"OMG is that a drone?" (Photo by n0nick.)

The House of Representatives just set rules for debate on H.R. 2578, the "Conservation and Economic Growth Act," meaning it will come to the floor for a vote. (Every single bill currently proposed in the House must be titled with the words “economic growth” or “jobs” or both. If it doesn’t, the bill is put out on the Capitol steps and abandoned, where it sings doleful songs to passing children.)

Sorry. Got sidetracked.

Among 2,578 other things having to do directly or vaguely with land management, H.R. 2578 establishes a 100-mile zone within the borders of the United States in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection is given a free hand. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) thinks these measures are so important that DHS head Janet Napolitano deemed the effort "unnecessary" and "bad policy."

House Democrats, who oppose the measure, have labeled the 100-mile area the "Drone Zone," creating a website outfitted with intern-crafted, Twilight Zone-style graphics of a Predator drone sort of hovering over middle America. You are meant to be scared by this. As we mentioned yesterday, drones are the go-to bogeyman these days, the barely visible eye-in-the-sky that is taking out terrorists in Afghanistan and Yemen. (The "taking out" is not confirmed by the government; the term "terrorists" is not always supported by the evidence.) So, yeah, Drone Zone. Look out, America! Fine.

Here's what else H.R. 2578 would do: waive the application of each of the following laws [PDF] on any public land in that area.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

After being fired by Cumberland River Coal Company last year, Charles Scott Howard sued, alleging that he was fired for blowing the whistle on the company's safety issues. On Friday, a court agreed. From the Huffington Post:

A federal judge ordered Friday that Howard's company immediately reinstate him at the mine and pay a $30,000 fine for discriminating against a whistleblower. The sharply worded decision said managers at Cumberland River, as well as its parent company, coal giant Arch Coal, went to great lengths to find a reason to fire Howard after he brought his mine to the attention of federal safety officials.

"It is obvious that [Cumberland River] worked diligently to end Howard's employment," wrote Margaret A. Miller, an administrative law judge for the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. "The discrimination against Howard ran through [Cumberland River] and its parent, Arch, at the highest management levels." ...

In 2007, Howard recorded video of faulty seals in the mine that was presented to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. When he suffered a head injury on the job, the court determined that his employer unlawfully used the injury as an excuse to fire him.

The Washington Post's Charles Lane has a column today in which he argues that the Obama administration's efforts to bolster clean energy is money "wasted," and that if government does "double down on clean energy, it’s the federal budget that will end up busted."

He's wrong.

Lane bases his arguments largely on a report released earlier this month by Brookings. "Clean Energy: Revisiting the Challenges of Industrial Policy" assesses the value of subsidies in bolstering a clean energy economy.

What Brookings found probably won't come as much of a surprise: Subsidizing clean energy initiatives is not always effective and is not the ideal way to bolster the sector. Instead of subsidies, the most market-efficient way to support clean energy is to internalize the costs of fossil fuel-based energy production. In other words, to build a system that -- among other things -- ends the ability of coal power producers to emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere where they will produce long-term costs in global warming and negative health impacts.

We tried this one way; it was called cap-and-trade. It was proposed by Republicans, then killed when Democrats began to champion it. Politically, it's a non-starter.

There's another way to do it: regulation. The EPA has issued several rules that would lower the allowable baseline for fossil fuel pollution. This is the sort of reception such efforts receive.

Which is why the fossil fuel industry and its allies focus on subsidies as a target. Subsidies are the primary support the government provides to clean energy. If you remove subsidies for clean energy projects, it's almost impossible for them to get a foothold in a crowded marketplace -- even if, over the long run, the technology will obviously be dominant and more cost-effective. If you came up with a new retail system, one that held real promise to vastly improve the consumer experience, how do you think you'd do if Walmart wanted to take you out?

Along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a series of billboards sponsored by FORCE, a pro-coal lobby, make the argument for coal-based power by arguing that "wind dies" and "the sun sets." Coal wants you to think renewable energy is unstable, uneven.

Bad news, coal. A massive study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) modeled the impacts of a national energy grid with renewable power comprising between 30 and 90 percent of the mix -- including the requisite generation, transmission, and storage. In short:

The central conclusion of the analysis is that renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.

That quote scratches the surface of the NREL's findings, which follow collaboration with 110 contributors from 35 organizations inside and outside the government. (The list of abbreviations used in the report itself runs two-and-a-half pages.) Another study released in 2010 found that Europe could similarly make a transition to a renewable-heavy energy infrastructure.

In a guest post at ThinkProgress, Neven Acropolis outlines the bad news about Arctic ice:

If you want to mislead people into thinking that there is nothing weird going on in the Arctic, you have to do it during winter. In winter things almost look normal on some graphs, with gaps between trend lines and long-term averages not as ridiculously big as during spring and summer. ...

