The operating assumption that generally prevails in Washington, DC, is that the facts should fit the political narrative, not the other way around.

Every once in awhile, someone comes along and tries to spoil the fun. Such was the case February 1 when Dr. Bernard Goldstein, a physician, toxicologist, member of the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine, and former Reagan administration appointee at the Environmental Protection Agency, testified to the House Science Committee's energy subcommittee about public health issues associated with hydraulic fracturing.

This was the hearing from which Josh Fox, producer of the anti-fracturing documentary Gasland was ejected and cuffed by Capitol Police. That unfortunate incident grabbed the headlines, but Goldstein's important testimony shouldn't be overshadowed by the fracas over Fox.

The subcommittee hearing was called to rake EPA over the coals about natural gas. (Sorry for the mixed energy references.) The point in contention was EPA's controversial study in which agency experts said they found evidence of hydraulic fracturing chemicals in an aquifer in proximity to the Pavilion gas field, a tight sands formation in Wyoming.

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There was something for everyone in a blue ribbon commission's final report about managing waste from nuclear power plants.

The report, released January 26 and in such high demand that downloads crashed the commission's servers, drew praise from the Nuclear Energy Institute. And from utility organizations. And from Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate majority leader who hates the Yucca Mountain waste repository. And from Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican and House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman who likes the Yucca Mountain waste repository.

Not bad for a bipartisan commission charged with the thankless task of recommending alternatives for disposing of some 70,000 metric tons of hot stuff nobody wants in their backyard.

Strike that comment. Maybe there's a community that wouldn't mind having spent nuclear fuel in its backyard. It all depends on how it's asked. The Swedes have figured out that honey works better than vinegar. We could learn from their example. More on that in a bit.

Two of the blue ribbon panel's recommendations were: 1) geologic disposal is the only practical way to dispose of spent fuel rods that can no longer support productive fission reactions, and 2) a "consent-based approach" should be instituted for finding the right location for the burial ground.

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The boom in domestic gas production will drive down gas prices and cut carbon dioxide emissions. Until it drives both prices and CO2 emissions up. Confused? Don't be. Markets can do funny things like that.

Here's the scoop: It wasn't so long ago that forecasts of declining domestic production from "mature" gas fields resulted in a flurry of proposals to build terminals for importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) from overseas. LNG is floated across oceans in special ships fitted with bulbous, imposing tanks for keeping the gas chillled to at least 259 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Now, with domestic shale gas production surging--up by a factor of nearly 13 between 2000 and 2010-- the market for importing LNG into the U.S. has dried up. The gas guys are talking about exporting LNG in order to chase higher prices available in Asian and European markets.

There have been rumbles from industrial gas users and publicly owned gas utilities that exports would drive up prices for domestic consumers. Last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration released a study that in essence said, yup, exports would cause prices to rise -- for everyone: homeowners, businesses, and industries. During the 2015-2035 period, residential customers, for example, would see price increases averaging 3.2 to 7 percent per year over the study's business-as-usual scenario.

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My first computer was a 386 PC.  Its hard drive topped out at 160 megs. Paid $400 for the machine. It was fabulously useful two decades ago. Today, it's taking up space in an upstairs closet, an obsolete, outdated museum piece that I couldn't give away, except perhaps to a PC museum.

The laptop on which this is being typed cost two and a half times as much as the 386 in nominal dollars. It has 1,000 times as much hard drive capacity as the 386 and runs a whole lot faster.

Technology marches on … except for those folks with an ax to grind who assert that the way things are today are the way they will always be.

Witness the saga of the Chevrolet Volt. GM's "extended range" high-mileage baby, which supplements an electric motor with a small internal combustion engine, has caught flak because in a handful of cases, battery fires broke out days or weeks after the Volt was crash-tested. See, the champions of the energy status quo argue, electric vehicles will never work. They catch fire. Well … so do gasoline-fueled conventional cars. Some 200,000 accidental car fires broke out in 2010, according to a recent report from the National Fire Protection Association. Gasoline is flammable. Always has been, always will be.

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Forty years ago, the young Environmental Protection Agency hired freelance photographers to travel about the U.S. and shoot pictures of how the country was treating its natural resources. They did that and more. In a visual analogue of the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, the photographers compiled a trove of some 80,000 images documenting the people and places of that time, which was vastly different from today's world but remains a vivid memory for millions of Americans now in their 50s and older.

The collection, called Documerica, was unearthed recently by the National Archives. (Many photos are available on Flickr.)

A few observations are in order. One, it's hard to imagine today's EPA initiating a similar project without it being skewered by melodramatic vocal chords from the talk radio/blogosphere fever swamps. Two, it presents striking evidence of how far the United States has come in taking better care of the air and water on which our lives, communities, economy, and well being depend. We can be proud of what we have accomplished as a nation, but remember what they say about eternal vigilance.

