … She soon realizes that the fires of the morning are hardly out until those for the noon are kindled … [the dish-rag] waves over her helpless head as an insight of her rank and profession, under which she is really a slave.

But raw food will save her. “It is from this deplorable condition of womankind that the use of uncooked or natural foods will surely bring relief and freedom,” they write.

The Christians are really into dairy. They love egg-nog and fruits with thick cream. And, although they don’t really recommend eating meat, they’re OK with it — as long as it’s raw, as “it is admitted by all authorities that rare meats are more easily digested and far more nutrients than those well done.” (Worried about needing heat to kill germs? You shouldn’t be eating things with germs in the first place, DUH, say the Christians.) The book includes recipes for beef tartare and chipped beef in (of course) cream.

Sarah Lohman, who writes about historic gastronomy at Four Pounds Flour, actually followed the Christians’ seven-day meal plan for a week. And, she said, she felt great:

Despite my kvetching, I’ve been generally very satisfied with my meals. The food is good and fresh, and extremely healthy while remaining delicious. I feel full at the end of a meal … Compared to other historic diets I’ve been on, this one is a breeze.

She says she developed a “new-found love for cabbage” but was not particularly fond of the no-bake biscuits, which she called “miserable little things … less edible than silly puddy.” The raw food diet did work its magic on her digestive system, though: “I’ve got bowels John Harvey Kellogg would be proud of,” she wrote at the end of the experiment.

Our recommendation: Buy it, slather it in cream, and read it while you munch your steak tartare.

By now you’ve probably seen the time-lapse of the funnel cloud raging through Moore, Okla., donated to the Red Cross, and thought to yourself, “Ohmygod, I am so glad I don’t live someplace where there are tornadoes.” Or maybe you do live someplace where there are tornadoes, and you’re wondering why God and/or the climate decided that your community should be blessed with this particular terror. Well, we wondered too.

Natural disasters are both devastating and frustrating, but particularly so when no one else in the world seems to get them. Seventy-five percent of all tornadoes on Earth occur in the United States [PDF]. To which we say, “Dammit America, why do you do this to us?”

Cue insightful map from the Weather Underground:

It’s possible the number of non-U.S. tornadoes could be much higher. Every continent except for Antarctica has reported tornadoes, but the numbers are sketchy. Some places, like Australia, are suspected of having lots of tornadoes, but many occur in less populated areas, so they are left to spin out uncounted and unnoticed. Other places, like the U.K., have lots of tornadoes (the most tornadoes per area, actually), but British tornadoes don’t have nearly the same magnitude.

From the good folks at PBS:

All told, about 1,200 tornadoes occur annually in the United States. The entire rest of the world collectively reports just 200 to 300 every year. Yet only in this country is the number of reported tornadoes roughly equal to the number of actual tornadoes in any given year. The U.S. began officially collecting tornado reports back in 1953 and rating tornadoes using the Fujita Scale 20 years later. No other nation has such a robust or long-standing system.

Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that tornadoes occur with the greatest frequency and strength in the U.S. — and most U.S. tornadoes occur in Tornado Alley. Check out this crazy video that tracks all the tornadoes in the U.S. from 1950-2011:

So why so many U.S. tornadoes? The traditional response is that warm, moist Gulf air gets together with dry air from the Rockies and cold air from Canada to birth tornado babies over the broad, flat Midwestern plains.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency says that’s a “gross oversimplification”:

Many thunderstorms form under those conditions (near warm fronts, cold fronts and drylines respectively), which never even come close to producing tornadoes. Even when the large-scale environment is extremely favorable for tornadic thunderstorms, not every thunderstorm spawns a tornado. The truth is that we don’t fully understand.

