On a normal day, New York's subway system is magical. That the largest city in the United States, one of the densest and tallest places on Earth, should have running beneath it an intricate, extensive series of tubes linked at various places to the surface is an achievement we rarely reflect upon. Right now, as they have been for months, crews are digging a new tunnel along Second Avenue, a brand new subway line, under homes and stores and businesses like it's just the regular way things are done.

Public transit is never simple, but when it's done elegantly and well, it seems like simplicity incarnate. Go down, get on the train, get off where you wanted to be.

Sandy shook that. For a week, the subways were soaked and silent. For the first two days after the storm, New Yorkers were immobile. But only for two days. What happened next, as the head of one riders' advocacy group told the Times, "borders on the edge of magic."

In light of the enduring tree-sit blockade in East Texas that's holding off the Keystone XL pipeline construction there, this op-ed from Waging Nonviolence.

A tree-sit was organized to challenge strip mining in 2011 and in 2012. This year the tactic was used to resist fracking and to protest a new biolab in Florida. Other “climbers” have included members of the Ruckus Society, students at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of California Berkeley. But the most enduring example was Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year tree-sit in the late 1990s.

It's almost the 15-year anniversary of Hill's Northern California campaign against redwood clear-cutting, and the tree-sit tactic has never been so popular. It's practically become de rigueur for the environmental movement.

Our tiny fish are in trouble. Sardines may be considered "sustainable," but we're not managing them well.

A new study from researchers in the U.S. and Venezuela on sardine collapse in the Caribbean has found "climate change, plankton decline, and overfishing" are to blame for an extreme decline that "may have dire socioeconomic consequences" for countries in the region. From SciDev:

As predicted (sort of), gas prices have dropped after Hurricane Sandy.

From Time:

[A]round the country, and even in states affected by Sandy, [a] trend has arisen, with gas prices dropping dramatically pretty much everywhere. According to Reuters, gas prices nationally decreased nearly 21¢ over the two-week span ending November 2. That’s the steepest dip measured since 2008, when demand for gasoline plummeted amid the onset of the Great Recession.

Except … not really. Here's a graph of gas prices over the past three months. The blue line is the national average price. The red line is the price in New York City. The green line is the price in Philadelphia, a city only lightly affected by the storm.

Now that the occupant of the Oval Office is settled, speculation turns to the room down the hall. When Obama is sworn in next January, it will be to work with a potentially much different Cabinet. One area in which there might be some turnover: Cabinet members who work on energy. Specifically, the secretary of the interior, secretary of energy, and administrator of the EPA -- each of whom has at some point discussed leaving the administration.

Finding itself suddenly in a relatively quiet political moment, Politico has written not one but two stories on possible Cabinet changes. This one details each of the the three posts above. This one walks through every Cabinet position, suggesting possible replacements as needed. We've pulled the two together.

EPA
This is certainly the position about which green groups are most concerned. The current administrator, Lisa Jackson, has been a fierce advocate for toughening pollution standards -- regularly, in opposition to the White House.

Jackson has testified before Congress so many times that Republicans have joked she should get her own parking space.

Over the past four years, she has won admiration from the environmental community for imposing tough new clean air regulations, including the first-ever climate rules for new power plants.

But Jackson’s tenure also saw increased concern from the White House about the cost of those regulations. Obama punted the agency’s plans to tighten smog standards last year, dealing a huge blow to environmental and public health groups.

Who might replace her?

Adorable pet-snatching coyotes are flocking to North American cities, and new research shows that they're pretty well-adapated to urban life.

Biologist Stan Gehrt has been studying Chicago's near-secret coyote population for 12 years. About 2,000 coyotes live in the city, and "the majority of people have no idea," says Gehrt.

From The Ottawa Citizen:

He thought at first there wouldn’t be enough to study, but when he trapped them and attached radio collars it became clear the animals were common, and multiplying.

Gehrt and others have found the coyotes are not just moving to the city from the wilds -- they're making their homes in the city and raising urban pups, establishing coyote communities that sometimes stay within only a couple of city blocks. In Massachusetts alone, the population has grown from zero to about 10,000 in 60 years, with many animals making their homes in "very urban" sections of cities.

