MADISON, Wisc. -- President Obama's lieutenants put on their game faces as they fielded journalists' questions Friday, but there was a palpable sense that they know the game is already over going into the global talks on climate change in December.

I wish I could say something different, but that's the sense I got as these key administration officials appeared here at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Former vice president Al Gore also tried to say a deal is possible at the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen. But read between the lines, and it's clear that the administration is already focused on what happens after that.

Just listen to Nancy Sutley, head of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality: "I'm optimistic we'll know what we need to do when we leave Copenhagen."

Jim Rogers, head of Duke Energy (I guess they're the "good guys" on climate now? Because they're working for a climate bill...) even came out and said it: "Copenhagen has the capability to (continue) all next year."

If there was a bright side, it was Gore's speculation that Obama will in fact attend the Copenhagen talks. The former veepster said "I feel certain he will," this coming on the same day Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. (The prize will be presented in Oslo on December 10, making it very easy for the president to zip down to Copenhagen.)

For the record, from Gore as keynoter and all the members of the opening plenary panel, the order of the day was cheerleading for U.S. climate-change legislation and a successful meeting in Copenhagen. (Well, there was one exception: climate change denier and GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner said anything coming out of the COP15 meetings would be no better than "a blank piece of paper.")

In fact, Duke Energy's Rogers claimed that his firm is making decisions as if the climate-change legislation already had been passed.

Gore went so far as to predict relatively fast passage of climate legislation in the Senate, saying, "There is much more bipartisan dialogue behind the scenes in the U.S. Senate than is publicly known." He called Senate passage by December "more likely than not." OK, if you say so, Al ... but realistically, aren't senators going to be tied up with health care at least until December? Sure seems that way.

Gore went on to say he didn't expect a perfect treaty to come out of Copenhagen, but he looks at it the way he did the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which was drawn up to save the ozone layer: It was far short of what was thought was needed; but the very fact that so many nations signed on and got to work made it much easier to reach a more realistic and effective treaty three years later.

Jane Lubchenco, the ocean scientist Obama tapped to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was among those predicting a political tipping point on climate, just as happened previously with smoking, drunk driving, civil rights and women's suffrage.

"We are approaching the end game, I think," she told the conference.

But later I caught up with Lubchenco, and she didn't challenge my interpretation that administration officials aren't too hopeful about the climate talks. She allowed that every day that passes without climate legislation in the U.S. "makes it that much harder to get agreement in Copenhagen."

So, I asked, what's the road map beyond Copenhagen if there is no treaty?

"We've been working so hard on Copenhagen that we have not really thought beyond that," she answered.

Check out my Twitter feed @robertmcclure.

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In response to criticism that the Army Corps of Engineers has failed to take needed action, President Obama is creating a federal task force to overhaul management of coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley made the announcement this week in an interview with Bloomberg News. The panel will consider options for revamping how the federal government manages environmental restoration and protection efforts in the region, which suffers from a serious coastal erosion problem.

The administration's budget and environmental offices will lead the effort, according to Sutley. The Corps will be part of the task force and continue to work on its projects in the Gulf, Sutley told Bloomberg:

"We thought it made sense to have an interagency working group on restoration that would include the Corps, but include other agencies as well," Sutley said. Discussions about how the group will be structured are in the early stages, she said.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently wrote a letter to Obama calling on him to reform the Corps and create just such a working group to address coastal restoration and flood protection. She told Bloomberg that she was "pleased that the President has responded to my request to elevate the challenges that face coastal Louisiana to a higher level of priority within the federal government."

As Facing South reported, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups held a press conference this week calling on the Corps to honor the president's pledge to restore wetlands that provide critical protection from storms.

The coalition noted that Congress directed the Corps to come up with a comprehensive plan for closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet navigation channel near New Orleans and restoring adjacent wetlands by May 2008. But the agency doesn't expect to complete its draft plan until next year.

In another example of slow movement by the Corps, it was more than four years ago that the agency completed a report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects. Congress authorized those projects under the Water Resources Development Act of 2007 -- but only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding as "shovel-ready" under the recent economic stimulus.

Louisiana officials recently offered recommendations for speeding up hurricane protection efforts. Pointing out that it currently takes an average of 40 years for the Corps to complete a project, they say the state's coastal communities don't have that much time.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Mired in the acrobatics of regulatory doublespeak, the Obama administration's increasing oversight of the unbearable daily toll on Appalachian coalfield residents from mountaintop removal begs the question: Are Obama's well-meaning but irresolute environmental administrators abetting the crimes of human rights violations and historicide?

Whether they are unaware of decades of regulatory circumvention by Big Coal or not, one extraordinary fact about the Obama administration is certain: While American citizens continue to lose their homes, health, jobs and heritage to regulatory manipulations by mountaintop removal operators in Appalachia, not one top level Obama administrator has bothered to visit and see the urgent human rights and health care crisis in the coalfields.

In effect, the mountaineers have been removed from the mountaintop removal debate.

Take Nancy Sutley, whose Council on Environmental Quality recently announced "unprecedented" actions to "regulate" mountaintop removal and "minimize adverse environmental consequences." For all of her good intentions, Sutley has never publicly mentioned or recognized the decades of human suffering, daily rounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil blasts, toxic dust, contaminated water, harassment and violence, desecration of cemeteries and national heritage sites, and the de facto forced relocation of American citizens from mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia.

Is it perhaps because she has never been to a mountaintop removal site?