These air collisions often produce supercells — the kind of rotating thunderstorms that are wont to produce tornadoes. The rotation is caused by cold air hitting warm air and spinning — kind of like a yo-yo. However, the final steps of tipping a horizontal supercell on its vertical tornado side are where things get a little fuzzy. Here’s a super-informative video with NASA’s Tim Samaras that makes essentially the same point, but with a bit more exactness and eloquence:

Or if you got really into science textbook illustrations …

So how about the connection between tornadoes and climate change? There, too, the science doesn’t help us much. Earlier this week, Susie Cagle asked whether or not tornadoes are affected by climate change. Results: We don’t have much of a clue.

As John Upton noted, although tornado patterns have been more erratic lately than in the past, there haven’t necessarily been more of them. We are seeing a steady rising trend of smaller tornadoes being reported, but NOAA mostly attributes this to things like better communication and more amateur storm-chasing in the family Canyonero. The number of tornadoes rated EF1 or greater remains pretty steady over time. (The EF Scale, or Enhanced Fujita Scale, lets you know whether your tornado’s removing shingles or flattening towns. EF0=shingle removal, EF5=flattened town.)

Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground added in this HuffPo piece that “our database for evaluating long-term changes in tornadoes is pretty awful, so we really don’t know how tornadoes might be changing.” Maybe he hasn’t seen that crazy/helpful tornado history video, but the more likely case is that he’s right. Tornadoes are complex, and in order to more deeply understand the tornado-climate relationship, we’ll need better trend data and more powerful climate models.

What we do know is that big, destructive tornadoes are uniquely American, like apple pie, baseball, and low congressional approval ratings.

So for the time being, let’s be careful about blaming tornadoes on climate change — and grateful that this one didn’t level our town. Here’s that link again for donating to the Red Cross.

At one time, escaping the dirty, dangerous city was a privilege. Now the wealthy are flocking back for newly “livable,” walkable neighborhoods that are safer than they’ve been in decades. New residents are remaking cities in their own image, driving prices way up, and ultimately pushing poorer city dwellers out to the suburbs.

A new report from the Brookings Institution, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” reveals how formerly affluent bedroom communities have faltered in recent years. Brookings researchers found that between 2000 and 2011, the rate of poverty in the American suburbs grew by nearly two-thirds — more than twice as fast as it did in cities. “The federal government spends $82 billion a year across more than 80 programs to address poverty in place,” the study notes. “But the spread-out nature of suburban poverty, and the lack of expert public and nonprofit service providers in suburbs, mean that most of those dollars remain focused on urban communities.”

Here’s a chart showing the increase in suburban vs. urban poverty in the last few decades:

To some degree, it makes sense that there are more poor people in the suburbs than there are in cities: Three times as many people live in the suburbs as in urban centers in the U.S. What’s really notable here is the rate of change.

But this report doesn’t really say that cities are winning. If anything, it says we’re all losing — you’ll notice that both of those trend lines in the graph are on the rise. It’s further evidence of the growing wealth chasm and how it dictates our choices.

Suburban poverty isn’t the epidemic — poverty is. Regardless, Brookings seems to have offended suburban champions who argue that white-picket-fence, car-friendly living is the real American way of life.

There are a few reasons the suburbs are losing wealth way faster than cities, besides the fact that comfy car-free city-living has become such an attractive, increasingly elite lifestyle. Working- and service-class industries moved to the suburbs, then crashed, while more lucrative “creative class” industry jobs have largely concentrated in urban centers. Cities are not only attracting the wealthy, but rewarding them for their investments. Urban home values have maintained and even increased while suburban ones have crashed on people for whom their house was their greatest asset and investment.

And living in the suburbs often requires extra resources. Hundreds of thousands of poor suburban families don’t have cars, so daily life becomes a time-consuming struggle of simply getting around places that have limited public transportation and often no bike-friendly infrastructure to speak of.

None of this sits well with those who champion the ‘burbs. Suburb-lovers and Richard-Florida-haters Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox have some choice words for urbanists at the Daily Beast. They call Brookings “something of a Vatican for anti-suburban theology,” pointing out great wealth disparities in large cities such as Chicago and New York, and championing suburban growth.

