You may have concluded a long time ago that the Obama White House is full of shit, but now there’s confirmation that your suspicion is literally true.

This spring, after weeks of high pressure from organic gardeners, the Obamas agreed to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, and share the veggies with hungry people in Washington D.C. Just weeks after the veggies began growing, however, it became apparent that nobody would be able to eat the produce that resulted from the presidential patch. The soil was contaminated with high levels of lead.

Where did this lead come from from? Mother Jones argues that it’s likely that the contamination came from processed sewage that Bill Clinton had sprayed on the White House lawn as a way to promote the use of sewage sludge in agriculture and American yards.

Sadly, what your instincts tell you about sewage sludge is more or less accurate: It’s filthy. It contains not just shit, but all sorts of chemicals that come from household cleaners, industrial activities, street runoff, and other miscellaneous dumpings of vile things down the drain. It’s been almost 20 years since the Clintons sprayed this polluted gunk all over the White House lawn, but the poisonous chemicals seem to still be there.

Barack Obama loves giving lofty speeches about the need to confront the crisis of global climate change and pollution of the environment. On March 19 this year, Obama laid down the line on what must be done: “We can let climate change continue to go unchecked, or we can help stop it. We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for lasting prosperity.”

This weekend, Obama moved that line, and twisted into a kind of squiggly shape with a lot of loopholes in it. Obama declared that he opposes efforts to hold foreign countries accountable when they refuse to comply with limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama used the term “protectionist” to refer to elements of the American Clean Energy and Security Act that establish tariffs against nations that continue refuse to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Well, yeah, I guess measures like this are protectionist. They protect everybody from pollution, and from climate change. They protect American workers from foreign governments that try to use dirty, dangerous old energy technologies to create an unfair trade advantage. What does Obama have against protecting us from these sorts of things?

President Obama is the one who set an absolutist, dichotomous standard for climate action. He ought to be judged by that standard. If, as Obama says, “We can let climate change continue to go unchecked, or we can help stop it,” then Obama chose to side for this weekend with the forces that want to let climate change go unchecked. If, as Obama says, “We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America,” then Obama chose this this weekend to let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad.

By Obama’s own measure, he’s not taking the action on climate change or labor that America needs from its President.

Remember those great TV advertisements against clean coal that were playing earlier this year? Maybe they’re still playing somewhere, but I don’t see them anymore.

The commercials were produced by the Reality Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups including the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. The Reality Campaign used to have a useful blog too, but that’s dwindled away as well. The last time an article was published there was back at the beginning of April.

That’s an interesting time frame for the Reality Campaign to wind down its operations, because it’s just after the Waxman-Markey climate legislation, to become the American Clean Energy and Security Act, was made public. That’s the legislation that was passed on Friday by the U.S. House of Representatives, the legislation that Barack Obama is pushing the Senate to pass as soon as possible. It’s billed as an important stand in confronting climate change, but the fact is that the bill has provided funding for the fossil fuel fraud of clean coal.

It’s a funny thing that, just when a funding for clean coal came into consideration in Congress, an organization supposedly dedicated to exposing the sham of clean coal claims stopped speaking out. Search the Reality Campaign’s web site, and you’ll see that it never mentions the American Clean Energy and Security Act, nor its authors, Ed Markey and Henry Waxman.

It looks as if the environmentalist organizations behind the Reality Campaign shut down as soon as it was the Democrats who entered the pocket of Big Coal. Maybe the these organizations figured that they needed to keep access in Washington D.C. Maybe they figured that it would be best to pass any kind of climate legislation, no matter its flaws.

Whatever the motivation for the sudden silence from the Reality Campaign, it demonstrates a lack of reliable leadership on the issue of clean coal. If the campaign’s organizations were really concerned about confronting clean coal, it would have continued speaking out to this day, and it would have opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Republicans are playing a briar patch game in Congress again. They’re whining, complaining about the Energy legislation going through Congress, when in fact, it delivers a huge amount of the same old 20th century fossil fuel subsidies that Republicans just love. There’s a problem with the American Clean Energy and Security Act, all right, but the problem is that the legislation is not sustainable enough. It’s been polluted with pork, continuing to support Big Oil and Big Coal.