Or that she has never sat in the home of coal miners like Steve and Lora Webb in Boone County, West Virginia, as a 2,000-pound ANFO blast exploded nearby?

Overwhelmed by the blasting of a nearby Massey Energy mountaintop removal operation, the Webbs now have 60 days to leave their beautiful home and century-old roots -- their multi-generational heritage and mountain homestead, and extraordinary cultivation of rare medicinal plants.

In a Coal Valley News interview last fall, the Webbs recounted their six-year nightmare of environmental regulatory loopholes and governmental inaction living near a mountaintop removal operation:

"It was like an earthquake," the couple says, describing the deep tremors caused by blasting on the mountain adjacent to their home. "When they set off their explosives, you get a whole storm of dust that covers everything -- the cars, the houses, the trees. It looks like ash or a fallout," Steve Webb said, sharing that he has also witnessed rocks hitting trees and the asphalt road. "If a child happened to be out in the road playing when they set the blast off, they would have been injured," Webb said, recalling one particularly strong blast that occurred several months ago.

Its destruction legally sanctioned through federal and state environmental regulations, the great American pastoral for the Webb family will be erased from existence in two months.

The complete Coal River News interview is here.

The Webbs are one example of many, many centuries-old families that have been legally hounded out of the mountains by Big Coal manipulations of environmental regulations.

And yet, EPA's Acting Assistant Administrator Michael H. Shapiro, in announcing the EPA's sign-off on 42 of 48 mining permits, wrote last spring: "I understand the importance of coal mining in Appalachia for jobs, the economy and meeting the nation's energy needs."

Environmental protection somehow didn't include the human needs of the coalfield residents.

Moreover, Shapiro demonstrated an incredible lack of understanding about Appalachian coalfield history, or the reality that mountaintop removal coal accounts for less than 5-7 percent of our national coal production, and that unemployment and poverty rates have skyrocketed in the most heavily strip-mined areas of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia due to mechanization and mountaintop removal operations.

As former West Virginia Congressman Ken Hechler noted in 1971, in his battle against the 1977 Surface Mining Act that granted federal sanctioning to mountaintop removal, the devastation of strip mining on his region's broader economy was inevitable:

In truth, strip mining more than strips the land; it strips the traces of any human contact. It results in a form of historical ethnic cleansing. Consider the Kickapoo State Recreation Area, an area today of wooded hills and riparian bottomlands off the Middle Fork of the Vermillion River in eastern Illinois, and the historic place of the birth of commercial strip mining of coal in the United States in the 1850s.

While the recreation site is now lauded by environmental regulators for its reforestation (albeit slight in diversity compared to the virgin forests) and fun recreational sites as the first state park developed from denuded strip-mined pits, it remains a haunting reminder of the removal of the Kickapoo and their ancient settlements, and the historic role of Kennekuk, the Kickapoo diplomat who lived in the area.

The Kickapoo villages were churned into ashes and spoil piles, stagnant mine ponds and pits; the first mechanized strip mining machines rattled their blades across the land cleared of virgin forests, creeks and 1,000-year-old Native settlements until 1939.

Unlike the dogwoods and the duck ponds, the Kickapoo will never return. Even worse, their history has been relegated to the heap pile of a vanished past.

The impact of mountaintop removal on historic and contemporary Appalachian settlements and coalfield communities is no less tragic. It has not only destroyed the natural heritage. It has deracinated the Appalachian culture, depopulated the historic mountain communities, and effectively erased important chapters of Appalachian history from the American experience.

With over 500 mountains destroyed, the central Appalachian coalfields and hollows are systematically being turned into boarded-up ghost towns and overgrown broken cemeteries.

Even the cemeteries are being wiped off the maps. Last weekend in Boone County, West Virginia, Danny Cook and several of his family members discovered access to their family cemeteries on Cook Mountain apparently had been intentionally blocked. Horizon Resources LLC is operating a surface mining operation on the mountain.

According to state law, coal companies mining near cemeteries must allow family members access to those cemeteries. A detailed account of the scene on Cook Mountain, with photos, is online here.

Cook was attempting to visit the grave of his ancestor, Civil War veteran William Chap, who served in the forces to end slavery, including the estimated 3,000 slaves that worked in the coal mines and salt wells in the Kanawha River Valley alone.

The destruction of cemeteries and heritage sites, and historic communities -- including the recent decision to take the strip-mine-threatened Blair Mountain in West Virginia off the National Registry due to regulatory procedures -- is part of a process of what some academic observers call "historicide," the eradication of people from history, or at least the killing of their presence in history.

As one of the last holdouts on Kayford Mountain in West Virginia, an area that has been decimated, Larry Gibson's tenacity to defend his mountain heritage and cemeteries in face of regulatory machinations has become legendary, though not without a price. The story of his hollow's depopulation and destruction, and razed cemeteries, is here.

Historicide sounds over the top to some. But this severe interpretation of history is not easy to disregard when all that remains of your heritage and your family's 200 years of important American history is a shattered cemetery surrounded by out-of-state coal company fences and do-not-enter signs.

In an exclusive interview with Grist last month, Sutley's fuzzy understanding of the human costs of mountaintop removal was painfully clear, as she adhered to Big Coal's marketing phrase of "mountaintop mining" instead of "mountaintop removal" that has been used by residents and writers for three decades. Sutley declared:

Sutley's line is worth repeating: "So, does it mean fewer projects, I don't know the answer to that."

