OK, technically, the exclusive I have is an internal email from the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement that was sent to his entire staff on Friday about the actions being taken against polar bear researcher Charles Monnett.  I will repost that below, but the bottom line is that the decision to place him on administrative leave “had nothing to do with his scientific work , or anything relating to a five-year old journal article” on polar bears.

This whole story is Kafkaesque.  Let’s take it from the beginning.  Here’s the lede from NYT blogger Andy Revkin:

There’s been a rush to all manner of judgments over the strange case of Charles Monnett, the biologist for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement who provided a powerful talking point for climate campaigners, including former Vice President Al Gore, with his description of several drowned polar bears spotted during an aerial marine-mammals survey in 2004 — an observation enshrined in a short paper published in Polar Biology in 2006.

Hmm, I guess that isn’t really the beginning, since Monnett’s work didn’t provide a talking point, powerful or otherwise, for Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The fact is that the scientific  community had already come to the conclusion that  the polar bear would not survive an ice-free arctic.  The 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States, summarized the state of scientific understanding:

Changes in the extent and type of sea ice affect the distribution and foraging success of polar bears (Ferguson et al., 2000a,b; Mauritzen et al., 2001; Stirling et al., 1993). The earliest impacts of warming will occur at their southern limits of distribution, such as at James and Hudson Bays; and this has already been documented by Stirling et al. (1999)….

The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover.

In short, there was a broad scientific understanding by the leading experts on the Arctic that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would be catastrophic if not fatal to polar bears — back in 2004.

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There are some very nasty pieces of legislation floating around the House that could strip away some of the nation’s most important energy and environmental programs.

We’re not looking at some modest cuts here and there – Congress is considering spending bills that could completely decimate government’s ability to regulate clean air and water, while turning clean energy programs into an afterthought.

Since the 112^th Congress began, there have been 110 anti-environment votes taken by the House – with 20 related to climate change, 28 on air and water pollution, and 22 on clean energy.

So how has your representative been voting on environmental issues? Below is a list of the votes on key legislation. It’s a daunting list, but it does show how important (or unimportant) energy and environment are to the House:

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What happens when a community dependent on a finite fossil resource can no longer go on exploiting? These powerful pictures tell the story.

The dead island of Hashima delivers a lively warning about the importance of foresight. It offers a view of the end result of “development,” the fate of a community severed from Mother Earth and engaged in a way of life disconnected from its food supply. In short, Hashima is what the world will be like when we finish urbanizing and exploiting it: a ghost planet spinning through space—silent, naked, and useless.

— Brian Burke-Gaffney, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science

Located 18 miles off the coast of Nagasaki, the island of Hashima was once the hub of Japan’s coal mining activity. From the early 1900′s to the 1970′s, the island played a major role in Japan’s economic growth. Owned by Mitsubishi, it was home to dangerous undersea mines that killed hundreds of people. At its peak, Hashima was producing about 400,000 tons of coal per year — more coal than the U.S. exported to China in 2009.

Hashima was was completely dependent on the outside world. It had coal, and that was it. The community, which peaked at over 5,200 people, had to import everything — food, fresh water, building materials and clothing. So when Japan started transitioning from a coal-based economy to an oil-based economy, the island had nothing else to rely on. Mitsubishi began laying off workers in the 1960′s and eventually shut down the entire community in 1974:

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