As the mayoral election of 2009 approaches in the midst of the gravest economic crisis of last 75 years, I’m wondering if we’ll hear candidates parrot the old line about “inevitable” material growth, or if they’ll really start to explore steady state sustainability.

Steady state economics emphasizes qualitative growth over quantitative growth. A steady state economy grows quality of life, not population, not geographic size, not material consumption. It is based, to some extent, on a mature concept of a satisfying “enough” replacing a dangerous too much.

Qualitative growth, of course, is subjective. But it is also quantifiable. It stresses wages over profits, rewarded effort over exploited labor, local business over international trade run by rootless enterprises. It has its focus on the arts, education, a high quality of public life, local entrepreneurism, on food, on discourse, parks, libraries and on resource conservation.

It’s not surprising that steady state economic theories are are moving back into American consciousness during these dire times.

Adbusters magazine’s current issue — “The Big Ideas of 2009″ — has awarded the great spokesman of steady state economics, Herman Daly, the Man of the Year award for 2008. Since the 1970s, Daly has been attacking orthodox economics for its “critical flaw,” failing “to take into account how economic processes consume resources and generate wastes.” Daly sees orthodox economic activity, Adbusters wrote, as a “growing sub-set, of a non-growing planet.”

Daly wrote that “current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”

Daly’s book “Steady State Economics,” was first published in l977. It had a powerful influence on the environmental movement of the time. But was always considered a “fringe” idea by those ran the show.

But Daly is not crank. He’s a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, a former senior economist at the World Bank, working on environmental economics, and the winner of numerous international awards, including the Honorary Right Livelihood Award, which has been described as an “alternative Nobel Prize.”

A discussion of steady state economics sounds like just the topic Albuquerque’s 2009 mayoral race needs if it hopes to become serious about the troubled world we’re living in.

I don’t mean, though, an idealized about face in our local approach to livelihood. I do mean, however, a discussion on how we can infuse our local economic thinking with steady state ideas, incentives, and solutions to problems.

I’m wondering if we’ll hear any new ideas this year from any candidate? Will candidates directly address the current, and sure to be long-lived, recession? Or will they talk about the present as if it were the past, urging growth, growth and more growth, offering TIDDS to every developer, vowing to create lustrous new urbanist settlements in the wild open spaces miles and miles from town? Or will some candidate catch our imagination, and step up to address the crisis that this city, along with every other city in America, is in?

What would stepping up mean? Might it mean being brave enough to discuss economics as if reality mattered? Might it mean proposing a moratorium on sprawl development, realistic water rationing, incentives for infill development, empowering neighborhoods to protect themselves from predatory builders, public investment in more and more mass transit, resurrecting the regional stock exchanges of the 1930s to support local business and agriculture, actually cleaning up Cold War water pollution from Kirtland and Sandia Labs, working arrangements with local banks to finance recycling operations with the city as a guaranteed customer, creating a local senior teaching core to stimulate younger students to think productively about the future.

Would stepping up mean, perhaps, actually giving serious consideration to embracing at least some ideas from the concept of a steady state economy in Albuquerque, allowing us to grow qualitatively, if not quantitatively, as this world-changing economic and environmental crisis unfolds?

Qualitative growth is not negative; it’s not a failure caused by material hardship. It is another way to make a living while making a life that better fits the environmental and economic realities of our times.

I can think of nothing I’d like better than to see candidates talk meaningfully about the economic analyses of Herman Daly.

Adbusters describes Daly’s views: Humanity, he argued, “had to shift to a steady-state economy, one in which demands placed on the ecosystem would remain safely in bounds. This would imply shifting economic policy from a focus on stoking growth, where the scale of physical demands on ecosystems perpetually increased, to a focus on development, meaning humanity would have to learn to make wiser use of a modest and more stable level of material taken from the environment.”

By contrasting “development” with “growth,” Daly means, I think, emphasizing quality of life, a developmental approach to living, rather than physical and material quantitative growth.

Adbusters believes that “Thanks to the overwhelming evidence natural scientists have amassed demonstrating that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, humanity must stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, mainstream economists are grudgingly coming to accept the fact that there are ecological limits to our growth afer all.”