Marchant Wentworth, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says of the Senate version of the bill,

“This bill’s renewable standard is so pitiful that it wouldn’t require any new renewable energy development beyond business as usual. Moreover, if any states adopted the loopholes and exemptions in this bill, it could reduce the amount of renewable energy development we expect under existing state policies.”

Wentworth points out that the Senate legislation could actually end up supporting dirty old energy sources, like coal-fired power plants, without supporting green energy solutions like wind and solar at all. “The entire fund could be invested in new nuclear reactors or coal plants instead of more cost-effective, low-carbon alternatives,” he says.

The House version of the legislation has many of the same problems as the Senate version. For example, it grants huge amounts of money into non-existent carbon sequestration technology, which, even if it were to be invented, would not make coal into a clean source of energy.

Dennis Kucinich is leading the progressive Democratic revolt against the pro-industry energy bill. Explaining his position, he says,

“We all want to protect our planet, but will the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 do that? I don’t think so.

The pollution targets are inadequate. Regulatory authority is stripped from the EPA. The bill relies on huge numbers of carbon offsets. For example, it says you can have 2 billion tons a year of carbon offsets, which is roughly equivalent to 30 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Recent analysis suggests it might be 2026 until we see the emissions decline below 2005 levels.”

How is this sustainable? How does this legislation meet the Democrats’ promises of a new generation of clean, green, energy?

Back in February, I wrote about a protest taking place against a mountaintop removal coal mine that had begun to destroy Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. Yesterday, another protest took place there, this one with much more high profile support. Those taking part in the protest, and among the 32 protesters arrested, were scientist James Hansen and actress Daryl Hannah.

The mountaintop removal, with its frequent explosions and dumping of massive amounts of toxic materials, is taking place right next to a coal sludge reservoir. That coal sludge reservoir holds 2.8 billion gallons of toxic waste, and it’s sitting behind a dam above an elementary school. You may remember when a similar dam broke not far away, in Kingston, Tennessee, spreading a deep layer of coal sludge, with heavy metals throughout, across the countryside, several feet thick.

Across the Atlantic, there has been another energy protest today, in Nottingham, UK. This protest was also against police tactics used to squelch an earlier protest against dirty energy. Police had imprisoned 114 protesters without charging them with any crime, merely for showing up at a demonstration outside the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. The police claimed that there was the danger that the protesters might have intended to disrupt the power station’s operations.

One of the most consistent points of resistance to efforts to bring America’s polluting contributions to climate change under control has been the claim that if we take any serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will end up costing individual Americans a lot of money. Now, that claim has been formally debunked.

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan office, was asked by Republican U.S. Representative David Camp to conduct an analysis of “the potential effects on households of the cap-and-trade program that would be implemented pursuant to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009″. Representative Camp was probably betting that the analysis would show an extraordinary cost. Camp lost his bet.

What the CBO analysis actually shows is that, on average, Americans will only have a tiny increase in their household expenses if the bill is passed: 175 dollars every year. Furthermore, most of that cost will be borne by people who have lots of money, because they’re the ones who use the most energy. Low income Americans would actually see a decrease in their household expenses because of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

The report doesn’t even take into account savings that will take place due to avoided expenses related to accelerated global climate change. Read it for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a great fan of this legislation. That’s for opposite reasons than the insubstantial whines of the Republicans. This bill gives huge amounts of money to dirty old fossil fuel companies. It’s not the clean, green energy bill we were promised last year. That’s what makes the Republican whining so ridiculous. The bill gives the Republican old energy crowd so much of what they want, they should be celebrating, rather than complaining.

We’re getting used to U.S. Representative Paul Broun promoting bizarre ideas, but a new amendment of his really takes the cake. Last week, Representative Broun offered an amendment to a commerce appropriations bill that would have forbidden any spending on a National Climate Service. The proposed National Climate Service will conduct research into climate change, but would have been stopped from doing so if Broun had his way.

It’s one thing to say that you don’t think that the available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that human-caused global climate change is taking place. You’d be wrong, but at least you’d be advancing a scientifically testable statement.

What Paul Broun has tried to do is much worse than that. Rather than try to argue that scientific evidence doesn’t support the idea of human-caused global climate change, Broun has simply tried to stop scientific research from taking place. His position on climate science is that the science itself ought to go away, because it keeps on interfering with his belief that human-caused climate change does not exist. It’s a position of willfull ignorance.