Here is the clip of Sutley:

On the heels of Sutley's indecision, Clay's Branch, West Virginia, coalfield resident Bo Webb (no relation to the other Webbs) received notice that the violations noted by federal regulators would be circumvented by a West Virginia state decision. Webb was told on Friday: While operators were ordered to stop blasting in Clay's Branch until they placed all the material, rocks, flyrock, boulders, downed trees and all back on their permitted area, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection-reviewed solution is to blast down to the next seam of coal, blasting closer to residents so they can get to all the material that is off the permitted area.

In a letter published in the Huffington Post, Webb lamented:

My family and I live in southern West Virginia, beneath a mountaintop removal site. I am forced to breathe silica dust everyday because of the blasting that is taking place right above me. Fly rock has landed in my garden. A boulder the size of a car hood came off there and stopped just short of my garden. The sediment catch ditches are full, again. The middle of the hollow is sliding in. The beautiful creek where I used to catch fish bait and along its sides dig ramps, mushrooms, and ginseng, is buried with rock, dirt and knocked down trees. The spring that we used to love to get water from is buried. The well water is sunken and muddy.

My house and my nerves rattle each day around 4 o'clock when the out-of-state Massey Energy company sets off yet another series of blasts. And every evening I am reminded that my family has been on this mountain since around 1830 -- long before Massey Energy invaded from Richmond, Virginia; it's as simple as that.

For those who know history, Sutley's rhetoric is part of another regulatory story -- decades of regulatory circumvention. This is the truth: Until mountaintop removal is abolished, environmental regulations will fail to protect the health and welfare of coalfield residents.

Returning to his own Appalachian woods in the 1970s, environmental writer Edward Abbey concluded:

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In an exclusive interview with Grist, Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says coal isn't going away anytime soon.  She also says the administration can't promise a slowdown in mountaintop-removal mining.  Here are highlights in video and text. (For more, read the full Q & A.)

Want more? Read the full Q & A.

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / GristNancy Sutley is sitting in the catbird seat as America's environmental landscape begins to radically shift under the Obama administration. As chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, she is President Obama’s chief environmental adviser, coordinating activities across more than half a dozen federal agencies on issues ranging from climate change to water quality to land conservation.

Sutley, a Latina and the first high-level openly gay official to join the Obama administration, served from 2005 to 2009 as deputy mayor for energy and the environment in Los Angeles. There she helped quadruple renewable energy production, cut greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels, and push through a program to cut air pollution from cargo ships at the region’s enormous ports. An outspoken advocate of environmental justice, Sutley also served at EPA during the Clinton administration, where she worked on clean-air protections.

For all her achievements in the environmental realm, Sutley is no idealist. She promotes the development of cleaner coal technology, reasoning that “clearly coal is a part of our energy mix now and it's likely to be so in the future.”

I met with Sutley at CEQ headquarters in a cozy brick townhouse next door to the White House, where we discussed climate policy, the fruits of the economic stimulus bill, and her role as an agent of environmental change.

Q. Let’s start with your job description. You coordinate federal activities on environmental policy. What does this entail on a practical level?

A. CEQ was created back in the 1970s to provide some policy guidance to all the agencies toward the U.S. meeting its environmental goals. On a day-to-day basis it can mean anything from thinking about the environmental trends and what are the pressing environmental issues affecting the country, to trying to resolve differences of opinion between agencies on very specific environmental questions.

Q. The House may soon vote on the landmark Waxman-Markey climate bill. You have said that President Obama is willing to personally intervene to ensure the passage of strong climate legislation. In what ways are you and he working behind the scenes to rally support for this bill?

A. The president’s been very up front. He met with the House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats, and he’s talked about it repeatedly, that he wants to see comprehensive energy and climate legislation on his desk for him to sign. He has urged, as we’ve all urged, Congress to continue to move forward on acting on comprehensive energy and climate legislation, to foster this clean energy economy, to foster green jobs, and to tackle this pressing problem of climate change.

Q. Has President Obama said that specific provisions need to be included in the bill for it to be acceptable?

A. I don’t think that he has, and [I don't think that] now it is appropriate to draw lines in the sand. I think Congress is doing its job, it’s debating about the best ways to approach very important issues.

He has called for and been consistent in calling for an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. I think that’s generally an accepted, scientifically based goal, the goal we need to meet to try to deal with the worst potential effects of climate change. He’s also talked about protecting consumers, in addition to promoting clean energy and creating green jobs. There’s a lot of different ways you can go about doing that and it’ll be an important component of the bill going forward.

Q. Do you think that passing a moderate bill would be worse than passing no bill at all? Some people have voiced concerns that the bill might get stripped of its strongest provisions.

A. I think that the U.S. needs to deal with these energy issues. This has been a lament in Washington for many years, that we don’t have an energy policy. We are on the cusp of being able to really move our economy in a different direction, in a cleaner, more sustainable direction. There’s not always one way to do it. And it’s not just the only opportunity--we’ve made important efforts and investment through the [economic] recovery act in clean energy and in green jobs.

Q. The stimulus package allocated tens of billions of dollars to clean energy development and green jobs promotion. Can you give examples of energy projects and green jobs that are emerging as a result?

A. One of the important things that the recovery act does is provide very significant funding for green job training. That’s something we really never had. The Department of Labor is working very hard to get that money out the door to provide a platform for people to be trained for these new green jobs.