On a macro scale, Daly feels bailouts of failing industries are “merely a way to keep the growth economy from failing a little longer while allowing it to continue degrading the planet…. Instead, we need to redesign our laws and institutions to foster an economy that remains within biophysical limits… Of course the growth economists will howl that such measures would slow the growth of the GDP. I say so be it –- growth has become uneconomic, and we have limited time to bring the economy into line with the biosphere’s carrying capacity.”

Daly considers the earth as a whole to be in something like a steady state, not static, but with the inflow of radiant energy from the sun equal to the outflow of energy, until the trapping of greenhouse gases. “The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth,” Daly writes in Adbusters. “That behavior mode is a steady state -– a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth.”

One practical way of bring that about, Daly says, is to tax “what we want less of [depletion and pollution] and ceasing to tax what we want more of (income…) -– as the bumper sticker puts it ‘tax bads, not goods.’”

It would be a major political stunner to hear a viable candidate for the mayor’s job in Albuquerque proposing to heavily tax what we don’t want -– sprawl development, excessive water use and air and water pollution for starters -– and ceasing to tax, and even giving incentives to, what we want -– water conservation, infill development, local agriculture for starters.

That would be a candidate I could support.

Photo by Obama-Biden Transition Project/Flickr

When Barack Obama announced his nomination of Bill Richardson to be commerce secretary in early December, my initial thought was something along the lines of, “That must mean the federal investigation of the governor’s administration has ended.”

After all, articles about the probe into allegations of pay-to-play had first been published on my blog and in the New Mexico Independent and the Albuquerque Journal in August. It was a serious investigation: I knew weeks before Obama’s announcement that people close to the governor had been subpoenaed, and that the probe was focused on whether people at the highest levels of Richardson’s administration had helped CDR Financial Products secure a lucrative state contract in exchange for contributions to two Richardson political action committees.

So didn’t the Obama people know that too? They must, I reasoned at the time, and Obama certainly wouldn’t appoint anyone in such a precarious situation to such a position, so that must have meant the probe was over.

How wrong I was. We learned within days, as the national media explored the situation, that the investigation had only become more serious as the U.S. Attorney’s Office had empaneled a grand jury to investigate.

I began to have my doubts in mid-December that Richardson would make it through the media scrutiny and Senate confirmation hearing to actually become commerce secretary, so I began adding an additional statement to articles related to Obama’s nomination of Richardson that read something like, “assuming the Senate confirms him” — just in case.

Getting into a mess

So, frankly, I wasn’t surprised when Richardson withdrew his nomination on Sunday because of the investigation. This is a governor who has been dogged by pay-to-play allegations throughout his tenure. This is a governor who has appeared tired, worried and distracted for months. This is a governor who uncharacteristically ducked out of a press conference last month when the topic turned to the CDR investigation.

Ironically, that press conference was about an economic development project related to the state’s spending of millions of dollars on a highway interchange that will benefit a company that has contributed a lot of money to Richardson’s campaigns.

Surely Obama knew all of this. So why did he get himself into this mess in the first place by appointing a scandal-prone governor who was in the midst of a federal, criminal investigation?

The best answer comes in an ABC News report that indicates that Obama transition team members believe Richardson wasn’t forthcoming with them about the federal investigation. The implication is that the Obama transition team either didn’t do its homework and really didn’t know about the federal investigation, or that the Obama team did know about the probe, but Obama took Richardson’s word when the governor assured him there was nothing to the allegations and the probe would wrap up quickly.

The real Bill Richardson

Either is a mistake on Obama’s part. But perhaps, I’m realizing, Obama just doesn’t know the Bill Richardson that is known by those in New Mexico who are paying attention. This is a governor whose administration has repeatedly awarded state contracts and handed out state jobs and appointments to people who have, coincidentally or not, given lots of money to his campaigns and PACs. This is a governor who appears to believe he’s made of Teflon and flaunts the fact that he’s comfortable with blurring ethical lines even as he proposes ethics reforms that would make what he’s doing illegal.

For some reason, the real Bill Richardson apparently isn’t widely known outside of New Mexico. Perhaps indicative of that reality is a Seattle Times editorial that asks, in response to Richardson’s withdrawal, “Why on Earth is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson anywhere near a cheesy scandal that forced him to withdraw his name to be President-elect Obama’s commerce secretary?”

“The question grates on his political fans, who imagined even bigger roles for him,” the editorial states.

