That vote wasn't some fluke. Following Pittsburgh's lead, both Republican and Democratic residents in the city voted overwhelmingly to ban the controversial natural gas extraction process after reports from (among others) the Environmental Protection Agency, Duke University, the University of Colorado and the fossil fuel industry itself documented fracking's potential hazards. Yet, despite all of this, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) just announced that his administration will officially back any lawsuit brought by those same firms against Longmont's new law.

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Surging gas production has led the drilling industry to seek out new markets for its products. And energy companies, increasingly, are setting their sights on the transportation sector, trying to boost demand for natural gas buses, taxis, shuttles, delivery trucks and heavy-duty work vehicles of all sorts.

Fleet managers are taking notice, with waste haulers and transit agencies leading the way in converting to natural gas.

But a lack of fueling infrastructure remains a high hurdle to consumer adoption.

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The answer obviously depends, in part, on whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama wins the race.  When we elect a president, we are also, in effect, appointing or reappointing thousands of committed progressives or equally avid conservatives to federal jobs where they try hard to carry out policies they support or to block ones they despise. Romney may be a cagy moderate at heart, and Obama may yearn to live up to the bipartisan rhetoric of his 2008 campaign. But most of the people who have the necessary skills and experience to work for a president are determined to move the nation to either the right or the left.

At the same time, what will happen after Inauguration Day raises the question of which parts of the left one is talking about. Four of its largest sections -- the LGBT community,  promoters of immigrant rights, environmentalists and organized labor – usually come together at election time, but they do not have similar prospects for growth or success.

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This was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job creators.”  Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.)

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According to a release from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the entire Disney company and its licencees will be "eliminating paper connected to the destruction of endangered forests and animals." The entertainment giant will no longer source from controversial paper companies Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings (APRIL). The release noted:

Disney is the world’s biggest publisher of children’s books and magazines. The new paper policy will be applied to the Company’s entire global operations and those of its supply chain. The commitment includes Disney’s media networks, theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, and all its product packaging, copy paper and book publishing as well as the 3,700[1] licensees that use Disney characters. It will also influence the operations of 25,000 factories in more than 100 countries that produce Disney products, including 10,000 in China.

RAN began working with Disney in 2010 when lab results found that its children’s books were printed with rainforest fiber. Disney joins the company of nine top U.S. publishers which have also worked with RAN to announce rainforest commitments, including Scholastic, Hachette, Pearson/Penguin, Candlewick Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan, Random House and Simon & Schuster.

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Fairchild, joined by actress-turned-activist Darryl Hannah, threw her arms up in front of the machinery and proclaimed: "I don't want tar sands anywhere in the United States. I am mad. This land is my land ... it's about all of our country" but to little avail. Fairchild was arrested on eminent domain grounds.

As Nation of Change reported, however, the issue of eminent domain is especially complicated here. The government is allowed to seize private property with or without the owner's consent (although with fair compensation) in cases where a project is considered to be of public use or benefit.

A judge ruled that Keystone XL Pipeline owner, TransCanada, could be granted eminent domain (and hence the ability to arrest Fairchild on her own ranch when she refused to negotiate with the company).

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People love to talk about the weather, especially when it's strange like the mercifully ended summer of 2012. This year the nation's weather has been hotter and more extreme than ever, federal records show. Yet there are two people who aren't talking about it, and they both happen to be running for president.

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Where they stand:

In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed a bill that would have capped power plant carbon dioxide emissions and allowed trading of credits for the right to emit greenhouse gases, but the measure died in Congress. An international treaty effort failed. Obama since has taken a different approach, treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the law. He doubled auto fuel economy standards, which will increase the cost of cars but save drivers money at the pump. He's put billions of stimulus dollars into cleaner energy.

Mitt Romney's view of climate change has varied. In his book "No Apology," he wrote, "I believe that climate change is occurring" and "human activity is a contributing factor." But on the campaign trail last year he said, "We don't know what's causing climate change on this planet." He has criticized Obama's treatment of coal power plants and opposes treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the capping of carbon dioxide emissions, but favors spending money on clean technology. Romney says some actions to curb emissions could hurt an already struggling economy.

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Although we haven’t raided Canada’s hydrologic treasure chest yet, large water transfers across countries, states and watersheds are commonplace. The great hand of politics usually plays a major role in many of these interbasin transfers. The Los Angeles Aqueduct (of Chinatown infamy) may be one of the most well-known in recent U.S. history, as its construction (and backroom politicking) destroyed the farming community of Owens Valley.

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Throughout 2012, these Fijian villagers have been in the process of moving from their current home village – a tract of land overlooking Natawa Bay, the largest bay in the South Pacific, to their new home which they named Kenani, Fijian for Canaan, the biblical “promised land.” Last month, I visited both sites - the seaside village that is now uninhabitable and the mountaintop site of their intended new home. I talked with the villagers about their feelings, hopes, and fears, as they become one of the very first villages in the world to be wholly relocated as a result of the effects of climate change.