In terms of clean energy, the Department of Energy [is] working on loan guarantees for money for the smart grid. The Department of Transportation [recently announced] the first money on high speed rail, which is a really exciting opportunity to change fundamentally the transportation system, to bring us into the 21st century with respect to rail, which can help to reduce pollution in our cities and reduce our contributions to greenhouse emissions as well. Money for weatherization, money for improving the energy efficiency of government buildings—the U.S. government is the largest landlord in the country, we own thousands of buildings and manage thousands of buildings—to try to reduce their environmental footprint. The president said when he signed the recovery act that he wanted not only to stimulate the economy now, but to provide the foundation and the investment in this clean energy future.

Q. Sometimes building clean-energy projects butts up against protections for endangered species and land. How can you speed up renewable energy projects when you confront such barriers?

A. What’s important is for there to be a cooperative and concerted effort. Most of these projects will be built by the private sector, but we have an important role to play thinking about putting renewable [energy projects] and transmission in places where it’s appropriate to have them, where you have the best resources, but also to stay away from areas that are very sensitive.

I think there’s an important effort underway between the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture -- which manages the Forest Service, which manages a lot of land -- between the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to try to work together as federal agencies to speed up the process, to not shortchange the environmental review. There [have] been efforts at the state level, in California and the Western states, to try to identify areas where the renewable resources are good, and to try to identify areas that are particularly sensitive that you want to stay away from. So I think with the federal government working together with the states, local governments, the environmental community, and the people who want to build these projects, we can come up with a sensible, efficient way to move forward with projects that will help move our country toward a cleaner energy future.

Q. Will there be trade-offs? Will we have to decide that clean energy may need to trump endangered-species protection? Or do you think it’s possible to do it all?

A. I think we have frameworks [so] that we can do it all. The National Environmental Policy Act reviews are intended to do that, to understand what the environmental impacts [are] of actions that the federal government’s involved in. Many states have similar kinds of reviews, so we don’t have to make tradeoffs between endangered species and transmission lines. It’s possible in a smart way, if we’re working together, if we’re planning ahead and making smart choices, that we can do both. I don’t think people have really anything to fear by the expansion of renewable energy.

Q. Mountaintop-removal coal mining has gotten a lot of attention recently for the harm that it’s causing Appalachian communities and waterways, and I know that the Obama administration has said that you will scrutinize permits more rigorously. Do you think this means we’re going to see less mountaintop mining as a result?

A. I don’t know the answer to that right now. There are a bunch of permits sitting in limbo because of some court decisions, and the reviews of those will have to move forward, and the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers will have to make decisions based on science and the law. The Department of Interior has asked to withdraw a last-minute Bush administration rule under the surface mining law that they oversee. So with respect to projects that are pending right now, I don’t know the answer to that, but they will have the scrutiny they deserve.

I think everybody acknowledges, the president has said it, and I think everybody you’ll talk to acknowledges that there are serious environmental impacts associated with mountaintop mining, and we have to address them going forward, and we have to look at what we can do under our existing authority to strengthen the oversight of these projects and to see that we’re using those authorities fully to try to address the environmental impacts of mountaintop mining. So again, does it mean fewer projects? I don’t know the answer to that. But it will mean that we will deal with the environmental impacts of those projects.

Q. Another hot-button issue is “clean coal.” Do you think it’s misleading to imply that mining and burning coal can be clean?

A. I think what we have to recognize is that all forms of energy production have environmental impacts. The only one I think that doesn’t is energy conservation. So we have to consider what are the best ways to address those environmental impacts. I think there is hope for technology that will help to reduce both the environmental impacts of mining coal and producing electricity with coal. There are promising technologies to deal with the carbon dioxide using carbon capture and sequestration. The truth of the matter is we’ve had a generation of coal plants that have been built using basically 1950s technology and we really have to push to innovate in that technology because clearly coal is a part of our energy mix now and it's likely to be so in the future.

But even if we were to stop using coal tomorrow, it’s used around the world and we have to deal with its environmental impacts. So investing in the technology, investing in innovation in how coal is used to produce electricity, is very important not only for our country and our economy but really for the entire world. And we can be a leader in providing that technology, we can be a leader in providing the innovation and research that will get us to be able to deal with the effects of burning coal and try to address carbon capture and sequestration. These are important technologies that we’re going to need.

Q. A clean environment should be a universal civil right, and yet it’s widely perceived to be an issue of a narrow, white, privileged slice of America. The Obama green team is a diverse group. How are you helping to shift the way Americans think about the environment and potentially expanding this narrow issue into a universal political movement?

A. I’ll take a little bit of issue with the premise because I’ve worked here in Washington, I’ve worked in California, at the state level in Los Angeles, where the environment is an issue for everyone. People care about the environment they experience, as they experience it. People care very much about the environment in their communities, they care about the health of their families and their community, they care about the places that they live.

It doesn’t always get translated into the big policy issues of the day, but I think this team, the Obama administration, the team here at CEQ, we are people with a really broad range of experience. A lot of us have worked at the community level, at the state and local level, where there is no doubt that the environment is an issue people care about across the board. So I think we bring that perspective, and reaching out to people across a broad range of communities is a very important issue for us. And we’ve got Van Jones here, who’s a special adviser at CEQ on green jobs. We believe, and I know the President believes, that the promise of a clean energy economy will reach across the entire spectrum of our country.