From On Earth:

I bet you thought that with the end of the election, you were done hearing about the "War on Coal." That is because you do not understand how wars work. In a war, you have a series of skirmishes and battles. The end of one battle does not mean the war is over, people. Look it up in a history book. And so the "War on Coal" continues even to this day, except not really, because it is made up.

Tuesday night saw the culmination of the non-war's biggest battle: the battle for Washington. The winner was obvious. From Politico:

Mitt Romney's strategy for picking up coal country was simple: paint President Barack Obama as the enemy of the region's important industry.

But millions of dollars in advertising later, Obama still picked up Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia -- states Romney needed desperately, leaving him with only West Virginia. …

Even several Democrats in down-ballot races were victorious despite Republican efforts to tie them to Obama’s EPA regulations and other mandates opposed by the coal industry.

Coal advocates insist the complete loss they saw on Tuesday won't keep them down.

Yesterday, we ran through some of the consequences of newly legal weed in Colorado and Washington for local ecosystems and power grids. But those new marijuana laws also specifically allow for the cultivation and processing of super eco-friendly hemp, which could -- at least in theory -- be an environmental game changer.

Hemp completely dominated the U.S. textile market before the invention of the cotton gin. Some believe cannabis was originally made illegal by William Randolph Hearst and Dupont looking to knock hemp out of the market to protect their investments in timberlands and petrochemicals.

Hemp and marijuana are genetically distinct but are both regulated as Schedule I narcotics, even though if you smoked a bowl of hemp you'd end up with lungs full of smoke and no THC high. Textiles, biofuels, foods -- that's where hemp really shines. (Vanilla Tempt hemp milk is kind of amazing, you guys, I swear.)

Here Slate's eco-advice columnist half-heartedly makes a case for polyester as the best textile (um, ew), but ultimately admits: "Overall, hemp appears to be slightly easier on the environment than cotton, superior on water and land requirements, and only slightly worse for energy use."

In the New York Times today is a handy overview of environmental politics over the course of Obama's first term, focused on the new, post-Sandy reality. Just getting up to speed after, like, a Rip van Winkle-sort-of thing? Read it. Well, everyone else might want to take a look, too; that's why I'm putting up this goldurn post about it.

From "A Change in the Weather on Wall Street", by Tina Rosenberg:

In March, 2009, the White House invited leaders of environmental organizations to a meeting. The invitees thought they were going to hear about the president’s strategy on climate change, in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December. And they did -- aides to the administration’s environmental adviser Carol Browner, its green jobs adviser Van Jones and Nancy Sutley, the head of the Council on Environmental Quality, gave out a one-page memo. The key point: don’t talk about climate change. …

Judging by the campaign, politicians, as well, still assume that the “C” word is toxic. Public belief in climate change and support for action did dip for several years, beginning in late 2008. In part, that fluctuation occurred because of people’s experience of the weather -- winters were cold. And the recession made it an unreceptive time for proposals such as a carbon tax that would probably increase the price of energy and cut jobs -- at least in the short term. ...

Remember how after 9/11 President George W. Bush exhorted America to defeat terrorism by buying things? Well, consumers: America needs you again.

From The Wall Street Journal:

McDonald's Corp.'s global same-store sales fell 1.8% in October -- the fast-food chain's first monthly sales drop since 2003 -- as it struggles to combat slowing consumer demand amid ongoing economic uncertainty. ...

"Though October's sales results reflect the pervasive challenges of today's global marketplace, I am confident that our strategies and the adjustments we are making in response to the current business headwinds will build sales momentum and drive sustained, profitable growth," said President and Chief Executive Don Thompson.

McDonald's has been able to boost guest traffic and sales faster than most of its competitors with its expanding global operations and increasingly diverse menu, such as higher-margin products like blended-ice drinks. But austerity measures in Europe have contributed to slower global same-store sales growth in recent months.

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.