What’s even sadder than Paul Broun’s individual choice of ignorance in the face of crisis is that 160 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives chose to join Representative Broun in that choice. They voted for his amendment.

They weren’t all Republicans. Among them were the following 7 Democrats:

Dan Boren
Bobby Bright
Travis Childers
Nita Lowey
Walter Minnick
Harry Mitchell
Gene Taylor

The Democrats from these representatives’ districts would do well to rustle up some primary challengers for the 2010 election.

If there was one state in the USA that you would think of as not ocean, what would it be? For most people, that state would certainly be Arizona, which is far inland and has both mountains that are high above sea level and deserts so dry it’s difficult to even imagine the ocean when walking through them.

Yet, from a politician representing part of this profoundly non-ocean state has come legislation that pretends to know just what the oceans need - and what they don’t need. U.S. Representative Jeff Flake offered an amendment to a commerce appropriations bill. This amendment would have cut money from the budget of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The cuts would have slashed programs dealing with fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. Other amendments offered by Flake on the same day cut other oceanic research programs at NOAA .

Shuttling back and forth from his offices in Arizona and the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., Representative Flake somehow got the idea in his head that he was an expert in oceans policy, and could tell that NOAA’s work in the oceans is unnecessary. Flake’s decision comes at a time when ocean ecosystems are in profound crisis. Populations of animals we use for seafood are plummeting because of overfishing, pollution and climate change. Coral reefs are dying off. Dead zones, such as the one at the mouth of the Mississippi River, are expanding.

Jeff Flake’s amendment ignores all this, but then, it may be difficult to tell that anything is wrong with the oceans, when your view of the sea comes from an inland desert.

Yesterday was a big day for the San Joaquin Valley in California, as several separate strings in climate politics converged there, culminating in a rollicking debate and high-stakes vote in Congress. You may not have noticed, but it was the annual UN World Day To Combat Desertification and Drought. As noted in the Global Climate Change Impacts In The United States report released this week by the US Global Change Research Program, California has been suffering a ten-year drought in which climate change is a contributing factor. California, including the San Joaquin Valley is expected to experience more droughts in the future due to climate change, which is also reducing the area’s ability to grow some of its most profitable crops. You could say that California is in the early stages of widespread desertification.

On the other hand, you could note that much of California was already close to desert conditions to start with, and has only become lush and green through the unsustainable use of massive amounts of river water and groundwater for irrigation. It was never a strategy for growth that could last, and under the present drought, California’s water system is beginning to fall apart. Climate change is merely hastening the demise.

Yet, San Joaquin Valley politics is fueled by the agricultural giants that work in the region, and those giants can’t survive without the unsustainable practices - organic as well as conventional - that depend upon massive irrigation. So, San Joaquin politicians in the U.S. Congress have been thrashing in a kind of panic, desperately searching for ways to keep the industrial agriculture of their home districts going for just a little while longer.

Their struggle has come to a head with a scientific opinion from the National Marine Fisheries Service released this month. That opinion concludes that several endangered species, ranging in size from minnows to chinook salmon to orcas, will probably not survive unless the extraordinary pumping of water from the San Joaquin River is stopped. The opinion sets the legal foundation for changes required by the Endangered Species Act. In this case, the changes include a five to seven percent reduction in water pumping operations from the San Joaquin River.

What are the consequences of a five to seven percent reduction in irrigation for big agricultural operations in the San Joaquin Valley? According to U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, civilization itself is at stake. Yesterday, Nunes warned that unless the Marine Fisheries opinion was reversed through congressional action, “a collapse of civil society in the San Joaquin Valley” would take place.

Here’s a hint to Representative Nunes: If the survival of a civil society depends upon just a five percent margin in irrigation, the society isn’t very strong. That’s the nature of California’s agricultural boom, and the economic expansion that it has supported. It’s been built upon a temporary cheat that could never be maintained for very long.

With long-term droughts and an end to the irrigation bonanza, the California agricultural bubble is about to pop, but Devin Nunes is determined to glue the bubble back together. That’s why, yesterday, he introduced H. Amdt. 225 to H.R. 2847, an appropriations bill. The Nunes amendment read simply, “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to implement the biological opinion entitled ‘Biological Opinion and Conference Opinion on the Long-Term Operations of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project’, issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service and dated June 4, 2009.”