In cruising through the photos, it's remarkable to look back on how much we used to abuse the environment. A photo by Charles Steinhacker shows a paper mill outflow pipe pouring ugly liquid refuse into Maine's Androscoggin River.

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While Congress is temporarily consumed with payroll tax conniptions, the season of good cheer is as good a time as any to share a Top 10 list of things we'd like to see happen on Capitol Hill in 2012. Let's do this in reverse order, David Letterman style.

10. Kindergarten teachers descend en masse onto the Hill to refresh their former students' memories about critical life lessons: You have to share and you can't have your way all the time.

9. Congress resumes passing wilderness bills, starting with legislation that has bipartisan support in California, Idaho, Washington, Nevada, Michigan, and Tennessee.

8. Lawmakers realize the Antiquities Act works just fine as a remarkably effective tool for protecting rare natural and historic treasures, and decide to leave it the hell alone.

7. Lawmakers realize that retaining protections for roadless areas and wilderness study areas is in the public interest and decides to leave them the hell alone.

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Well, they did it. During the sausage making that went into a 2012 budget bill last week, a House rider slipped through that bars the Department of Energy from enforcing incandescent lighting efficiency standards that begin taking effect on January 1. Assuming the bill is passed and signed into law, as seems likely at this writing, the standards stay on the books, but until the end of the fiscal year next September 30, DOE can't enforce them. Even though lighting products that comply with the 2012 standards already are on the shelves at a home improvement store near you.

I know, I know. Only in Dee Cee. As an associate of mine put it: "A remarkably dim-witted decision, even by current political standards."

The result of Congress acquiescing to talk radio demagogues haranguing that freedom isn't free without 100-watt incandescent light bulbs is likely to be marketplace confusion. Lighting manufacturers, who invested millions of dollars in good faith to design and produce light bulbs that meet the standards, are left with at least nine months of uncertainty. The standards already are in effect and being enforced in California, so the lighting industry faces a patchwork that would make life unnecessarily difficult. Congress, despite all its talk about helping business create jobs, has just thrown a spanner into the works for one industry in order to indulge the political fringe in another ideological excursion.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who chairs the Energy and Natural Resource Committee, believes Congress' latest banana peel moment "may have little practical consequence on which incandescent bulbs are available in stores because, starting Jan. 1, it will be illegal to produce or import the inefficient, wasteful bulbs in the United States. The five major lighting manufacturers have already switched to making and selling the better bulbs." Hope Bingaman is right.

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It's that time of year when people compile Top 10 lists—10 best of this, 10 worst of that, 10 best funny cat videos, 10 worst campaign ads (which presupposes the questionable assumption that there are any good campaign ads).

Just in time for the coffee table book season, the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation has published an online volume (Spanish and French versions also available) detailing the air emissions of some 3,000 power plants in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico—the three parties to the NAFTA trade deal that has a lesser-known environmental side agreement that spawned the commission.

The document, which details top 10 lists for power plants in each of the three countries, is a treasure trove for pollution voyeurism, although the data is of 2005 vintage, the most recent year the commission could pull together information from across the continent. Being parochial, we'll let our Canadian and Mexican readers explore the emissions profiles of their countries' champion power plants. Here in the U.S., the winners, all of them coal-fired, are:

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On December 16, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to finalize its proposed rule limiting mercury and other hazardous air emissions from power plants.

If EPA goes ahead, does that mean the lights will go out in coal country? If your only source of information is press releases coming out of what Ronald Reagan called the "puzzle palace" on Capitol Hill, you'd best lay in a supply of candles. But The Daily Green's readers don't take everything they hear coming out of Dee Cee at face value, right?

Reliability of the electric power system--its ability to deliver juice 24/7/365--has been one of the neuralgic issues surrounding EPA's proposed rule, which comes straight out of the Clean Air Act's provision requiring limits on 189 toxic air pollutants using what the law calls "maximum achievable control technology," or MACT in the acronym-happy world of environmental politics. So, when you hear politicians rattling on about "Utility MACT," that's what they're talking about.

For all intents and purposes, the rule would apply to coal-fired power plants and would come into force in 2015. Critics say the rule would force utilities to shut down coal plants, impairing reliability, or force them to take too many of them down at once for pollution control retrofits, also impairing reliability.

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The federal government has to stop picking winners and let the market decide which energy resources Americans use.

That's what we keep hearing lately from Washington, D.C. That's not what Washington, D.C., does, however. The federal government has been picking winners since the days of hooped skirts and beaver top hats. Notwithstanding this-time-it's-different rhetoric, there is not a lot of evidence that politicians will change their habits, level the playing field, and let coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables, and technologies we have not yet dreamed up fight it out in a perfectly competitive market that has perfect information and no unpriced externalities.