The other thing I’d say about this theme is that the experience really goes beyond the environmental agencies. We have people in positions, in agencies, that don’t have the environment in their title, who care very much about these issues. Secretary Solis in the Department of Labor sponsored the first environmental-justice legislation in California. John Donovan, the secretary of [Housing and Urban Development], came in with a lot of experience trying to green public housing in New York and bringing that same ethic here, to think about sustainable and livable communities. So I think it’s not just the type of people, but also that the environment cuts across so many issues that we deal with, and we have a great team in place who bring those experiences here to Washington.

Q. What policy developments would you like to see with regard to environmental justice?

A. What unfortunately I think happened over the last eight years was that those voices didn’t have a place in the administration’s discussion about the environment. The first thing we need to do is give those voices a place as we put policy together. We’ve been very active in reaching out into a diverse set of communities. As I talk to people to hear what they’re thinking, I think there’s really a lot of excitement about the possibilities of growing this green economy and creating a clean energy economy of green jobs and what it can mean to communities which have been suffering a long time with both economic deprivation and environmental harm. So there’s real opportunities there, and most important is to start the conversation with them. And that we’ve started to do.  And we’ll make sure that as we move forward on this clean energy economy, that it really does touch all parts of our economy and all parts of our country.

Q. What’s the most fun part about your job, and the hardest part?

A. The hardest part is that, having spent the last 13 years in California and coming back here, the weather really stinks, so sometimes I get up in the morning and I think, why did I leave California?

The most fun, as my experience has been doing jobs like this in other places, is the people you get to work with. It’s an incredible group of people, and we’re working for someone who’s a very inspiring leader, who cares about these issues. And I think we feel the sense of possibility, the hope that’s out there in this country that we can move our country into a better place, and that this clean energy economy is really an integral part of a vision for the future. To work on forward-looking policies with a great group of people is great, and it’s wonderful and I look forward to many happy years doing it.

Be sure to check out video highlights from the interview.

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Feeling ambivalent?Will the Waxman-Markey bill spark a full-scale energy revolution?

No. Not on its own, not in the next 10-15 years. The short-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases are too low, the renewable electricity standard is too weak, too many offsets are allowed, and there's too little investment in clean energy. To boot, there's every indication the bill will get worse before it passes ... in the unlikely event it passes.

The green world is grappling with these unpleasant facts right now, fluctuating between rage (kill it!), dread (we're screwed), and resignation (it's better than nothing). Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, on odd-numbered days, I think I've reached a fragile zen detente with the whole process. Mainly, I've been trying to focus on a different question: will there be an energy revolution? After all, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is not the only shot for Obama to make good on his campaign promises on energy. Nor is the legislation our last chance to tackle the climate crisis. No bill can carry that kind of weight, not at this moment, with this Congress. America is at the tail end of an era of cheap energy and heedless economic growth. Waxman-Markey is just the struggle to get an extremely hidebound, backward-looking set of political institutions to acknowledge that the old order is collapsing. Building a new order is something else entirely.

The question is, what's going to happen after the bill is passed? An energy revolution will require a combination of social, technological, business, legal, regulatory, and legislative changes. Federal legislation can't do all the lifting. Conversely, other changes can compensate somewhat for a weak (at least at the outset) federal framework. What will ultimately make the difference is not the specific mechanics of the bill but the, ahem, Sweep of History. (And who better to capture the Sweep of History than Some Blogger?)

I am reasonably optimistic, despite the flaws in Waxman-Markey, that history is on our side, and that the arguments happening today in Congress will soon be seen as peculiar and archaic. Here, briefly, is why:

Obama (Lo, is he not The Beginning of All Lists?)

There is no reason to think that this bill is going to be Obama's only legacy on energy. Already there's been the stimulus bill, which will probably do more for clean energy in the next five years than Waxman-Markey, the new mileage standards, and the big climate impacts report. And there is plenty more to come.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell has a fantastic piece on Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (For reasons only RS understands, it is not yet online. However, Charlie Petit at Knight has a bootleg PDF copy and some thoughts on the piece. Also read Brad Plumer. And while you're at it, read Brad's long and extremely excellent piece on the question of whether we need technological breakthroughs to beat climate change, which is centered on Chu.)

The RS piece contains this striking passage:

"The fact is, we're not going to level out at 450 ppm," [Chu] says. "We're going to go over 450 ppm. So what will we do? I'm not in favor of deploying geoengineering. But thinking about it is OK."

For a moment, the room goes quiet. In effect, the United States secretary of energy has just told an elite group of scientists and politicians that, no matter what happens with climate legislation this summer in Congress, no matter what China does or does not do, no matter what targets are set at climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, our future as a species is likely a grim one. Chu has uttered the politically unthinkable: that his own administration's efforts to halt global warming might not be enough to avert a catastrophe.

In other words, Chu gets it. He knows that this isn't just political football. It isn't just another "issue." It's imminent misery, not just for future generations but for people alive today.

And he's not the only one. White House science adviser John Holdren gets it. So do climate czar Carol Browner, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, CEQ chief Nancy Sutley, and both Hillary Clinton and Todd Stern at State. So, if we're to believe those close to him, does Barack Obama (though many of his supporters are beginning to have their doubts, what with his ongoing low profile on the subject).

If Obama wins a second term, we will have eight years of an administration filled with people who believe that the fate of millions, possibly human civilization itself, rests on their ability to tackle this problem. They're not going to view the passage of a compromised cap-and-trade bill as the end of their responsibility. They'll use their eight years to make sure the long-term emission-reduction framework put in place by Waxman-Markey is part of our national DNA. They'll keep pushing China. They'll use executive branch tools (including, but not only, the EPA). They'll drive research and deployment.