The Nunes Amendment would have taken the Marine Fisheries opinion, which was crafted through long deliberation including two scientific peer review boards, and replaced it with a move founded completely upon political considerations. That’s an approach that agriculture in California has taken for a long time, ignoring scientific warnings about the unsustainable nature of crop irrigation there, for the sake of short-term, local benefit for a small number of influential constituents. It is not an approach that should be adopted by the national government, which has the responsibility of serving the general welfare as it exists broadly, across the boundaries of small congressional districts, and beyond the convenience of the moment.

This more responsible, comprehensive, scientific approach was advocated by U.S. Representative Mike Thompson, who reminded Nunes and his San Joaquin colleagues that the agricultural boom in the San Joaquin Valley has resulted in a bust for the fishing economies of the Pacific Coast. “The last administration devastated the fishing families of the north coast. We haven’t had a fishing season up there in years. Again this year it’s closed. And it’s all because science was put aside in favor of politics. Finally we have science coming in. Science should be allowed to be considered,” Thompson advised.

Thompson’s vision of a more general general welfare won the debate against the local commercial interests advanced by Nunes. The Nunes amendment was defeated, but only barely, on a vote of 208 in favor and 218 against. 37 Democrats joined 171 Republicans in supporting the amendment. The drought of integrity in the U.S. congress is bipartisan.

Nevada’s U.S. Senator John Ensign, although he has been forced to admit to having an extramarital affair, declares that he will not resign from office. He has important work to do in the U.S. Senate, Ensign says.

I wondered - what kind of work is it that motivates Ensign to remain in the Senate? So, I took a look at the legislation sponsored by Ensign this year, to get some idea of what he’s hanging on for, what makes it worth having his personal life detailed in the newspapers.

Here’s one item I could come up with on the Ensign agenda: Make sure the U.S. doesn’t do anything about the growing problems caused global warming. Ensign has fought against any legislation that would bring the USA away from 20th century energy technology, toward something more sustainable.

And then there’s another issue to which Ensign has shown himself to be especially dedicated: Land management. In March of this year, Senator Ensign introduced S.508, a law which would, if passed, direct the Bureau of Land Managment to transfer 115 acres of federally protected land to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Why transfer this land? So the Las Vegas Motor Speedway can build a new parking lot. This is where Ensign’s two great legislative agendas come together. That parking lot sure would keep those 115 acres of land managed, and it would help to encourage more people to get out on the road and burn some gasoline. The Las Vegas Motor Speedway would do its fair share, of course, by running race cars at highly inefficient speeds, spewing greenhouse gases all the more, helping to preserve the 20th century way of life, and staving off any efforts to deal with global warming.

So, you see, it’s really, really, really important that Senator John Ensign remain in the United States Senate.

The Maine Green Independent Party, which recently saw two of its members elected to the Portland City Charter Commission, is moving upward in scale with Green Party member Lynne Williams running for Governor of Maine in the elections of 2010.

Lynne Williams shares her life story here, one with many moves in many places and through many institutions and counter-institutions. With electoral work for Tom Hayden and Gary Hart, a PhD in psychology and a legal degree, residence from New York to California to Maine. Considering that Williams is someone who has come to Maine from “away,” it is interesting to me that she ends her biography with a proclamation against “interlopers who seek to colonize Maine.” A more complete introduction to Williams’ campaign principles is here.

A reader may be surprised to learn that Williams does not back the current expansion of wind farms into Maine by corporations such as First Wind. Indeed, her current line of work as a lawyer has been to advise the rural communities of and surrounding the town of Lincoln in social movement organizing against the erection of wind farms. Her arguments regarding “the impact of noise, vibrations and light flicker on people and wildlife” has some critics belittling Williams for NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activism that promotes green industry… just not the sort that smirches residents’ own pretty view and property values. But Williams clearly promotes other forms of wind farm development, highlighting this year’s successful arrangement for cooperative windfarm development on Vinalhaven, community owned, community researched, community developed, providing local power and local income.

If a Maine progressive is looking for other indications of Lynne Williams’ bona fide status, a look to the Bangor Daily News supplies detail of Williams’ recent work as a legal backbone for Maine activists in trouble:

As an attorney, she represents Forest Ecology Network and RESTORE: The North Woods in their roles as intervenors in the permitting process for the Plum Creek development proposal on Moosehead Lake. She represents the Wildlife Alliance of Maine and Animal Welfare Institute in their efforts to protect endangered lynx by increasing restrictions on trapping in the state.