A venture capitalist who works with renewable energy companies and a former staffer for the Massaachusetts legislature have published an interesting report exploring the history of energy subsidies. It's entitled "What Would Jefferson Do?"

(As an aside, I suspect Jefferson would not like subsidies for any form of energy, nor would he approve of the federal government's current size or of sprawling corporate capitalism as a way of organizing our economy. Too much concentrated power, public and private, for the man from Monticello's liberty-loving taste.)

Delve into the report and you'll get a sense of the little-known history of subsidies that politicians have showered on favored technologies. You probably have heard of the intangible drilling costs deduction, enacted 95 years ago, that allows oil and gas producers to deduct certain costs in one year rather than capitalizing and depreciating them over time. You might not have heard of a Korean War-era tax preference that gives capital gains tax treatment to coal royalties, which in effect lowers the tax on this type of income.

The federal government and states have been picking coal as a winner since the republic's early days. In 1789, the nascent federal government slapped a 10 percent tariff on imported coal, giving domestic producers a leg up over imported competition. The commonwealth of Pennsylvania exempted anthracite coal from taxation shortly after hard coal fields were discovered. State geological surveys sprung up in the 19th century to map coal fields and mineral deposits, saving business the costs of exploration. The big daddy of coal subsidies, although not intended as such, was the vast land grants awarded to railroads. A fair accounting would not charge the entire value of these grants to coal, but the railroad construction that the grants spurred certainly enlarged both coal supply and demand enormously.

Defenders of fossil fuel subsidies argue that intermittent renewables get far larger subsidies per unit of energy produced than oil, gas, and coal do. True, but why defend fossil fuel subsidies at all if the government shouldn't be picking winners?

Back-and-forth arguments that boil down to "Your favorite energy technology gets more subsidies than mine does" miss deeper points. If the government shouldn't pick winners, how realistic is it that the federal government would do away with tax, insurance, research, and myriad other subsidies that benefit specific forms of energy? Should the federal government stop giving tax credits to renewables? Should Congress kill the extended amortization period that coal receives for pollution control costs? Should the federal government repeal the indemnity protection the Price-Anderson Act gives nuclear power plants? Should the oil industry be charged some or all of the costs of maintaining the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf? Tough questions, and there is very little likelihood that such questions would be settled quickly or amicably, if at all.

Let's reframe the question. Instead of fruitless rants about "picking winners" that don't square with history or current practice, better questions would be what energy policies should America adopt and what should the federal government do to put those policies into effect?

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Today is the 11th day of the 11th month of the 21st century's 11th year.

It's 11-11-11. Eleven is supposed to be a lucky number. As Schoolhouse Rock described it back in the day, "Eleven will always be a friend of mine."

It's a good day to be upbeat and put out a list of 11 great examples of America's natural and historic heritage. These are places to put on a bucket list. And please, this list is subjective. Feel free to disagree and develop your own list of 11. There are plenty of examples to choose from.

Such as:

1. Yosemite. It's where the national park idea germinated, when in 1864, President Abraham Lincoln granted Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California for "public use, resort, and recreation." Lincoln's action set a precedent for establishing national parks, which have been described as America's best idea. Yosemite's roaring waterfalls, towering sequoias, stunning mountain vistas, spectacular trail views, granite fastnesses, and quiet back country make up a dreamscape for inspiration. Upon awakening at a snow-covered campsite atop Glacier Point in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed, "I never felt better in my life!" And so will you, after a trip to Yosemite.

2. Yellowstone. America's first national park was established in 1872 to protect its "curiosities and wonders." They include the geological—bubbling mud pots, steaming hot springs, and bellowing geysers, a greater concentration of hydrothermal features than anywhere else in the world and signs of Yellowstone's explosive past as the caldera of a volcanic supereruption. They include the biological—grizzly bears,wolves, bison, elk, pronghorn, moose, cougars, lynx, bighorn sheep, a greater concentration of mammals than anywhere else in the lower 48 states. Curiosities and wonders, indeed.

3. The Grand Canyon. From rim to bottom, nature has left a geological memory album stretching back 2 billion years, in the form of nearly 40 rock layers exposed by the Colorado River's remorseless carving of the great chasm. From top to bottom, the ecological zones shift dramatically, from lowland desert scrub to high-elevation spruce-fir forest. Theodore Roosevelt said at the canyon's rim in 1903, "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been work on it and man can only mar it … Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you." Good thing we listened.

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Why does dependence on imported oil cause national heart palpitations in ways that dependence on other imported commodities does not?

Just look at our dependence on imported bananas. The U.S. is a bit player on the commercial banana production scene. Every year, we fork over nearly $2 billion to foreigners to buy their bananas. Where's the outrage?