Somehow, the newspaper’s editorial board has apparently missed all the articles — many that didn’t circulate outside New Mexico but others that appeared in publications such as USA Today and FOXNews.com — that help portray an accurate picture of the real Bill Richardson: one who has spent his tenure as governor blurring ethical lines and has faced allegations of pay-to-play from the very beginning.

The warning signs were there. Somehow, Obama missed them all.

We thought the dust was about to settle. Domenici was out. So were Wilson and Pearce. And Bill Richardson — well, we all knew he came back to New Mexico to run for governor primarily so he could get another job in Washington, and we started 2009 thinking he was leaving to become commerce secretary.

Which would mean Diane Denish would become, in the coming weeks, the first woman to be governor of New Mexico.

But Richardson dropped another bomb on New Mexico politics on Sunday when he withdrew his nomination to be commerce secretary.

So now we’re at another point where we don’t know a lot. Barack Obama, Richardson and Denish have all publicly hinted that, if the investigation into allegations of pay-to-play in Richardson’s administration clears him of any wrongdoing, he might still join Obama in Washington and Denish might still become governor.

On the flip side, there’s the possibility that Richardson or members of his administration could be indicted, and Denish — and the Democratic Party in general — could lose favor in the eyes of the public at a time when the GOP will make a strong push to win the governor’s race in 2010 so it can have a say in redistricting in the next decade.

In addition, people close to Richardson and Obama are sparring about whether the governor was entirely forthcoming about the investigation during the vetting process, and there are questions about whether Richardson’s relationship with Obama is already tainted, regardless of whether the probe clears him. So Richardson may or may not be leaving the state before his term ends in 2010, regardless of the outcome of the investigation.

Many members of Richardson’s administration have already left in anticipation of his departure. Denish has assembled a massive transition team that includes paid staff and volunteers from all over the state. Politicos have been lining up to ask Denish to appoint them to replace her as lieutenant governor.

That’s all on hold.

A serious investigation

What’s clear is that the investigation is serious. The Washington Post is reporting that “the governor’s top aides — and even Richardson’s actions” are under scrutiny, and that “some evidence raises concern about the propriety of the Richardson administration’s interactions with a donor.”

What started as an FBI probe is now a full-fledged grand jury investigation into whether there is any connection between the state’s awarding of a lucrative contract to a California company and sizeable contributions the company made to political action committees formed by Richardson. CDR Financial earned almost $1.5 million advising the state on interest-rate swaps and other business related to $1.6 billion in bonds appropriated for a massive transportation project.

Meanwhile, in 2003 and 2004, CDR Financial gave $75,000 to Richardson’s political action committee Si Se Puede!, and the company’s head, David Rubin, gave $25,000 to Moving America Forward, another Richardson PAC.

Richardson has been dogged by pay-to-play allegations throughout his tenure as governor, and many members of the New Mexico media reacted somewhat nonchalantly when word of this investigation first leaked in August. But it’s quite serious. Richardson has appeared tired, worried and distracted for months, with good reason.

Despite his public statement that he’s confident the probe will clear him and his administration, Richardson’s future is uncertain. And that means the state’s political scene is too.

We will emerge from recession in 2009 or fall into Great Depression II. But we’re not likely to take steps toward restoring economic democracy, though. Free market fundamentalists still man the barricades, promoting their delusions. It’s understandable that the affluent should subscribe to doctrines generally consistent with their self-interest. For non-wealthy fans, laissez-faire is religious belief, a matter of faith, resistant by definition to reason.

What’s worse — and what I find difficult to grasp — is liberals who still grovel before a god that’s failed.

We were told, back in Reagan’s time, to cut taxes, stomp inflation, deregulate, emasculate organized labor, privatize and, well, the “free market” would do the rest.

The tellers included the best and brightest academicians (economics departments violate the “all faculty are liberal” rule) and foundation scholars. Milton Friedman, Paul Craig Roberts, Jude Wanniski, Arthur Laffer, George Gilder and others channeled (they said) prophets like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Friedrich von Hayek.

Thirty years later, their gifts have turned out to be, like so many toys from China, poisonous. We’re on the road to Third World status, with huge disparities of wealth, huge personal and national debts, rampant corruption at the highest levels. Unemployment soars, health declines, dependency on foreign lenders swells — even as our leaders play at empire.

The financial bust could mark the end. James Galbraith reports in “The Predator State” that conservative economists are disillusioned, it’s hard to find dedicated monetarists (money supply is everything!) or supply-siders. And, true, Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand acolyte, is on the record doubting his own dogma.