Sea ice area has never been so low for this date in the satellite record, not even close to it. 2012 has over half a million of square kilometers less ice than record minimum years 2007 and 2011.

There was a distinct possibility this would happen, although I didn’t expect it to happen quite this early.

Japan's announcement over the weekend that it would restart two nuclear reactors caused no small amount of consternation within the country and abroad. Seventy-one percent of the country opposes turning the reactors back on. They point out that the country has been meeting power demands just fine without the reactors online, and also note some of the challenges of using nuclear power. Such as earthquake/tidal wave combos that knock out power plants and lead to radiation leaks. That has happened before. In recent memory.

On the other hand, Japan is also moving to become a solar power heavyweight. A boom in the country's solar market may soon move it past Germany and Italy to be the second-largest in the world. Bloomberg reports:

Industry Minister Yukio Edano set today a premium price for solar electricity that’s about triple what industrial users now pay for conventional power. That may spur at least $9.6 billion in new installations with 3.2 gigawatts of capacity, Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast. The total is about equal to the output of three atomic reactors. Solar stocks rallied.

This is outside your window right now, maybe. (Photo by quadrocopter.)

Did you hear that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is using drones to spy on farmers to track their movements and probably take away their Second Amendment rights and force them to use solar power and eat soy?

If you heard that, turn off Fox News. And maybe wean yourself off of Twitter.

A long time ago, the EPA discovered that it was much more cost-effective to monitor violations to the Clean Water Act by using small planes to fly over farms. As the Washington Post notes, the Supreme Court signed off on the practice in 1986, and it's only a very small part of how the EPA does enforcement.

In May, a group of U.S. senators sent a letter to the EPA asking about flyovers in Nebraska. A Twitter user with a fondness for eagles read "aerial surveillance" in the letter and tweeted "'security' drones." A conservative blog picked that up and, next thing you know, it's on Fox News. Fox, perhaps busy with other things, failed to call the EPA to ask whether the rumor was true.

Image by eldh.

Twitter is really great at letting you know about the weather. Twitter may be less great at impacting it. But two initiatives aim to try.

Activists from 350.org and partner organizations have launched a "Twitterstorm," encouraging people to tweet the hashtag #endfossilfuelsubsidies today. Their aim is to both draw attention to government underwriting of the fossil fuel industry and to put pressure on participants at the Earth Summit in Rio to take effective action on climate change.

They have a benchmark in mind: to best a record set by Justin Bieber fans in which the same message (wishing him a happy birthday) was tweeted 322,000 times in one day. Tracking the hashtag, it looks like they have a ways to go -- but any contest that aims to diminish the dominance of Justin Bieber is obviously one that receives my hearty endorsement.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Department of Transportation (ADOT) is having a poetry contest, as transportation agencies so often do. They've hit on a rarely recognized feature of Twitter: It's the perfect size for a haiku. (You remember haiku. A poem in three lines; five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables.)

The beach at Cabo Pulmo. (Photo by jeffgunn.)

Located at the tip of the Baja peninsula, Mexico's Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park looks beautiful. (According to photos; efforts to cajole funding for a personal visit by this writer were unsuccessful.) But what sets the park apart isn't the gorgeous view from the beach, it's what lies underwater offshore.

Cabo Pulmo is home to one of the northernmost coral reefs in the world. Sixteen years ago, the Mexican government set the area aside to protect it from rampant commercial and sport fishing which, during the 1980s, damaged the reef and depleted its number of fish. In the time since the reserve was announced, Cabo Pulmo has rebounded. A study by researchers in the United States and Mexico found that by the end of last decade, its biomass of fish had rebounded 463 percent. The local area saw benefit, too, transitioning successfully from a fishing-based economy to one based on ecotourism.

A classic story of a successful conservation effort. And then, in 2008, a developer was granted permits to build a massive resort just outside the park boundary. With a proposed name of Cabo Cortes, the plan was to essentially replicate nearby Cabo San Lucas.

Photo by tedeytan.

From Bloomberg News:

Kaiser Permanente (KP), one of the largest health care providers in America, has a clear mission: improve health. In a surprising and welcome twist, KP is publicly recognizing that climate change threatens that mission.

"One of the largest health care providers" glosses over it a little bit. Kaiser has over 180,000 employees -- 16,000 of whom are physicians -- and 8.8 million members. In short, Kaiser is an institution that rivals New York City in scale with a history rooted in tackling social issues; the company evolved from an informal association aimed at providing health insurance to shipbuilders in Oakland.

Kaiser's climate change efforts are ones you might predict: increased energy efficiency, carbon offsets, and generating its own power, including 11 megawatts of solar. More interesting is how Kaiser anticipates climate change will impact public health.