Taking this step depends on two men: President Obama and Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Both men want to leave an important legacy, and both are in a unique political position: they still possess real political power, but neither will ever face another election. (Obama, of course, is limited to two terms, and Baucus has just announced that he will retire.) Acting together, the two of them could completely change the odds of enacting a carbon tax this year.

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The Pilgrims called cicadas “17 year locusts,” because some of them survive for that long underground, sucking the sap from roots, between periodic emergences in epic swarms. Locusts are in the grasshopper family, however and cicadas are garish relatives of spittle bugs and crickets. Beyond that we know precious little about cicadas' mysterious lives under the earth. And we don’t understand why they wait 17 years between appearances (for some subgroups it’s 13 years, and there are also annuals.) Why 17? Why 13? We also don’t have a clue how these brainless arthropods manage to keep track of the passing years. And how exactly do cicada nymphs know when to all come wiggling out of the soil on cue, emerging within hours of one another after spending over a decade interred?

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McGowan wrote about how between 2008 and 2010 he served time in the Communication Management Unit (CMU) at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Ill. The unit, dubbed "Little Guantanamo," sees prisoners isolated from other inmates and severely restricted in their contact with their families and the outside world. In his column, McGowan charged that he was put in the CMU because of his political beliefs -- a court document revealed that he was apparently transferred in part because of his communications with the outside world, writing to contacts in radical and environmentalist communities.

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Of course, activists concerned with campaign finance reform and the undue influence of money in politics will not welcome Steyer's pledge. Others might be pleased that the Koch support for climate skeptical policy will have a match. In the parlance appropriate to an aggressive financier, the green capitalist told the Hill that he planned to "destroy" climate skeptics and sought a "smashing victory." Via the Hill:

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This weekend, the Orwellian-named Exxon Pegasus pipeline spilled thousands of barrels of oil into a residential neighborhood in Mayflower, Ark. Twenty-two families were evacuated from their homes, and cleanup, days later, continues. Check out this appalling video of crude oil leaking into the streets of this everyday American community:

The oil is the same heavy crude from tar sands that oil companies behind the Keystone XL pipeline want to extract. In fact, the only difference between the Pegasus pipeline that leaked and the proposed Keystone XL? The proposed Keystone XL is longer --- over 300 miles longer than the pipeline that leaked in Arkansas on Friday. That means the Keystone XL pipeline is even more likely to leak. Not exactly a comforting prospect.

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ERM also authored a report that argued that the 2002 BP Caspian pipeline was environmentally and economically sound --  as the firm has also determined with the Keystone XL project. Horn notes that the predictions about the Caspian pipeline were dramatically wrong -- the project failed to deliver on jobs and the pipeline has been the site of explosions and oil spills. Via DeSmog Blog:

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For a market that’s yet to be determined, this much ballyhooed project would transport hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil daily from Canadian tar sands compounds to the U.S. Gulf Coast for refining. What we do know is that the pipeline would dramatically increase the volume of climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, erasing what little progress North America has made in reducing its carbon footprint.

The State Department — which has final say in whether Keystone XL gets built — recently admitted as much in a highly publicized (and heavily criticized) preliminary draft of its environmental impact study. State acknowledged the climate-change risks but then argued that rejecting the project wouldn’t reduce the amount of emissions flowing into our atmosphere because Canada would still burn the tar sands and pipeline the oil elsewhere.

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Wikipedia editors have accused BP of editing its own page entry to whitewash its environmental impact in the public record. As CNET reported Thursday, "angry Wikipedia editors estimate that BP has rewritten 44 percent of the page about itself, especially about its environmental performance." Via CNET:

BP is not directly editing its page, but instead has apparently inserted a BP representative into the editing community who provides Wikipedia editors with text.

The text is then copied "as is" onto the page by Wikipedia editors, while readers are none the wiser that the sections pretending to be unbiased information are, in fact, vetted by higher-ups at BP before hitting the page.

... BP's image cleanup cleverly skirts Wikipedia's editorial rules, wherein Wikipedia editors are using text that BP posts on Wikipedia itself as the source (although the text is not published on BP's Web site).

This way, the significant involvement of BP in its own entry is completely hidden from Wikipedia readers -- while Wikipedia editors, as usual, argue and attack each other over editorial policy while BP's favorable PR editing continues.

