Here at Gristmill, we like to keep you ahead of the game on the outrage of the day. So here's a little sneak peek at the next thing about which conservatives are going to be furious.

A school in Tulsa, where kids learn things. (Photo by pixelpackr.)

It seems that an environmental organization recently called together a group of 223 Oklahoma teachers for a workshop outlining ways in which the world could move to renewable power. The group was given teaching material and workshop ideas predicated on teaching the science behind the technology. The intention of the lessons was overt: get kids to understand the importance of renewable energy in the modern world. Get kids to embrace it. Here's the mayor of Tulsa:

"What you're going to hear today is the truth," Mayor Dewey Bartlett Jr. … said while addressing workshop participants at the Memorial auditorium. "We need you to get the word out. You have the hearts and minds of those children at your beck and call every day."

The teachers embraced the curriculum, recognizing the importance of renewable energy to our nation's future.

"It teaches kids when you see a [solar array] to go, 'Oh stay away from that,' " [kindergarten teacher Margaret] Trahern said. "This really brings a lot of jobs; it's what Oklahoma is all about."

Exactly. But, of course, you can expect Big Oil and their allies and hard-line supporters to condemn the exercise in short order. After all, in 2009, Fox News railed against environmental "indoctrination" in our schools for a much-less-thorough curriculum. Once they find out about this, they're going to go apoplectic.

Yeah, no they won't. The seminar wasn't about renewable energy at all. It was about oil.

Please eat no more than six-sevenths of this animal. Thanks.

I'm going to begin with a caveat: Beef magazine is a real thing and it is perfectly safe for work.

Yesterday, Beef ("the nation's leading cattle publication," meaning about cattle, not by) reported on a tempest in a Crock-pot: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was suggesting people not eat meat.

Now, to clarify, they weren't saying everyone shouldn't eat meat, nor were they saying that people shouldn't eat meat all the time. The agency simply posted an interoffice newsletter that suggested, for purposes of reducing one's environmental footprint, that employees consider having a "Meatless Monday."

Meatless Monday is an initiative undertaken in association with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. (Er, sorry: the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.) The effort suggests that Americans give up meat one day a week for a variety of reasons: health, weight loss, and, yes, the environment. Beef (the food, not the magazine) is a massive source of carbon emissions. Some innocent employee in the USDA read that fact somewhere, or got a press release, and added Meatless Monday to the "Greening Headquarters Initiative" section of the agency newsletter.

Cue outcry. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association (link safe for work) represents an industry that is clearly on the brink of extinction. So they saw the USDA's internal newsletter as an existential threat, suggesting that it "calls into question USDA’s commitment to U.S. farmers and ranchers." The NCBA's allies on Capitol Hill got into the act, with famed-Twitter-user Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) writing:

I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendationabt a meatless Monday

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 25, 2012

(One response:)

@ChuckGrassley: see you on Thrombosis Thursday!

— Archie Moore (@ArchieMooreBye) July 26, 2012

It seems like a decent bet that the Prairie State Energy Campus, a massive coal plant in southern Illinois that just started operation in June, is at the tail end of a long trend. There will be more coal plants, to be sure, but I'd be willing to bet there won't be many more at the scale of Prairie State. So it's only fitting that its debut be marked by broken promises and threats.

Coal ash, in its uncontained form, seen in Tennessee.

Midwest Energy News has the story. In 2005, while seeking a permit to begin construction, the company told the local zoning board that the tons of ash produced by burning coal would be shipped out of the county to permitted disposal sites. That was good enough for the county. Zoning variance granted.

About a month ago, shortly after the first generating unit went live, Prairie State Generating Company paid county officials another visit.

On June 26, the Washington County Board met behind closed doors with the lawyer from Prairie State and passed an amendment to an ordinance that granted the company permission to build a 720-acre coal ash landfill on flat farmland near the controversial Marissa, Illinois, plant.

The amendment allowed the company to bypass the normal zoning process, which would have involved public hearings, and negotiate a contract for the landfill with the county—all out of the public eye.

Why did the board agree?

“Our attorneys and powers that be told us there was a good chance if we did not negotiate they could go ahead and do it on their own,” he said. “So if we tried to fight, nothing would be gained other than a big bill over court fees.”

So did Prairie State actually threaten to sue Washington County if they failed to approve the landfill, and if so, on what grounds?

“That was never explained to me,” said Brent Schorfheide, another member of the Washington County Board. [Board member Gary] Suedmeyer said he was not at liberty to say because of the closed proceedings. And when asked that question, Prairie State spokeswoman Ashlie Kuehn responded, in an emailed statement, “no comment.”

Democracy in action.

OMG, look how environmentally friendly this company is. (Photo by voltageek.)

Greenwashing is stupid and obnoxious. "Oh, we loovve the environment. We have 1) made our bottle green and 2) printed instructions on our boxes about how to put a can in a recycling bin!" Thank you, company! That is helpful and now I would like to give you money.

And now the punchline: Greenwashing is actually more helpful for businesses than sustainable practices. From EnvironmentalLeader.com:

The authors found symbolic actions have a higher impact on market value than substantive actions, when the company has higher [corporate social responsibility]-based assets. The study also concluded that a larger gap between symbolic and substantive actions has a higher positive impact on firm performance; and the more companies engage in both symbolic and substantive actions, the higher the value accumulates to the company. ...

Symbolic actions can be more generally described as “window dressing” or greenwashing -- essentially anything designed to give an appearance of an action while allowing business to proceed as usual.

In other words, here are the best things a company can do for its bottom line, in increasing order of benefit:

Most Americans are smart enough to think we should give this guy some tips.