But I find free market fanaticism lingers on, like a hangover, in the print press and on the Web. Faced with the utter failure of their ideology, some fundamentalists deny, some prate about “greed,” some blame the victims. And liberals still talk respectfully of discredited doctrines.

Why? How many “free market” busts does it take?

As Arianna Huffington recently pointed out, the collapse of the communist political system killed Marxist ideology. “But while laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls,” she writes, “the ideology is still alive and kicking.”

It all starts with language, of course. Words never fully capture what they purport to describe, but in economics (more properly, political economy) we employ language that’s parsecs from reality.

Take “market.” Buying fruits and vegetables and chatting with folks at the Downtown Growers’ Market, I note that the City of Albuquerque provides the park (subsidy) and many growers accept WIC food stamps (subsidy). Also, I pay for what I take home, according to contract law and the police power behind it. Society makes my favorite market possible; it’s neither pure nor free.

So, too, the metaphorical “free market.” As for “free trade,” it’s a pipe-dream, that’s not how nations do business. Silliest yet is “free enterprise.” How does that describe the National Labs? Pete Domenici’s beloved nuclear industry? Federal research transferred to industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to weaponry? Well, they do “freely” use public money for private gain.

Conclusions based on these words so boldly misstate how we get and spend that we should shelve them under “fiction.”

Liberals must reject conservative myths to get at bedrock issues. Who gets what? And how? Answer: corporate America employs government, under Democrats as well as Republicans, to redistribute wealth upward.

As we tiptoe into 2009, Washington has bailed out big businesses. Obama’s upcoming stimulus package may jump-start activity, but it won’t restore economic or political democracy. To do that, we must understand how ridiculous and how dangerous free market fundamentalism remains.

And in the beginning is the word.

It was the day before Christmas Eve, and friends told me there was a whiteout in Santa Fe. Normally, I would count myself lucky to live in nice, dry Albuquerque with no compelling reason to go to anywhere on a day like that.

But my two boys live for snowy days…and I’d been meaning to try out the Rail Runner… and all my Christmas stuff was done…so we decided to bundle up, hop the train and check it out.

Ours was strictly a recreational excursion –- we went up at 10:37 a.m., arrived at noon and headed back at 4:10 p.m. — taking the latest morning run to Santa Fe and the earliest afternoon return to Albuquerque. Not exactly commuter hours.

Our train was filled with shoppers and grandmas and looky-loos who ooed and awed at the bright shiny newness of New Mexican’s $400 million toy. Passengers carried overnight bags and brightly-wrapped presents or, like us, traveled empty-handed, with an unmistakable air of leisure and enjoyment at just being there.

Our train was clean and precisely on time. The snow, along with the most beautiful scenery, kicked in a few minutes after we left the U.S. 550 station outside Bernalillo. The lulling ride was marred only by an older grandma-type who insisted on barreling out Christmas carols, long after everyone else stopped singing. But I decided I sure would rather relax on that train listening to her sing than trying to negotiate La Bajada on I-25.

We arrived in a wonderland of snow, met our friends and grabbed lunch at the uncrowded Zia Diner (Tomasita’s, directly across from the depot, was mobbed). Afterward we roamed the Santa Fe Railyard shops, The Sanbusco Center, REI and the holiday Farmer’s Market. After playing in the snow a bit, we grabbed some hot chocolate at Tomasita’s and hopped on the train for a 5:30 arrival back in Albuquerque.

Total time on Santa Fe: 4 hours. Dollars spent? About $100. Not bad for an unplanned, agenda-free trip that most emphatically would NOT have happened if the Rail Runner didn’t exist.

And I am looking forward to taking the Rail Runner again, maybe for work next time. Judging from conversation among friends and colleagues, ridership should be high during the upcoming legislative session in Santa Fe.

So I guess I should thank all of the people who made the Rail Runner happen, in the face of all the criticism and crabbing (which I am not going to recap here). Because I think it’s important to speak up when things go right, not just when they go wrong.

I do have just one little nitpick, though, one that’s common among people I’ve talked to.

