NEWSBYCHRIS SANTIAGO

Think a 9.5% unemployment rate is bad? Try 60 to 70 percent. Those are the kind of egregious numbers that have been dogging Native American communities for decades.

Now, a proposed new wind farm on the Campo Kumeyaay Nation reservation, which is located in the desert mountains east of  San Diego, could potentially provide lifelines to the tribe's unemployed, as well as prosperity to the community as a whole. Even better, it could do so while promoting clean, homegrown energy.

What, then, is standing in the tribe's way? Taxes.

As NPR reports, the tribe's status as a sovereign nation means that it doesn't have access to the federal tax credits that make big renewable energy projects affordable. In addition, the Campo Kumeyaay can't tax companies who could partner with them to build the wind farm. Their status, in other words, acts like a double-edged sword.

A successful wind farm already exists on the tribe's lands, providing power for 35,000 San Diego-area homes and saving 110,00 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year. But the tribe only leases the land to enXco, the wind farm's owners.

The proposed new project, on the other hand, would be owned by the tribe and could bring in an estimated $24 million annually, based on NPR's projections. It could also make a bigger dent in San Diego's carbon output.

Mortgages. They're not exactly the sexiest topic in the world. In fact, before the Great Recession slapped us all in the face with the ugly truth about our crooked financial system, I pretty much tuned out when an acquaintance started going on about their fixed rate, this or that.

But the SAVE Act—a bill that would require mortgage lenders to consider energy costs before granting a borrower a federally-insured mortgage—has gotten my attention. Backed by Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, the SAVE Act would apply to all government-sponsored mortgage enterprises. That includes our pals Fannie and Freddie, as well as the Federal Housing Administration. According to The Economist, those three amigos currently guarantee more than 90 percent of all new loans.

Why should lenders care about energy efficiency? Because borrowers who spend less on utility bills have more cash to drop on their mortgage payments. Jonathan Hiskes at Grist breaks it down: the average energy costs over a 30-year loan amount to $70,000. Lay that on the table next to $170,000, the median home price in the U.S., and you start to see how significant a consideration energy costs should be.

This time of year marks "Back to School" for millions of children. For students in Greensburg, Kansas, though, this week means a whole lot more—a brand-new, state-of-the-art, $50 million green school. This more than just your same-old bland sustainability story, however. The old school, and most of Greensburg actually, was leveled 200-mile-per-hour winds in a tornado three years ago.

Now, thanks to the innovative thinking and dogged determination of Greensburg's leaders, school is not only back in session, but Greensburg has gotten a whole lot greener.

"There wasn't a book, a ball, a bus, a building [after the tornado struck]," Superintendent Darin Headrick told NPR. With water, power, sewer and gas services gutted, the entire town was uprooted.  The population that numbered 1,400 before the storm dropped to as low as 900. There were doubts about whether Greensburg would ever be able to recover. Headrick said the  biggest concern "was that if we didn't have a school in town as quickly as possible, people wouldn't have a reason to move back."

That's when community leaders dusted off their shoulders and stared clearly into the future: Not only were they going to rebuild the area's schools, they decided but they were going to build them sustainably. They hired Kansas City-based architecture firm BNIM to design the building. They leveraged insurance, partnerships, and federal support so that the building will be paid off a few months after opening its doors.

So far, it seems like Greensburg's grit has paid dividends.

In fact, Greensburg has been so successful that the new building went "platinum," earning the highest ranking for sustainability in the "LEED" green building certification system. Greensburg today stands as a model to our representatives of how we can use renewable energy in public schools to reduce costs and pollution.

The school started by implementing energy-saving and water conservation measu

Republicans in the Senate have banded together to kill the nominations of two highly qualified Asian-American candidates — Goodwin Liu and Eric M. Chen — for the federal bench.

Liu, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and Chen, a federal magistrate in San Francisco, have both cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee. By nominating both Liu and Chen, the White House had hoped to correct the historical underrepresentation of Asian-Americans on the federal bench. But apparently, the GOP doesn't want that to happen.