In eight years, the quest for a clean energy revolution will not be a subject for partisan dispute but a simple fact, a shared national mission, and part of every business's long-term planning.

Some other reasons for hope:

• Oil prices threaten the economic recovery, as Ryan Avent keeps warning. Coal is getting more expensive, and several coal utilities are applying for rate increases. Gas prices are going to fluctuate (generally on the way up).

In short, fossil fuels are not going to become less of an economic pain in the ass. Their corrosive effects on the economy and public health seem likely to become steadily more apparent. Once consumers are familiar with alternative sources that offer stable, effectively free (after the initial capital investment) power, they're going to start demanding them.

• Cleantech is cool. This is from Joshua Green's excellent piece on clean energy in The Atlantic:

Shortly after the inauguration, a friend up for several jobs in the new administration confessed that he yearned to wind up at the Department of Energy. "It's like NASA in the '60s," he told me. "All the best and brightest want to be there." Obama's choice of Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate physicist, as secretary of energy only heightened the allure. In the early Obama era, romantic notions about making one's mark on history tend to take the form of helping recast America's economy, and by extension the world's, in a way that will head off global catastrophe.

And this:

"Think of the smartest guy you've ever met and then imagine 50,000 more just like him innovating all at once," Mike Danaher, a partner and cleantech specialist at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told me. "Just as they did with telecom in the '90s, they're attacking every component of every kind of alternative energy to improve it."

Cleantech's allure can partly be captured via numbers -- the amount of VC investment, the amount of stimulus money -- but it goes beyond that. It's about nerd chic. Figuring out energy is what all the hot-shit brainiacs coming out of Ivy League schools want to do these days. There's just an amazing amount of brainpower being devoted to these problems, more every day. I predict the pace of innovation is going to outstrip even the most optimistic projections. The clean-energy mammals will overwhelm the dirty-energy dinosaurs sooner than we think.

• The need for a real economy. One thing you frequently hear about the bubble-busts of the last 20 years is that there was too much capital chasing too few real investments. We need a new source of economic growth to absorb that capital. And there's a felt need today for Americans to start making stuff again -- inventing, manufacturing, and exporting things of real value.

What can we make? What's the new source of growth? Here's how economist James K. Galbraith put it:

Finally, there is the big problem: ... How to build the productive economy for the next generation? ...

Today the largest problems we face are energy security and climate change—massive issues because energy underpins everything we do, and because climate change threatens the survival of civilization. And here, obviously, we need a comprehensive national effort. Such a thing, if done right, combining planning and markets, could add 5 or even 10 percent of GDP to net investment. That’s not the scale of wartime mobilization. But it probably could return the country to full employment and keep it there, for years.

Moreover, the work does resemble wartime mobilization in important financial respects. Weatherization, conservation, mass transit, renewable power, and the smart grid are public investments. As with the armaments in World War II, work on them would generate incomes not matched by the new production of consumer goods. If handled carefully—say, with a new program of deferred claims to future purchasing power like war bonds—the incomes earned by dealing with oil security and climate change have the potential to become a foundation of restored financial wealth for the middle class.

This basic view, albeit toned down, is mirrored in Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force, which is pushing hard on clean energy as a source of restored middle class prosperity.

All of which is to say: the structural position of the U.S. economy more or less requires a push toward clean energy. You can't build an economy on moving fake money around forever. If you want large and expanding markets, there aren't that many places to go.

• States and cities won't stop. Waxman-Markey may set national standards at relatively weak levels, but plenty of states have tougher renewable electricity standards. A few are experimenting with feed-in tariffs (see here and here) and producing extraordinary results. You can't throw a rock without hitting a mayor who wants to revitalize his or her city by establishing a reputation as green (see Grist's list of 15 green mayors).

The federal debate is warped by the outsized influence of carbon-intensive states and industries (magnified both by corporate contributions and by the frakked-up structure of U.S. constitutional government). But at the subnational level, there is a swarm of political leaders without the same constraints. Eventually, their success -- not only environmental success but subsequent economic and political success -- will alter the political calculus even in the most recalcitrant states. Whether or not the trend is accelerated by Waxman-Markey, wealth is already transferring from middle states to the coasts, because the East and West coasts are where the action and innovation are.

• We are on the cusp of an extended progressive era. This is the one I'm least confident about, so I'm putting it last. But in my optimistic moments, I agree with the politics editor at The Nation, Chris Hayes:

Look at how far we've come in the last four years. We have a black president who ran on the most ambitiously progressive domestic agenda in a generation. Look at the political perspectives of the youngest voters, the most progressive cohort since the dawn of polling on almost every issue. White, male, Christians are the demographic roadblock. And the country is getting less white and less Christian. The macro forces are moving in our direction. What makes you lose hope is the hand-to-hand combat happening on Capitol Hill. Progressives have a unique lack of self-confidence where we feel like we are just going to get this one little chance, but I think the force of history is on our side. I believe that with every last fiber of my being.

I can't say I believe that with my every fiber. Maybe 60 to 70 percent of my fibers. But sometimes, when I squint just right, I see a future blooming with cultural and technological ferment, a tidal change on the way that will be helped by a strong federal climate bill but will not be stopped by a weak one.

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The Obama administration on Thursday announced new steps to reduce the environmental damage from mountaintop-removal (MTR) mining, a controversial and highly destructive practice used to extract coal from Appalachia. Activists from the region and the environmental community say that's a nice first step, but they're disappointed that the admin isn't planning to rein the practice in further and ultimately put a stop to it.

