Photo by Austen Hufford.

Today marks a symbolic vote in the Senate: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) is putting forward a Congressional Review Act resolution [PDF] that would stop the EPA's impending standards on mercury and other toxic power plant emissions in their tracks.

I won't rehearse all over again why the mercury rule -- mandated by court order, more than a decade overdue -- is such a big deal, or why further delaying it is a terrible idea, or how it fits into a comprehensive GOP plan to dismantle the system of U.S. environmental law, a plan relentlessly advanced by the most anti-environmental House in the history of Congress. Nor will I go on about how popular it is with the public. UPDATE: As Philip reported, and as expected, Inhofe's resolution was defeated in the Senate, 53-46.

I just want to mock the Romney campaign for a minute.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg recently proposed a ban on sales of sugary drinks over 16 oz., prompting an astonishing outpouring of strong pundit feelings on the subject of "paternalism" in government policy. (Honestly, I saw more genuine anger over this than I have seen over torture, food-stamp cuts, climate denial ... it does not speak well of the political elite, frankly.)

I'm not all that interested in soda policy as such. I agree with many others that taxing soda would make more sense than banning specific sizes. I am, however, interested in the deeper issues at stake in this discussion.

The clearest articulation of the anti-paternalistic case, the one that gets at the fundamentals, comes by way of one of my favorite writers, Will Wilkinson:

[I]deas about the human good are variable, controversial, and ever-changing. Indeed, the fact of pluralism -- the diversity of conceptions of the good and the right -- is much the original impetus of liberalism. The liberal idea was that, in the interests of civil peace and the benefits thereof, the state should remove itself as much as possible from controversies over religion and morality and allow each individual conscience sovereignty over each individual life.

...

How do we stay (or become) liberal? By opposing state encroachment on the individual's rightful sphere of sovereignty.

So, what are the bounds of this "sphere of sovereignty"? As I understand it, a good (small-l) liberal will say that it contains all "victimless" decisions -- all those decisions that bring consequences only for the decider. If it only affects me, the state should butt out of it. This was always the objection to seat belt laws (who is hurt but the person who chooses not to wear one?) and is now the objection to soda laws (who gets obese but the soda drinker?) and marijuana laws (my being high doesn't hurt you).

By temperament and general philosophical orientation, I'm extremely sympathetic to this kind of argument. There was a time in my life when I identified as a fairly rabid libertarian. (Hey, we all experimented in college.) The problem that has nagged me more and more over the years is simply that the class of "actions that do not affect others" is a null set. Nothing I do in the world only affects me.

Back in April, The Evergreen State College invited me to speak at a TEDx event called "Hello Climate Change: Rethinking the Unthinkable." Videos from the event are now online.

My talk was called "Climate change is simple." I'm proud to say that I used only 17 of my allotted 15 minutes.

I've put an annotated version of my slideshow beneath the video, linking to sources and adding thoughts. The only thing I'll say about the video itself is that I've always thought these things would be better with a soundtrack. If anybody out there on the web wants to make a mashup with it, add some good beats, be my guest.

The song "Home," by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, was the best song of 2009. Most of the world didn't discover it until 2010, when for some reason it started being used in a ton of TV shows and commercials. However, lucky listeners to my 2009 mix were ahead of the curve. Basically cooler than the rest of you, is what I'm saying.

The whole debut album was good. And last year, lead singer Alexander Ebert put out a solo album under the name Alexander, which in a low-key, sneaky sort of way ended up being one of my favorite albums of the year (on my 2011 mix!).

Now ESMZ has put out it's sophomore record, Home, and sure enough it's already worming it's way into my neural circuits.

It's basically hippie campfire music, with lots of harmonies, hand-claps, and talk of love and good vibes. If you find yourself instinctively skeptical of that genre, well, you're a sensible person. The world is filled with awful hippie campfire music. In my Montana hippie days, I had to pretend to like a lot of it. No longer!

Ebert has something rare in any genre, though: an ace way with hooks. Oh, and a Grace Slick-sounding girl to sing with. What else do you need, really?

This song is called "That's What's Up," and it's about, well, love.

People involved in climate politics are always throwing polls at each other purporting to "prove" that the public likes this policy or hates that policy or wants this or doesn't want that. Everyone, at every point on the political spectrum, has a set of polls showing that the public supports their positions. I've done quite a bit of poll-pumping myself. The reality is, though, that polling on these issues tells us very little about how the politics will unfold.