As the L.A. Times explains, the Senate must agree to carry over pending nominations when it goes on a 30-day recess. But Republican leaders have objected to carrying over Liu's and Chen's nominations. Or, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (who recommended both Liu and Chen to President Obama) puts it, "The Republicans are obstructing and, in effect, trying to kill these nominations....It is tragic because these are very worthy nominees who deserve to have their nominations debated and put to a vote."

Send your senator a message right now, urging them to fight back against the GOP's attack on highly qualified Asian-American nominees to the federal bench.

Asian-Americans are shockingly underrepresented in our nation's court system.

It rhymes with "shinola." Maybe that's why the you-know-what has hit the fan, at least as far as genetically-modified canola goes: Researchers in North Dakota have discovered hundreds of genetically modified canola plants growing wild all over the state.

In fact, 80 percent of wild canola in a sample from North Dakota roadsides contained genes that transferred resistance to either glyphosate or gluphosinate. Glyphosate, in case you were wondering, just happens to be the active ingredient in GM behemoth Monsanto's RoundUp Ready pesticide, while gluphosinate is found in Bayer's LibertyLink seeds.

What does this all mean? Well, one of the primary concerns with genetically-modified, or transgenic, crops is the risk of genetic contamination. The doomsday scenario with transgenic crops is that they'll find a way to transfer their engineered genes to wild versions of the same plant. While corporations and regulators have been pooh-poohing that possibility for some time, this new study is proof of the existence, in the words of Grist's Tom Laskawy, of CANOLA GONE WILD!

Quick! Your multinational corporation has just gushed millions of barrels of oil on America's shores. What's the fastest way to cover your rear while protecting your bottom line?

Slave labor, of course!

This is at least the conclusion BP recently came to, as detailed in a stomach-churning report by Abe Louis Young in The Nation. Within days of the Deepwater Horizon's wellhead explosion, crews of laborers with "Inmate" scrawled across their backs were spotted out and about on Louisiana's beaches.

Granted, beach cleanup for a major oil spill is back-breaking, dangerous, and toxic work, often involving twelve-hour shifts wearing heavy gear under a blazing Gulf sun.  For $10 an hour, most people wouldn't touch such a job with a ten-foot pole.

Under normal circumstances, that is.

But the job situation in Louisiana—particularly on the oil-choked Gulf Coast—was and is far from normal, which is why residents are enraged that BP bypassed out-of-work residents in need of a job for a cheaper, easier-to-silence chain gang. And here's the kicker: BP is also getting fat tax breaks for all this skulduggery.

Call it a Western poison pill.

In recent years, many Asian countries have bought into our culture of consumption. In fact these days, many of them — eager to break out of the pack and play on the same economic field as wealthier Western countries — have become what Asia Society in New York president Vishakha Desai calls “GDP junkies.”

There's no doubt that Asia's all-out obsession with economic growth has brought it American-style luxuries. Unfortunately, it has also brought American-style ecological disasters, like China's recent Dalian oil spill and the May collision of two oil tankers in the Singapore Strait.

While nowhere near as large as the BP spill (for now, at least), these accidents have caused some Asian soul-searching. At this point, these countries are at a crossroads. As Shanghai economist Andy Xie puts it, it isn't realistic for 1.3 billion Chinese people to hope to live like Americans.

Nobel laureates like Anil Markandya and Joseph E. Stiglitz have been telling the world for some time that it's foolish to try to tell how well a country is doing by relying solely on its GDP. Markandya, for example, has an amazing podcast in which he explains some of the other areas he measures, including a country's sustainability, Happy Life Years, Healthy Life Years, Intangible Capital (good governance, the rule of law, education), Social Capital (a nation's network of relations and institutions that allow it to function) and Genuine Savings (gross savings adjusted to reflect depletion of natural resources and pollution).

Did Obama drop the ball on the Shirley Sherrod scandal because he isn't black enough? New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd seems to think so.

