Photograph of the author, taken today.

It's hot on the East Coast today. Very hot. To the extent that I'm fairly confident that my brain isn't working properly. The first day of summer is saying, "Hey, everyone! I'm here! Look at me!" Yeah, we see you, summer.

Temperatures in New York and Washington are still over 90 degrees. A local station in Baltimore reported that it was 775 degrees there, but that seems a little high. These are the days when we look wistfully at our air conditioners, appreciating all that they do for us even as we know that we shouldn't use them, but we use them anyway. (Love you, air conditioner!) (Need tips on buying one? Voila.)

Here's how the temperatures in New York between yesterday and today compare. (The gap is missing data, probably obviously.)

Here's a chart of the average temperature for June 20 in New York.

Image courtesy of Weatherspark.com.

Today's temperature is somewhere above and outside the graph.

Photo courtesy of NASA.

This image (click to embiggen, click here to embiggen A LOT) was stitched together from photos taken by NASA's Suomi NPP satellite. It shows the Arctic in all its glory -- or anyway, all its remaining glory. The ice cover there has been decreasing fast enough that within 20 years, a photo of the Arctic taken at this time of year would show no floating sea ice at all.

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.

Coal ash from the Tennessee spill.

One of the core tenets of the environmental justice movement is that poorer communities and communities of color disproportionately bear the negative impacts of a pollution-rife economy. Power plants and water treatment centers aren't built in affluent areas.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is being asked to decide if the location of a landfill is a violation of a predominantly black community's civil rights.

In 2011, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (DEM) renewed the permit for a landfill in Uniontown, Ala. The Arrowhead landfill is authorized to receive more solid waste per day than any other landfill in the state -- waste that includes coal ash, toxic residue from coal-burning power plants. Four million tons of ash from Tennessee's 2008 Kingston power plant spill ended up at Arrowhead.

This January, residents filed a complaint with the EPA, arguing that the renewal of the permit was a discriminatory violation of the Civil Rights Act. From a report at the Huffington Post:

The Uniontown facility has been the focus of a long and contentious battle between the mostly black residents living nearby and the developers of the landfill, which opened for receipt of municipal waste and other trash in 2007. The facility is currently permitted to receive up to 15,000 daily tons of municipal, industrial, commercial and construction waste -- as well as "special waste" like coal ash -- from nearly three dozen states.

Taken in aggregate, the civil rights complaint argues, the population of that expansive service area is predominantly white, while the population bordering the landfill is nearly 100 percent African American.

The Earth Summit in Rio begins today. What's that? You thought it started weeks ago? Very understandable.

You can watch the plenary sessions here, or streaming below.

Later today, 17 year-old Brittany Trilford will speak to the assembly. (You can read Greg Hanscom's interview with her here.) We'll update this post after she does.

The EPA doesn't want you inhaling this.

Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), a first-of-its-kind baseline regulating the emission of mercury (and, as you might have guessed, other airborne toxics) from coal- and oil-fueled power plants. Today, the Senate, led by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), will vote on blocking the regulation from ever taking effect. Thanks, Senate!

Obviously, everyone you know will be talking about this. Americans are obsessed with the intricacies of governmental regulation and the procedures by which they are overturned. So to ensure that you're the life of any party, we've put together this overview.

What is the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard?

The rule itself is straightforward. By reducing -- not eliminating -- mercury, sulfur dioxides, and particulate matter emissions, the EPA estimates that between 4,000 and 11,000 premature deaths can be prevented each year. That includes 4,700 heart attacks avoided, and 130,000 asthma attacks. The total economic benefits from this improved health are measured at between $37 billion and $90 billion annually.

The rule was originally proposed by the Bush EPA, but an appeals court determined that its scope was insufficiently broad. Last March, the EPA proposed a revised rule; last winter, they issued a final standard.

Twenty years ago, a 12-year-old rocked the Earth Summit in Rio with a plea to world leaders to get serious about saving the planet. Her name was Severn Suzuki, and today, she hands the torch to another young'un, Brittany Trilford, 17, who will address the leaders of 140 nations as the Rio+20 Earth Summit finally gets off to its official start.

Trilford hails from Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Last winter, she entered the Date with History contest that invited young people to record themselves giving a speech to the leaders of the world about the future they wanted. She won the grand prize, a trip to Rio for the Earth Summit. She didn’t learn until later that she would actually have a chance to speak to at the summit in person.

Trilford’s date with history is at 9 a.m. Eastern time (that’s 6 a.m. on the West Coast). It should be webcast live here. Watch Grist for highlights later in the day, and a link to the video when it’s up. (See update at bottom of post.) Meantime, I caught up with Trilford yesterday with some questions about her speech, her prognosis for the planet, and how she got to be so freaking opinionated.

"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.

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.

Youth activists staged a "flash mob" at the Earth Summit talks yesterday, part of a broader effort to roll back subsidies for fossil fuels. (Photo courtesy of Human Impacts Institute.)

The Crazy Twitter Kids got a lesson in international diplomacy yesterday during a panel before the Rio+20 Earth Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

The panel was part of a broader push to end an estimated $1 trillion in government subsidies that go to fossil fuel companies around the world each year. At an event that has brought an incredible diversity of people to Rio, this was a largely white, Western bunch, with three Americans and a Scot (who currently resides in New York), no women (with the exception of Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, who introduced the event and then left), and a single researcher from India. Representatives of three environmental groups took turns arguing that it was time to stop pouring our tax money into oil, gas, and coal companies, and instead invest in clean energy like solar and wind.

“We’re handing a $1 trillion bill each year to the most profitable companies the world has ever seen,” said Iain Keith, a campaigner with Avaaz. “The measure of success this week will be whether or not we’re still paying $1 trillion to polluters after Rio.”

It was a clean, simple message at an event that has been characterized by cacophony and chaos, and even as the panelists spoke, it was going bananas on the Interwebs. Jamie Henn, communications director for the climate action group 350.org, beamed that, thanks to a “Twitterstorm” orchestrated by his group and others, the hashtag #EndFossilFuelSubsidies” had hit No. 2 on the list of top trending topics on Twitter worldwide. (No. 1 was “20FactsAboutMe.”) He rattled off the names of celebrities (Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo) and politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Mike Lee) who had added their voices to the storm. “We’re looking to see if that message can break through here in Rio,” he said.

If the conference room was any indication, it didn’t.