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# Kathleen McGinty-Former Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Head: McGinty served as a top environmental official under President Clinton, and she has promoted renewable energy legislation in Pennsylvania while working with utility companies. # Mary Nichols-California Air Resources Board Leader: Another former Clinton official, Nichols is working on the development of rules to limit heat-trapping emissions from power plants in California. Nichols is Senator Boxer's top pick for the job. # Ian Bowles-Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Leader: Bowles worked with officials from other Northeast U.S. states to open the first American market for trading greenhouse gas permits. # Kathleen Sibelius-Kansas Governor: Sebelius vetoed the Kansas legislature's attempt to overrule the denial of a permit to expand a coal-fired power plant. # Lisa Jackson-New Jersey Environmental Commissioner: Jackson is the current co-chair of Barack Obama's environmental transition team. She has worked at the EPA for 15 years and has focused on hazardous waste clean up and enforcement in New Jersey. # Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.-Environmental Lawyer: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is probably the most well-known candidate on the shortlist:

Congress will not act until 2010 on a bill to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming despite President-elect Obama's declaration that he will move quickly to address climate change, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee predicted Wednesday. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said that while every effort should be made to cap greenhouse gases, the economic crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a nationwide market for carbon pollution permits preclude acting in 2009.

President Barack Obama announced plans on Tuesday for a national fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas standard that would significantly increase mileage requirements for cars and trucks by 2016. Obama called it "an historic agreement to help America break its dependence on oil, reduce harmful pollution and begin the transition to a clean energy economy." The new requirements mark the first time there has been a nationwide standard for emissions of greenhouse gases. They require an average mileage standard of 39 miles per gallon for cars and 30 mpg for trucks by 2016 - a jump from the current average for all vehicles of 25 miles per gallon.

Ukraine signed an accord with Russia and the European Union on monitoring transit gas through its territory, setting the stage for the resumption of supplies to Europe after four days of disruption amid freezing temperatures. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, who represents the EU, secured the agreement of Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko in Kiev, after talks with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin yesterday at his residence outside Moscow.

The Utah Legislature will soon begin its 2009 session, and we may expect bills promoting two favorite pieces of home-grown pork, the Lake Powell pipeline and Transition Power's nuclear nightmare on the Green River. But before legislators cast more of our recession-stretched cash before these two swine, they should read the latest study of Colorado River issues, James Powell's Dead Pool , from which the following is taken. For eight years under George W. Bush, the Bureau of Reclamation has refused to acknowledge the effects that global warming is having and will yet have on the Colorado, in spite of record temperatures and the recent 500-year drought that nearly brought Lake Powell to its knees. Instead, the bureau continues to use only data from the last century, the first half of which was one of the wettest periods in the known history of the Colorado. According to Bush's BOR, in 2050 Lake Powell, which reflects the health of the river as a whole, will stand at 3,660 feet, just 40 feet below full pool.

In 1970 James Gustave Speth co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has become one of America's most well-endowed and high-profile environmental organizations. He worked in the White House under President Carter, chairing the Council on Environmental Quality; when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected in 1992, Speth was a senior adviser to their transition team. He spent the 1990s as the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, where he integrated environmental sustainability into the agency's poverty-fighting mission. Thus, what follows--his call for a radical departure from the movement's current strategy--comes from the ultimate environmental insider. --The Editors I grew up in a small town on the Edisto River in South Carolina in the 1940s and '50s. As a boy, I often swam the Edisto, though at first I could not buck the river's current. But as I grew older and stronger, I was able to make good headway against it. In my environmental work for close to four decades, I've always assumed America's environmental community would do the same--get stronger and prevail against the current. But in the past few years I have come to the conclusion that this assumption is incorrect. The environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to deteriorate. The current has strengthened faster than we have and become more treacherous. It is time to consider what to do besides swimming against it.

Learn how to rely less on the system and more on your own abilities. In this week's issue, we have three articles, all of which are below. 1) How to Make Compost 2) Washing Clothes Without Electricity 3) Canning 101