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In new work published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, urban environment researcher Karen Seto of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and her colleagues first divided the global land area into discrete parcels and, using predicted gross domestic product growth, population growth and urban land area cover in 2000, they projected which parcels had a high or low probability of succumbing to citification over the next few decades. Using that model, 1.2 million square kilometers of land have probabilities higher than 75 percent of becoming citified and nearly six million square kilometers have some probability of going urban.

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Gafni’s final product, a striking cycle painted in lacquered, waterproof white with a bright red seat, costs just $9 to $12 in materials ($5 for a kids version), weighs 20 pounds, and supports a total weight of up to 485 pounds. They key to the bike’s design is that paper’s strength increases exponentially as it’s folded — Gafni compares it to origami, noting, “if you fold it once, it’s almost three times the strength.”

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It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.

— Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

In Cocodrie, Louisiana, the boats appear more solidly built than the homes, perhaps because the houses all rest on stilts to avoid being washed away by storm surges. The land here fades into the murky waters of the Mississippi River's delta, with no clear end until suddenly you are out of the marsh grass-lined channels and into the darker blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The boats are more solid for a reason: fishing. Terrebonne Parish, which encompasses Cocodrie and many other towns like it, hauls in roughly 20 percent of Louisiana's seafood catch, which, in turn, is the nation's largest.

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When someone moves to Portland from another state — and that's most people you meet in this city of transplants — their new dentist takes one look at their excellent teeth and concludes they must have been raised elsewhere, a place that puts fluoride in its drinking water.

The tale is also told from the perspective of native Portlanders.

"I have had several dentists comment on my and my children's teeth, saying: 'Oh, I can see you grew up in Portland,'" Mary Lou Hennrich said. And that's no compliment, she added.

Portland is the largest city in the U.S. that has yet to approve fluoridation to combat tooth decay, a distinction that could change at Wednesday's city council meeting. Mayor Sam Adams and two city commissioners have announced their support, ensuring a majority on the five-member panel.

Fluoridation has been an emotional topic in communities across the country for more than 50 years, and continues to be in cities ranging from conservative Wichita, Kan., to a place whose unofficial motto is "Keep Portland Weird."

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New government regulations encourage the sale of the bulbs, which conservatives see as a radical environmentalist power grab. “When the 100-watt incandescent light bulbs are outlawed only criminals will have them. That means me. I will be a criminal,” said Rush Limbaugh in a courageous outburst of civil disobedience. Rep. Michele Bachmann made supporting old-fashioned incandescent bulbs a key piece of her presidential campaign, “I think Thomas Edison did a pretty patriotic thing for this country by inventing the light bulb,” she said.

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Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund unveiled a report assessing the risks of an oil spill in the Pechora Sea in Russia's Arctic, where state-owned Gazprom has installed a huge drilling platform.

The report concludes that a sizeable spill from the Prirazlomnaya platform could contaminate protected areas and nature reserves on the shore and islands within about 20 hours after a spill, while emergency teams would take at least three days to reach the area. The platform is about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from Murmansk, the nearest port.

The report was commissioned by the two environmental organizations and compiled by an independent Moscow-based think tank.

Greenpeace International's director Kumi Naidoo told a news conference that the report reflects "a very potent reality — and that is an oil spill in the Arctic would be virtually impossible to clean up."

A projected oil spill that releases 10,000 metric tons of oil over five days would contaminate half a million square kilometers (about 300,000 square miles) of water, the report said.

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We live in a big house. You see, it really is the only place to live around here (it is a long, cold ride to anywhere else, and no one is even sure there is anywhere else). If we are all careful there is enough space, food and water for everyone, but "if" is always the problem; telling all that tale would take too long and there is an emergency.

Our home is on fire. Some of us, aware of the dangers, are trying to put the fire out but it is very difficult since everyone is not helping. Many sleep (it is a very large house). However, there are some who have known what was happening for some time; they have access to all the information; they knew full well what was coming to our home. These are the more wealthy among us, the ones who took advantage of any developments to increase their holdings. The future was always their particular kingdom, defining it, funding it, making decisions about it, betting upon it. The destruction of our future was anathema to those few, or so we all thought; surely they knew more than we did, seeing as they had succeeded so well.

But we were wrong.

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Even Greenland's coldest and highest place, Summit station, showed melting. Ice core records show that last happened in 1889 and occurs about once every 150 years.

Three satellites show what NASA calls unprecedented melting of the ice sheet that blankets the island, starting on July 8 and lasting four days. Most of the thick ice remains. While some ice usually melts during the summer, what was unusual was that the melting happened in a flash and over a widespread area.

"You literally had this wave of warm air wash over the Greenland ice sheet and melt it," NASA ice scientist Tom Wagner said Tuesday.

The ice melt area went from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent in four days, according to NASA. Until now, the most extensive melt seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55 percent.

Wagner said researchers don't know how much of Greenland's ice melted, but it seems to be freezing again.

"When we see melt in places that we haven't seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what's happening?" NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said. It's a big signal, the meaning of which we're going to sort out for years to come."

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