She also represents groups that oppose the development of liquefied natural gas terminals in Washington County and southern Maine towns that are concerned about Poland Spring’s use of groundwater in its water-bottling operations.

Former clients include anti-war protesters charged with criminal trespass after refusing to leave the Bangor offices of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and Friends of Magurrewock, which sought to halt construction of a new border crossing in the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge in Calais. She also represented Deane Brown, an inmate at Maine State Prison in Warren who unsuccessfully sued prison officials for barring him from speaking to the media.

Williams has advocated for repeal of Maine’s school administration consolidation law, favors impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and briefly represented two men who were accused of trespassing on Martha Stewart’s property on Mount Desert Island. She has helped gay and lesbian couples in Maine register as domestic partners and has been honored by the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine for representing nonviolent protesters of the Iraq war.

Lynne Williams will not be running against incumbent Democrat John Baldacci, who must step down due to term limits. This will be an open election for an open seat. Ongoing evidence of the Green Party’s viability in Maine will make this a good race to watch.

In spite of all the promises we heard last year about how the Democrats in Congress about how they would inaugurate a new generation of sustainable energy in order to fight the global climate change caused by the 20th Century’s fossil fuel economy, we’re getting new energy legislation that looks an awful lot like what Bush and Cheney were hoping for, with expanded offshore drilling and other dirty energy sources such as Canada’s tar sands.

There are real consequences to the Democrats’ assistance with the Republicans’ backwards energy policy. We’re seeing those consequences in places like Greenland. A study just published finds that the glaciers of Greenland are now melting at a rate even faster than previously believed.

A new front in the battles over the future of America’s energy policy opened up in Congress this week, with legislation introduced by U.S. Representative Diana DeGette. H.R. 2766, also known as the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2009, or simply the FRAC Act, would grant the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate the process of hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking.

Fracking is part of the process for drilling for natural gas. Water containing fracking fluid is forced down into the ground at high pressure, creating cracks in rock through which natural gas then escapes. What’s in fracking fluid? Nobody knows for certain, except for people working for Halliburton, which creates the fluid. Currently, there is a special exemption for fracking fluid that allows Halliburton to keep the contents of the fluid a secret from the public, even though fracking fluid is believed to contain many chemicals that are dangerous to human beings. In the fracking process, ground water used to drinking often becomes contaminated with fracking fluid, so it’s an important issue.

The FRAC Act requires the disclosure of the contents of fracking fluid, and so would give communities the power to make informed decisions about whether to create local laws to regulate natural gas drilling. The legislation is cosponsored by Jared Polis and Maurice Hinchey. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate by Bob Casey, and has been cosponsored by Charles Schumer.

Looking at the dirty business conducted by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee yesterday, it’s no surprise that the committee chair, Jeff Bingaman, decided to censor the normal live webcast of the committee. If Americans could have watched the servile catering to fossil fuel lobbyists by several of the committee’s Democrats, they might have questioned the narrative of the 2008 election, that the Democrats would bring hope and change to Washington D.C.

It wasn’t just the way that four Democratic senators on the committee - from inland states - joined with Republicans to pass an energy bill amendment to expand offshore drilling in waters near Florida’s tourist beaches. Democrats supported other amendments favoring the fossil fuel industry, and opposing environmental concerns, as well. They voted in a second amendment offering yet more oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and another amendment that creates a special loophole allowing the federal government to buy energy products from Canada’s tar sands - one of the dirtiest sources of energy on the planet. Currently, a law forbids the government from purchasing energy from sources that result in greenhouse gas emissions at a rate higher than ordinary petroleum. Yesterday, Senate Democrats on the energy committee helped to roll back that restriction.

Looking back to the 2008 election, I seem to remember that the Republicans, with their drill baby drill message of an America that hugs fossil fuels, lost. They lost the presidency. They lost seats in Congress. The old oil economy was rejected by voters, who supported candidates promising a new focus on sustainable energy.

Why, then, are the Democrats in Congress now acting like Republicans, and supporting dirty old energy interests? Do they really think voters won’t notice?