On Saturday, Dowd decided to rub salt in the president's wounds by charging that the White House is just too white — because Obama chose to fire Sherrod, a USDA appointee, after she appeared to make some racist comments on film. (In truth, the video was heavily edited.)

Without a doubt, the fiasco surrounding the firing of Sherrod marked a low point for race relations in the Obama presidency. That the president and some of his key advisers would fall for the shenanigans of a right-wing hitman like Andrew Breitbart makes the whole thing even harder to swallow.

But Dowd goes even further by claiming that Obama fumbled because he hasn't been able to get beyond "the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him." The U.S. may not be a “nation of cowards” on race, as Attorney General Eric Holder maintained, but we just might have a "West Wing of cowards on race."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist even levels the charge that Obama isn't plugged into "the central African-American experience." And she uses the cover of an anonymous "top black Democrat" to get away with it. Obama doesn't have anyone around "who understand[s] 'the slave thing,'" the anonymous Democrat adds.

As the first black president, Obama has had to walk a very fine line: Many of the people who put him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue expect him to do something about the racial problems still metastasizing in the U.S., if not fix them altogether. At the same time, if he does address such grievances, Obama runs the risk of being portrayed as doing too much for African-Americans. He has to steer between being called a black militant or being called a race traitor.

But Dowd's race-based critique of Obama's performance — and the words of the anonymous pot shot-taker she quotes — falls flat because it depends on a familiar racial syllogism: That a lack of blackness equals a lack of diversity.

This week, Harry Reid and his sad posse of Senate Democrats declared—yet again—that the climate bill was doomed, at least for the time being. This naturally set off another seismic wave of finger-pointing on the Left and backslapping on the Right, as well as a good deal of hemming and hawing and gnashing of teeth among environmentalists.

But unlike those marking the occasion with a fresh round of Obama-bashing, I'd like to boldly—and perhaps foolishly—do the unthinkable: I'd like to look for the silver lining (which Grist and others say doesn't exist).

After all, now that it's dead, it's safe to call the American Power Act what it was: lipstick + pig. It was the blue pill and the red pill wrapped into one. It was so full of unsavory compromises, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if its main cheerleader, Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) himself, wasn't somewhat relieved about its demise.

To be sure,  our collective national failure to address what may be the most pressing issue of our time is shameful. (For those who argue that the economy or the deficit is more pressing, that whistling you hear is the sound of the clean tech industry hurtling toward China, and that $19 billion of chump change you just tripped over is how much the Congressional Budget Office estimates the climate bill would have trimmed from the deficit in a decade.)

But now, to borrow a little WWII terminology (via its recent ripoffs by neocons), instead of opting for a strategy of appeasing the Axis of naysayers -- coal-backers, oilmen, and nuke-niks -- we're going to have to fight. So, as a little balm for your battered green souls, here are six reasons that the death of the climate bill could actually be a good thing for the environment:

The next chief justice of the California Supreme Court might just be the daughter of migrant Filipino farmworkers.

Tani Cantil-Sakauye was just nominated by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, following Chief Justice Ronald George's announcement last week that he will retire on Jan. 2. If she's confirmed, she'll become the Court's first Asian-American chief justice.

"Being nominated to serve on the state's highest court is a dream come true," Cantil-Sakauye says. "As a jurist, woman and a Filipina, I am extremely grateful for the trust Gov. Schwarzenegger has placed in me."

Cantil-Sakauye is currently a justice of the 3rd District Court, a post she was appointed to by Schwarzenegger in 2005. Her appointment to California's highest court would also mark other milestones: If seated, Sakauye would become one of four women sitting on the Court, giving the seven-member body a female majority for the first time in its history. According to the L.A. Times, only three other state high courts have female majorities.

Cantil-Sakauye would become one of three Asian-American members of the court, together with Justices Ming Chin and Joyce Kennard. That's nothing to sneeze at, given the historical underrepresentation of Asian Americans in the judiciary, even in a state with a large Asian-American population like California.