The government will end fast-tracked reviews for MTR operation permits, require tougher environmental review before permits are issued, and reassert federal oversight for state regulators that grant permits. The administration said it will also tighten the loopholes that currently allow companies to dump coal waste near streams, restoring a 100-foot buffer zone rule that the Bush administration removed shortly before leaving office.

"The Obama administration has serious concerns about the impacts of mountaintop removal on natural resources and the health and welfare of the communities of Appalachia," said Nancy Sutley, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in a call with reporters. The plans announced on Thursday will "ensure future mining projects are more responsible," she said.

But Sutley said the administration has not decided whether to move toward ending MTR outright. Mountaintop removal is "a practice we believe has serious environmental impacts," she said. "However, it is a practice allowed by law ... Until that changes, we have to use the tools that we have."

EPA Senior Policy Counsel Bob Sussman also emphasized that the administration will be acting within current law. "Our job under the Clean Water Act ... is to make sure that these projects do not result in significant degradation of water quality."

That's it?

Activists working to end MTR say that's not good enough.

"While we're certainly happy to hear government agencies say they're going to enforce the law ... those regulations have been so severely weakened by the Bush administration that it's doing no good for the communities in Appalachia and for the water quality of the southeastern United States," said Stephanie Pistello, a legislative associate for the Alliance for Appalachia and Appalachian Voices.

Pistello pointed out that the administration recently okayed 42 of 48 MTR permits. "Enforcing the law has already allowed for 42 permits to be approved since March of this year," she continued. "That should raise red flags ... Clearly the law is not sufficient for the protection of the people and environment of Appalachia."

Rainforest Action Network agrees: "Rigorous enforcement of existing laws is of course needed and would be a welcome change, but does not in itself represent the true change that we need to transition immediately away from the destructive practice of mountaintop removal."

Anti-MTR groups want to see the Obama administration restore language preventing the dumping of mine waste into waterways, reversing a change to the law that the Bush administration made shortly after taking office. The Bush administration in 2002 altered Clean Water Act rules to make it legal to fill valleys with waste from blast sites, which led to significantly increased use of MTR.

"[T]he only way to end the devastation in Appalachia is to quickly reverse the Bush administration's rule making it legal to fill streams with mining waste," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope in a statement. "The true test of these new policies and of President Obama's legacy on this issue will be whether they change the terrible situation on the ground in Appalachia."

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UPDATED: 16 Sep 2009

President Barack Obama's key advisers on energy and climate issues include a former top aide to Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, a governor, and a gaggle of former members of Congress. Here's a rundown:

Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change

Browner serves as a special adviser to the White House on climate and energy, a new role Obama created to work on an issue he has defined as one of his top concerns. Browner has been keeping a low profile in Washington, offering very few on-the-record interviews and not receiving as much of the limelight as other administration players, though it's clear her role in coordinating policy within the administration is major. She's at the table during economic discussions, and was the key negotiator hashing out a new deal on automobile emissions.

Browner served as Florida's secretary of the environment from 1991 to 1993, and was a top aide to Al Gore when he was in the Senate. She served as EPA administrator during the entire Clinton administration, and later served as a principal in The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm lead by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as Albright Capital Management.

Photo: epa.govLisa Jackson
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency | epa.gov

During her first months on the job, Lisa Jackson has made significant headway on several climate issues that the Bush administration EPA refused to take up. Within days of taking office, Jackson announced that the agency was beginning the process of reevaluating whether California and other states should be able to set their own higher standards for automobile emissions; the administration has now adopted those standards nationwide. She also moved the agency forward on regulating planet-warming emissions by declaring that they do, in fact, pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Jackson has been adamant that the EPA will move forward on regulating emissions under the Clean Air Act if Congress doesn't pass a climate bill this year, telling reporters, "The race is clearly on." But she has also maintained that the administration would prefer new legislation, and has encouraged Congress to deliver it.

Jackson came to the Obama administration from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which she lead from February 2006 to November 2008. Enviros in the state gave her mixed reviews, though national green leaders cheered her appointment to the post.

Watch a video interview with Jackson by Grist's Amanda Little.

Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy | energy.gov

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate physicist who came to the administration from a post at the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has made some ambitious moves in his first months in office. Greens swooned when he called coal his "worst nightmare," but he hasn't been quite as much of a rabble-rouser in office.

Among his biggest accomplishments so far have been streamlining the loan guarantee process at DOE and initiating new partnerships with other departments to improve energy efficiency. He also scored a win in securing funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Photo: BikePortland.orgRay LaHood
Secretary of Transportation | dot.gov

Ray LaHood was a Republican congressman from Illinois up until his retirement in 2008, making his pick a surprising one. He has not been a particularly visible member of the administration in its first months, though his department has made some major headway on key environmental issues.

The Department of Transportation scored $8 billion in funding for Amtrak in the stimulus package, as well as $15 billion in the budget to create a "world-class passenger rail system" across the country. Everyone's favorite climate curmudgeon, George Will, has basically written LaHood off as a communist for supporting mass transit.

DOT also played a central role in reaching a new deal on automobile emissions, one of the first major actions the administration has taken to curb global warming. And LaHood appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill in April.