To see why, let's take a look at the newly published results of Brookings' Spring 2012 National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change [PDF].

Here's how the results are being pitched: The public rejects the climate policies that economists prefer -- market-based options like carbon pricing through a tax or cap-and-trade system -- and embraces the climate policies that give economists hives, namely mandates, standards, and regulations. Also, the results show a considerable partisan divide.

Couple things to say about this.

I was on Sea Change Radio last week to talk about the military's efforts to use less oil -- and Republicans' efforts to stop them. It's a long bit, nice and meaty at about a half hour, so put it on your iPod for your next bus ride. Here it is:

I've been referring somewhat vaguely to "a future that makes sense" in posts recently. It's something I hope to flesh out over the next year or so. One thing I want to do is lay out some broad principles that would distinguish a FTMS from a continuation of the status quo (which would definitely not make sense).

One of those broad principles involves a shift from centralized hubs of production or decisionmaking to distributed, loosely networked local nodes. I'll probably write a long, wanky thought piece on this at some point -- there's a lot to say -- but for now I just want to point to a great example of the challenges of distribution and how they're being overcome.

Let's focus on distribution in energy, though I think the benefits are generalizable. Distributed energy -- whether it's rooftop panels, solar farms in the 2-20MW range, small wind farms, small hydro, geothermal, cogeneration and other waste-heat capture, district heating and cooling, or small biomass generators -- has certain advantages over equivalent power from large coal or nuclear plants. It saves on capital costs; it can be built (and financed) in increments, over time, rather than in one big chunk; power sources can be located on marginal or already developed land, closer to loads, saving on transmission costs and inefficiencies; it disperses the economic benefits and political influence of power generation more broadly and equitably.

Photo by Dave Lawrence.

The Romney campaign lies with amazing brazenness and regularity -- see, just to pick a recent example out of a hat, this whopper. Thus far, political horse-race reporters don't seem to care. They spend their time analyzing whether the lies will "work."

Outside the horse-race beat, however, there are still some reporters who do the old-fashioned work of assessing the truth value of political claims. (I know, boooring, right?) Take, for instance, this piece in the Washington Post from green reporters Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin.

Being that they are "objective" reporters, they can't just come out and state the thesis of the piece plainly: "Romney had sane energy policies when he was governor of Massachusetts. Now he's flip-flopped to far-right policies justified by outrageous lies that even industry doesn't support." But that's what the piece shows.

What drew my attention is buried down at the bottom of the piece. It has to do with the reaction of a certain kind of person -- the self-styled "centrist" or moderate -- to Romney's outrageous lurch rightward. I think there is, among those sorts of people, a lingering sense that Romney is "really" one of them, really a moderate, really the guy he was in Massachusetts, and all the loopy right-wingery is just what he has to do when he campaigns. It's all in the game. Once he's in the White House, his inner moderate will re-emerge. Right?

Last week's news about the tipping-point study in Nature ought to prompt some serious thinking. It is becoming increasingly clear that the decisions made by people alive today will determine the fate of life on Earth for centuries to come.

When stated plainly, that sounds almost absurd, like a science fiction premise: "They held the power to control the wooorld!" But it's true nonetheless. After a multi-century explosion in number, power, and impact, homo sapiens is now the dominant force on the planet, reshaping its biophysical systems through land-use changes, resource depletion, and climate change. We live in the Anthropocene, a geologic era shaped by humans.

We have not yet begun to grapple with that realization. In time, I believe it will rank alongside evolution by natural selection among ideas that have fundamentally transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. Like Darwin’s dangerous idea, it will ripple its way through the physical and social sciences. Hell, some day even economists might get it! (I kid. Kind of.)

There's a new scientific paper out in the journal Nature called "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere." In a sane world, it would be front page news. This is from the abstract:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. [my emphasis]

As examples of past global state shifts, the authors cite the Cambrian explosion ("a conversion of the global ecosystem from one based almost solely on microbes to one based on complex, multicellular life," which took a comparatively brief 30 million years), the Big Five mass extinctions, and the last glacial-interglacial transition, which started about 14 thousand years ago.

The difference today is that human beings are generating "forcings" (influences on biophysical systems) of unprecedented power at an unprecedented rate. These forcings include "human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change." The authors emphasize that all these forcings "far exceed, in both rate and magnitude, the forcings evident at the most recent global-scale state shift, the last glacial-interglacial transition."