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On Thursday Mother Jones reported that the State Department not only didn't mention these connections, but took pains to hide them:

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In two separate instances in 2011 and 2012, quantities of ionizing radiation were found in samples of bluefin tuna that had migrated from waters near the site of the Fukushima disaster, where the large fish spawn, to the southern California coastline, where they were eventually caught. In the first of these instances, Daniel Madigan, a marine biology graduate student at Stanford, bought 15 tuna steaks from dockside fishermen in San Diego and sent them off to a lab for testing. Madigan knew the migration patterns of the bluefin; at the time, which was less than six months after the accident, he was acting on little more than a hunch.

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I asked myself that question as I stood on a beach in Sendai in northeastern Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture two weeks ago.

I had arrived in Miyagi via Fukushima, the prefecture just to the south. In Fukushima I talked to people living through the most intensely-scrutinized environmental disaster in Japan’s history: the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that followed the tsunami and earthquake of March 11, 2011. Over 150,000 people are still living as evacuees, often in tiny temporary houses and subsidized apartments, as efforts at decontamination moves slowly forward. Many told me they didn’t ever want to return home, no matter how safe the government promised they would be.

I was hoping to find a more positive story in Miyagi.

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The Environmental Impact Statement, as Salon noted on its release, angered environmentalists for its assessment that the project was sound and would have limited negative consequences. As DeSmog Blog's Steve Horn noted Tuesday, however, "Unmentioned by State: the study was contracted out to firms with tar sands extraction clientele, as revealed by InsideClimate News."

InsideClimate News reported that two firms, EnSys Energy and ICF International provided the State Department that basis for their claims:

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The turning point, which could delay a decision for up to a year or longer, came in a series of phone calls with Kennedy. The two discussed a new health study on the hydraulic fracturing drilling method that could be thorough enough to trump all others in a debate that has split New York for five years.

"I think the issue suddenly got simple for him," Kennedy told the AP, then went on to paraphrase Cuomo in their discussions: "'If it's causing health problems, I really don't want it in New York state. And if it's not causing health problems, we should figure out a way we can do it.'"

Kennedy and two other people close to Cuomo, who spoke to the AP only on condition of anonymity because Cuomo is carefully guarding his discussions on the issue, confirmed the outlines of the plan the governor was considering to allow 10 to 40 test wells in economically depressed southern New York towns that want drilling and the jobs it promises. The plan would allow the wells to operate under intense monitoring by the state to see if fracking should continue or expand.

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First, though, the obvious weather irony: climate change didn’t exactly come out in support of that rally. In the midst of the warmest years and some of the warmest winters on record, the demonstration, which focused on stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline -- it will bring tar-sands oil, some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-richest energy available from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast -- was the coldest I’ve ever attended. I thought I’d lose a few fingers and toes while listening to the hour-plus of speakers, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who were theoretically warming the crowd up for its march around the (other) White House.

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The report makes no recommendations for the president's anticipated decision on whether or not to approve the project, which will carry crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast, while -- according to opponents -- producing high levels of carbon emissions, disturbing communities and adding to the coffers of oil magnates such as the Koch brothers. Friday's lengthy report suggests environmental objections have been overestimated by the project's critics. Via the New York Times:

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According to the Guardian, "the trial is expected to be one of the biggest in decades. It will open with 400 minutes of opening arguments from 11 teams of lawyers. Thousands of pages of exhibits have been filed, and 80 witnesses will be called. Tony Hayward, BP's former chief executive, will appear in a videotaped deposition." Following this, if a settlement is not reached in advance, federal Judge Carl Barbier will determine how much BP and its partners should pay for their role in the Gulf oil spill.

Via the AP:

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Locals gather at a railing, fishing in the brown water. One angler, a retired limo driver originally from Michoacán, Mexico, chomps a cigar beneath his handlebar mustache and surveys the scene. I ask him if he ever eats fish from the river, and he just laughs. He’s a regular here, he tells me, but returned to the spot only a few days ago after having stayed away for weeks.

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Enter: Red Carpet, Green Dress.

As the wife of director James Cameron, Suzy had attended her fair share of Hollywood events, and wanted to see her values as an environmentalist reflected in what she wore on the red carpet. But while organic cotton T-shirts might be on the racks at H&M (unethically produced as they may be), natural dyes and sustainable fibers aren't exactly de rigueur in high fashion.

Which is precisely the problem that Cameron ran up against with the "Red Carpet, Green Dress" design contest she started to raise money for MUSE school, which she founded with sister Rebecca Amis in 2006. "Deborah Lynn Scott was our mentor designer that year, and she came to me and told me she couldn't find [eco-friendly] fabric. Now, for me, I just assumed it was going to be an easy thing: They would make a dress and I would wear it. But it opened up a whole other world of what really happens in the fashion industry," Cameron said.

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