But suburban poverty is real. It’s the other side of the urban-gentrification coin toss — the losing side. When a city neighborhood hits peak coffee shop and beer garden, when families move out and investors move in, locals get pushed out. And the organizers and activists and the resources fighting for the poor don’t always follow them to the suburbs to keep helping out.

The major concern here is not just that poor people are being pushed out of the cities they’ve called home. It’s that when they’re in the suburbs, those poor people have a lot fewer opportunities to thrive.

Brookings has been beating this poor-suburbs drum for years now. “This ongoing shift in the geography of American poverty increasingly requires regional scale collaboration by policymakers and social service providers in order to effectively address the needs of a poor population that is increasingly suburban,” a 2010 Brookings report read.

Ironically, despite all the sniping back and forth between city lovers and suburban apologists, this is one point on which everyone seems to agree: “Rather than castigating suburbs for exaggerated dysfunction, retro-urbanists would be much better served focusing on how to correct and confront the issue of poverty, which continues to concentrate heavily in the urban core and elsewhere in America,” Kotkin and Cox conclude.

Such a vital issue shouldn’t — and doesn’t, really! — pit urbanists against suburbanists. No city is an island. Urban living is great, but ultimately our cities are only as great as the poverty concentrated in their centers, now spilling out into their suburbs.

This looks like Cousin Itt’s house, but it’s actually a proposal from Swedish architecture firm Belatchew, which wants to outfit this Stockholm building with an energy-collecting piezo-electric toupee. Could you start seeing hairy buildings in your neighborhood? Will you someday live in a hairy house?

Well, probably not — the technology is still pretty new. The idea is that these millions of piezo-electric “straws” blow in the wind, collecting energy out of thin air to power the building. But, says Treehugger, there are still a few challenges:

[H]ow do you clean all those piezo-strands? How much noise might they make on a windy day? In addition, most piezo-electric generators are sheets or plates installed where people move about, and underneath the collectors is wiring to bring the generated energy to where it can be used.

Last but not least, piezo-electricity isn’t very efficient. Not yet, at least.

Yeah, that last part’s a bit of a buzzkill. But at least this theoretical skyscraper would look sweet as hell, and not suffer the undermining of confidence that comes from building pattern baldness.

Pick 100 Americans at random and line them up. Ask those who think the country shouldn’t do a damned thing to rein in its greenhouse emissions to please step forward.

Guess how many would do so?

Six.

Just six out of every 100 Americans believe there is absolutely no need for the U.S. to take action to reduce its emissions to help combat climate change.

That’s according to the latest survey result from an ongoing project that tracks public attitudes towards climate change. The project is run by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Those six people may look around awkwardly, feeling lonely and lied to by whichever media outlets convinced them that green energy was a fringe obsession of the lunatic left. Meanwhile, 59 of the people in our hypothetical lineup think the U.S. should reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do; 10 think the U.S. should take action only if other countries do the same; and 25 are shrugging their shoulders and looking at their feet, unable to state an opinion.

The finding is a reminder that resistance to green energy in America is not created by its people, but by the global fossil fuel companies that pollute its land and water, screw with its weather, manipulate its media, and lobby the living shit out of its lawmakers.

Other results from the survey, which was administered in April, were also encouraging. For example, 70 percent of the 1,045 people surveyed said global warming should be a medium to very high priority for Congress and the president.

Despite the survey’s lopsided results, there remain reasons to be discouraged. Support for action on climate change actually waned over winter — a time of year when the effects of global warming can be less obvious. Take this graph from the survey report as an example:

But it’s Friday, so let’s revel in the positive. According to a summary of the results, the majority of Americans support the following:

• Providing tax rebates for people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels (71%);
• Funding more research into renewable energy sources (70%);
• Regulating CO2 as a pollutant (68%);
• Requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and using the money to pay down the national debt (61%);
• Eliminating all subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry (59%);
• Expanding offshore drilling for oil and natural gas off the U.S. coast (58%);
• Requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year (55%).

If only Congress would listen to the people instead of the fossil fuel donors and industry lobbyists, the U.S. could go green in next to no time.