The headlines of 2011 were driven by global warming disasters and the popular uprising against the powers-that-be who have accumulated profit at the expense of the future of humanity. The United States faced the most billion-dollar climate disasters ever, with 14 distinct disasters costing at least $53 billion to the U.S. economy. Stymied by the election of the science-denying Tea Party Congress, the Obama administration failed to pass climate pollution or oil and coal safety legislation in response to the disasters of 2010. The administration fought back attacks on investment in renewable energy and stopped the rush to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, spurred by mass protests.

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by Miles Grant, cross-posted from the National Wildlife Federation

How bad was 2011 for America’s wildlife, air, water, land and public health? After taking 191 anti-conservation votes, even the House of Representatives’ own members called it ”the most anti-environment House in the history of Congress.”

That’s not to say the last year hasn’t been without progress in Washington. The Environmental Protection Agency set long-overdue limits on mercury pollution that will prevent 11,000 premature deaths a year. The EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set new fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks that will cut our oil addiction by billions of barrels. And the EPA is ready to establish landmark global warming pollution limits on power plants.

But those actions represent the Obama administration implementing past acts of Congress, often in the face of opposition from one or both parties in the current Congress. Inside the Capitol, many members of Congress spent 2011 attacking wildlife, trying to roll back public health protections, and doing the bidding of its Big Oil donors.

10. The Dirty Water Act

Yes, 2011 will be remembered as the year Congress decided America’s water was just too darn clean, attacking the Clean Water Act and investment in clean water programs. The Dirty Water Act passed the House and now Senators Dean Heller (R-NV) and John Barasso (R-WY) have been working to sneak it through the Senate by trying to attach it as a political rider to must-pass budget legislation. Get Smart: Tell Congress to protect river otters’ streams from pollution.

9. Banning Imaginary Regulations

The Environmental Protection Agency has no plans to regulate farm dust, but that didn’t stop a bipartisan majority in the House from passing the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act. “Since I am sure that many little girls all over America care about this deeply, can you commit to me that EPA will never try to regulate fairy dust?” Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) jokingly asked EPA assistant administrator Gina McCarthy. The Senate has no plans to take up the bill and President Obama has promised to veto it. Get Smart: Learn what pollutants are real threats to America’s wildlife and public health.

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With the Iowa caucus looming, Newt Gingrich told a Rush Limbaugh listener he has killed a chapter by a conservative climate scientist that recognizes the reality of global warming. The book, being edited by Gingrich’s Contract with the Earth co-author Terry Maple, was to have an essay by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She was asked in 2007 by Maple to provide “a good opening chapter that lays out the facts on global climate change,” and submitted her chapter in 2009. After the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Gingrich had a climate science book on tap, Limbaugh skewered Gingrich and the “babe named Hayhoe.”

Confronted by a Limbaugh listener, Gingrich blamed an anonymous third party for requesting the chapter, and said “we told them to kill it,” CBS News reports:

The climate-change issue arose Thursday night at a Gingrich campaign stop in Carroll, when a woman expressed concern to Gingrich about the chapter. She said she had heard about it on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. As she began to tell Gingrich who the author of the piece would be, Gingrich interrupted. “That’s not going to be in the book,” he told her. “We didn’t know that they were doing that and we told them to kill it.”

Watch it:

“Good,” the climate denier responded. “That sounds a good idea because why would you want to have somebody like that in there?”

Gingrich and his co-author Terry Maple never told Hayhoe — a professor at Texas Tech University, mother, and evangelical Christian — that her chapter would be junked. Hayhoe was dismayed by the “ungracious” way she found out that her work was being discarded.

“Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my #climate chapter in the trash,” Hayhoe tweeted in response to the news. “100+ unpaid hours I could’ve spent playing w my baby.”

A cyber-penny for your thoughts.

Something about this New Yorker cartoon seems strangely apt….