For some completely inexplicable reason, the public is quite supportive of government programs that would help farmers adapt to climate change. It is almost like people enjoying eating food/not starving to death/having agriculture! From Phys.org:

Regardless of what those surveyed believe causes climate change, more than 65 percent of them support government assistance for farmers, said Scott Loveridge, MSU professor of agricultural, food and resource economics. ...

Aid for farmers can come in a number of forms. Some examples include addressing potential threats and opportunities related to climate change, securing more support for science-based crop projections, and finding and testing varieties and techniques that will perform well in the future, Loveridge added.

Why does this support exist? Here is a Google search for "grist news drought" that might answer your question.

Actually, if you think about it, what's remarkable about this study is that one-third of people don't support helping farmers adapt. There are undoubtedly a few folks in the mix who would gladly remove the majority of the skin on their fingers and then hand-squeeze lemons for 40 straight hours rather than pay an additional penny in taxes. So let's assume that's like half of the objectors. Is it really the case then that 15 percent of Americans just flat out don't want to do anything about climate change?

Another ugly power plant. (Photo by Avery Studio.)

The key to power generation is motion. Somehow, you need to rotate a magnet within a coil of wires (unless you're using solar power, of course). The most obvious way to rotate the magnet is to use some sort of turbine to catch the flow of air or water or steam. The turbine turns, rotating the magnet. So for a long time, people have looked at the ocean and thought: Hmm.

The ocean moves in two ways: through currents and through waves. For decades, as journalist Alexis Madrigal notes, inventors struggled to figure out how to translate wave motion into power. They sat buoys on the water surface, created shoreline installations, tried various random combinations of mechanical parts -- all for naught. Well, not entirely for naught. The stories are at least amusing.

With currents, there's been more success. Yesterday, Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) held the ceremonial launch for its project in Eastport, Maine. The Cobscook Bay Tidal Energy Project will put 20 small turbines on the ocean floor, generating enough power for 1,200 homes.

Tidal power has also been tried before -- in Eastport. In the early 1930s, President Roosevelt championed an effort to build a dam at Eastport that would capture the tide when high and release water through a turbine system when the tide went back out. The project was soon revealed to not be worth the cost. More recently in New York, a pilot project by Verdant Power placed turbines at the bottom of the East River using the river's currents to generate 70 megawatts of energy. Verdant received approval earlier this year to expand the project.

Solar panels on an Oakland rooftop. (Photo by Solar Mosaic.)

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Chris "Chris" Christie (R) signed into law an effort to expand the state's fast-growing solar industry. ThinkProgress has the wonky details.

New Jersey has the second-most solar installations in the country, behind only California. According to the Solar Energy Industry Association:

In the first quarter of this year, 174 megawatts of new solar capacity were connected to the N.J. grid. Cumulatively, more than 775 megawatts of solar has been installed in the state, enough to power about 130,000 homes.

That kind of growth is hard for any politician to ignore.

Infrastructure's curse is that we quickly take it for granted. It's like that Louis CK bit on technology, but with sewers and electricity.

Infrastructure is amazing and nobody's happy. Before infrastructure is in place, people want the infrastructure. Once it's there, people ignore it until it breaks.

Image courtesy of BeijingCream.com.

The 18 million residents of Beijing are no longer ignoring their sewer system.

Over the weekend, the city was drenched by the most rain it had seen in a single day since the 1950s. Nearly seven inches fell in the afternoon and overnight, quickly overwhelming the city's sewers. Thirty-seven people were killed: drowned, electrocuted, in collapsed homes, by lightning.

Outrage erupted immediately. Residents took to social media to document the storm -- and to wonder "how a city that spent billions building facilities to host the Olympics could struggle so badly in dealing with a thunderstorm," as the Wall Street Journal put it. The photos are really remarkable -- evocative, if I may, of post-Katrina New Orleans. Swamped streets, flooded cars.

Last week, we presented "Seven graphs that should make the Obama campaign very nervous." In short: Drought means higher food staple prices, which means higher food-and-many-other-things prices, just in time for Election Day. The post was what folks in the trade call "kinda-scientific."

Well, someone went ahead and went straight "scientific" on the issue. Namely, Larry Bartels of Princeton University. In a post at The Monkey Cage, he explains that there actually is a direct correlation between drought and reduced support for the incumbent president.

Several years ago, Christopher Achen and I examined the impact of droughts and floods in presidential elections throughout the 20th century. We found a surprisingly strong and clear tendency for voters to punish the president’s party when their states were too wet or too dry. In the 2000 election (the most recent in our data), we estimated that Al Gore got about 2.8 million fewer votes than he would have under ideal climatic conditions.

Adelanto is a desert town northeast of Los Angeles. The average high in Adelanto is 75 degrees; it's in the high desert, so it gets a lot of sun. Yesterday, the L.A. Department of Water and Power put that sunlight to work.

The Department of the Interior today announced plans to make that practice far more common throughout the West. The New York Times reports:

After more than two years of study and public comment, the Department of Interior on Tuesday identified 17 sites on 285,000 acres of public lands across six Southwestern states as prime spots for development of solar energy. Agency officials said the government would fast-track applications for large-scale solar energy installations at those sites in the hope of speeding construction of thousands of megawatts of renewable, non-polluting electricity generation. …

But officials said they were fencing off more than 78 million acres of public land from solar development because the areas have less solar energy potential, do not have immediate access to transmission lines or pose a threat to important archaeological or cultural sites, endangered species, scarce water resources or other environmental values if developed.

Click to embiggen.