Getting serious now. The banana is not a strategic commodity for the U.S. Bananas do not have a monopoly over the American food market. If banana prices shot up or banana supplies dropped—and, by the way, there is a real danger that a virus could do a serious number on the Cavendish cultivar that dominates the export banana trade—the U.S. economy wouldn't grind to a halt.

Not so with oil. Oil is a strategic commodity. Oil has a monopolistic lock on the transportation energy market, and reliable, affordable transportation makes the modern economic world go 'round. Lack of control over oil supplies and pricing puts the U.S. over economic and security barrels. That's why a new report from a panel of retired generals and admirals from the Center for Naval Analyses' Military Advisory Board says reducing dependence on oil is vitally important.

The report quickly zeroes in on why worries about dependence on imported oil misses the full scope of the problem. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in oil dependence. Not a 30 percent reduction in imported oil dependence but a 30 percent reduction in oil dependence, regardless of source.

Here's why: "Our overreliance on oil is made worse by our lack of control over global supplies, which is why, in this report, we focus on oil generally and not on foreign oil specifically. Oil is a global commodity, and"—listen closely, politicians—"any amounts of oil produced in North America become part of the global supply. When global prices spike upward, the domestic price also spikes—we don't get 'big-box store' discounts just because of our nationality."

Not that increased domestic oil production in suitable areas wouldn't help in the near term to shave down the gap between global demand and supply, the report says. There is excited talk among energy experts that conventional oil from the Bakken and other domestic deep shale formations could substantially boost domestic oil output and drive imported oil dependence below 50 percent. Still, domestic production alone would not feed the maw of American transportation energy demand, nor would it disentangle the U.S. entirely from the global oil market. Oil's monopoly over transportation must be broken, the report argues.

The report picked a 30 percent reduction target for interrelated defense and economic reasons. If the Strait of Hormuz or another shipping chokepoint through which oil tankers pass were closed down, the U.S. could get by without major economic damage if it were 30 percent less dependent on oil. And, a 30 percent reduction "would enhance our capacity to innovate, in large part because alternative energy investments would no longer be torpedoed by swings in oil prices caused by market forces or deliberately imposed by foreign cartels," the brass said. In short, the U.S. would have a lot more freedom of maneuver, something any field or fleet commander can appreciate.

How to achieve that 30 percent reduction and break oil's transportation monopoly? Start with efficiency, the commanders say. "The benefits of efficiency are so obvious and sizable that it is amazing to consider how or why our country has failed to insist on (or at least incentivize) it up to now." Obvious, that is, except to ideologues and entrenched interests dictating the agenda inside the Beltway. Just sayin.'

The report discusses candidate oil competitors and lays out their pros and cons, which energy geeks and other knowledgeable observers already know. Biofuels can be produced with simple, well understood technology, but there are supply chain barriers and food security issues. Natural gas is cleaner than oil and available in abundance at home, but concerns about water pollution will require enforcement of best practices in the gas fields. Coal can be converted to liquids, but the process is twice as carbon-intensive as refining fuels from petroleum. Electric cars would go a long way toward breaking oil's transportation monopoly, but there are access concerns with rare earth minerals required for making advanced batteries.

For the near term, the report pinpoints efficiency, biofuels, methanol, electric cars, and natural gas as the most promising contenders for edging oil off its throne. Ultimately, the commanders say, it will come down to voters putting pressure on politicians to act: "If our leaders don't take the necessary steps to make us more secure, we can make different political choices." That, we can.

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Got a nice compliment from Headwaters Economics about last week's posting that profiled wilderness areas that Republican lawmakers have proposed for permanent protection.

Headwaters sent me a link to a research brief from Utah State University professors arguing that wilderness designations are a net economic loser for nearby counties, resulting in reduced per capita income, payrolls, and tax receipts. Headwaters came right back at 'em with a critique of the brief, pointing out analytical flaws and the countervailing, peer-reviewed evidence documenting the economic benefits of wilderness for nearby communities.

It's never a bad idea to push back against factions and interest groups pushing tiresome, discreditable arguments that conservation is bad for the economy. Never tire of pointing out that Arizona mining interests went berserk when Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Antiquities Act on a breathtaking scale to protect the Grand Canyon from mining. Now, Arizona proudly calls itself the Grand Canyon State to advertise one of the world's greatest tourist attractions. Roosevelt once said, "There is nothing more practical than the preservation of beauty."

There is a risk, however, in boiling arguments for wilderness preservation down to dollars and cents. Because if all wilderness advocates talk about is dollars and cents, then that's all people will think wilderness is. There is more to wilderness than drawing in visitors who can support local businesses, expand payrolls, and enlarge gateway communities' revenue bases, as important as those are. Wilderness is essential for all the reasons wilderness champions more eloquent than me--Howard Zahniser, Wallace Stegner, John Saylor, Edward Abbey--have stated before.

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