Photo: Mike DisharoonKen Salazar
Secretary of Interior | interior.gov

The former Colorado senator got mixed reviews from enviros when he was nominated, and he's still getting them. He got cheers for withdrawing oil-shale leases on tens of thousands of acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. He also got a gold star for scrapping the Bush administration's offshore leasing plan. But he has not written off offshore drilling entirely and is reportedly at work on a new offshore-drilling plan.

Salazar got a thumbs-down from enviros for upholding the Bush administration's policy on polar bears. The bears will continue to be considered a threatened species, since climate change is melting their Arctic habitat, but they won't get the protections from oil and gas exploration that a declaration as "endangered" would give them.

Photo: change.govNancy Sutley
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality | CEQ site

Nancy Sutley came to the Obama administration from the Los Angeles mayor's office. She has promised to be the "voice for the environment" within the White House, and said she "will play an important role in coordinating the efforts of the federal government" on environmental policy, but her work is largely behind the scenes.

She has pledged that Obama and his administration are willing to stake their political capital on passing a climate bill.

Watch a video interview with Sutley by Grist's Amanda Little.

Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture | usda.gov

Obama's decision to appoint the former Iowa governor to head the Agriculture Department was blasted by some in the green movement who believe Vilsack is beholden to the industrial agriculture interests that are deeply rooted in his home state. So far, however, the ag secretary has avoided significant controversy, though USDA is working to influence how climate legislation governs farmers and the ethanol industry.

Vilsack has said he believes farm and forestry operations should earn carbon credits under a national climate program (a view in synch with Big Ag), with his department providing the necessary oversight. Then there's the question of how EPA will measure biofuels' impact on offsetting carbon dioxide emissions -- a complicated issue that promises to leave either farmers or EPA scientists angry in the end.

Photo: dol.govHilda Solis
Secretary of Labor | dol.gov

Hilda Solis, Obama's green-jobs-loving labor secretary, has been a low-key figure thus far, though she has spoken publicly about the administration's desire to create millions of jobs in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors. Before joining the administration, she represented California's 32nd Distract in the House and was a key player in getting the Green Jobs Act passed in 2007.

The Labor Department recently announced that it is partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spend funds from the economic recovery act to train and employ residents of public housing in green jobs.

Get involved in the fight against climate change via Grist's Climate Citizens project.

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As a new round of explosives shattered the ridges across mountaintop removal mines in Boone and Raleigh counties in West Virginia yesterday, unleashed by a recent U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, White House Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley gave the first indications that the Obama administration plans to act promptly on dealing with the ravages of mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

Sutley's testimony at a hearing at the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies -- whose electricity was powered by a coal-fired plant using mountaintop removal coal -- raised a few eyebrows of those who recalled a similar pivotal moment in the anti-strip mining movement 30 years ago, when a well-meaning liberal Democratic administration came into power in 1976 and ultimately caved-in to coal lobby pressure and relegated Appalachia to three decades of destruction.

In responding to a question on mountaintop removal policies, Sutley presented some of the questions her office is reviewing:

Significant environmental impact is an understatement: Over the past 30 years, more than 500 mountaintop have been blown to bits, 1,200 miles of streams have been jammed with mining waste, and untold numbers of historic communities have been impoverished and depopulated.

Bottom line: The Obama administration needs to end all mountaintop removal, one of the most egregious human right and environmental violations, in Appalachia, now.

Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward covered the hearing in detail at his blog, Coal Tattoo.

Sutley's timing could not be urgent: A sense of desperation for federal intervention has gripped the coalfields in Appalachia.

"Our members feel a sense of urgency like never before," said Jim Foster in a statement this week. Foster is a retired underground miner and member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, whose home in Van, West Virginia, is below another expanding mountaintop removal operation. "Unless the Obama Administration steps in to protect coalfield communities and retrain coal workers, the coal industry is going to take all it can, leaving us poisoned water, abandoned towns and a toxic future."

Thirty years ago, the movement to abolish strip mining was effectively derailed by the Goliath resources of the coal companies, whose sway on Capitol Hill was no less powerful in the state and township corridors. In the end, federal legislators opted to "regulate" strip mining, instead of banning its undeniable wrath of destruction in the coal areas.

In 1977, in the afterglow of the OPEC energy crisis and a new scramble toward coal production, President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, an admittedly "watered down bill" that would enhance "the legitimate and much-needed production of coal." The president declared that it would also "assuage the fears that the beautiful areas where coal is produced were being destroyed."

Few residents in the coalfields agreed. In his classic To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia, Chad Montrie described the sense of betrayal of the Appalachian coalition working with the Midwestern heartland advocates, and those living in the ruins of the strip mines: "... the present bill was so weakened by compromise that is no longer promised effective control of the coal industry or adequate protection of citizens' rights. A press release listed the provisions (or absent provisions) the Coalition found particularly troublesome: an eighteen-month exemption of small operators; recognition of mountaintop removal as an approved mining technique (rather than a variance requiring special approval); language allowing for variance from restoration to approximate original contour; failure to impose slope limitations (or a partial ban on contour mining); and failure to fully protect surface owner rights with a comprehensive consent clause."

According to long-time anti-stripmining activist Jane Johnson in Illinois, the Act further also allowed a flood of "grandfathering" of old mining contracts to circumvent the new requirements. Johnson wrote in the Illinois South newsletter in 1987, on the tenth anniversary of the surface mining act:

Nancy Sutley: Appalachia must not be betrayed this time around.

To fully understand the horrific impact of the mountaintop removal blasting and destruction, here is a video of an explosion earlier this week in Peachtree, W. Va.:

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