There’s a movement afoot in Santa Fe and Albuquerque to get the state Department of Transportation and the Middle Rio Grande Council of Governments to adopt a schedule that’s more adaptive to people who want to take the train to go to dinner or attend a concert or other event. The movement, led by Santa Fe actor and producer Giuseppe Quinn, goes by the catchphrase “Call for Culture Friendly NM Rail Runner Schedule” and was boosted a few weeks ago by this article by Dave Maass in the Santa Fe Reporter.

“Basically, I’m calling for everyone and their sister, who see that the current evening schedule is lacking in support for NM culture, to voice their opinion,” Quinn told me in an e-mail, adding that 930 people (including me) have joined a Facebook group advocating the cause. “People should write their favorite, and not so favorite newspaper, blog, Web site, billboard, chatroom, radio show, television Station, Mayor, Governor, City Council-person, priest, lawyer, and superhero. They should contact friends, family and anyone with an interest for better full-week evening scheduling, i.e. music venues, theaters, restaurants, bars, comedy shoppes, dance clubs, museums, and galleries.”

I know it’s supposed to be a commuter train, but the DOT and MRCOG have said they based the current Rail Runner schedule on many factors, including input they sought from prospective riders before the service started. And they say they are open to tinkering with the schedules and many other train-related issues as time goes on and people weigh in with practical suggestions, whether they are commuters or pleasure-riders. And so, far, that seems to be the case.

Let’s see what happens with this one.

But Russians and our other detractors should pay attention to New Mexico next year, and to civil libertarians around the country. They might get a lesson in the fundamentals of America’s bulwark against social collapse and the moral horrors that lead to political violence. That bulwark is, of course, the Constitution of the United States, a reality in our culture that officials from the former Soviet Union simply do not grasp.

A bill based on the Constitution’s protection of lawful assembly, will be backed heavily by the ACLU of New Mexico in the 2009 legislative session. It would prohibit police from infiltrating and spying on political groups that peacefully oppose government policies while exercising their right to dissent.

Another battle around the validity of dissent continues to be waged at the national ACLU over the core values of the organization. It’s a battle between marginalized old guard constitutionalists and more partisan, ends-justify-the-means mainstream that has alienated many longtime supporters of the organization.

Vibrant dissent, no matter in what venue it takes place, always stumps authoritarians, wherever they may be.

The delusional, America-hating Russian professor of post-Soviet diplomacy that’s predicting a civil war in 2010 is really stumped.

The former KGB agent, Igor Panarin, has perhaps misinterpreted partisan animosities in our country as a sign of a of fundamental fracturing in the American character producing fissures that will widen under economic pressures into a massive crevasse similar to the one that swallowed the Soviet Union in 1989.

I suppose it’s understandable that to outsiders, American political hate speech might seem like prologue to political violence. It makes sense, too, that growing economic inequalities in our country, magnified over the last three decades, might seem to be dragging us perilously close to class violence. It’s not totally unreasonable, either, to interpret racial hatred in America as becoming entrenched rather than lifting. And various assaults on the Constitution in the name of national security since 9/11, along with America’s suspicion of dissent since the 1950’s, might well be seen as preparing the way for an authoritarian crackdown that would amount to a call to arms in some quarters.

That all might well make sense to someone who works for a government that relishes the thought of us collapsing under our own paradoxes, inconsistencies and contradictions. In fact, anti-American prophets like Igor Panarin confuse wishful thinking with realism, and partial knowledge with transcendent insight.

If you’re a good spy, aren’t you supposed to pay attention to everything? Panarin has not. In the first place, of course, we are not a hodgepodge nation of regionally antagonistic cultures like the Soviet Union was, held together by state terror and five year economic plans.

We are a nation of the enlightenment. The American story is, as historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in American Creation, “about the triumph of representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty… a secular state unaffiliated with any official religion, and the rule of law that presumes the equality of its citizens.”

That spirit is vested in the Constitution.

And the Constitution, so foolishly damaged over the last eight years, appears about to make a comeback in the Obama administration. Even the most dedicated advocates of executive authority, and wartime suspension of civil rights, couldn’t demolish it, even after 9/11.

We have elected a new government, one based on dissent against the old one. The Constitution has survived once again. Without it, anything, even the Russian professor’s predictions, might befall us.

That’s why the local ACLU’s bill to ban police spying in New Mexico, and the internal struggles at the national ACLU, are so important. They are signs that Constitutional scruples are still vibrant in our nation.

As long as dissent flourishes, and even when it is reduced to mere tokenism, the Constitution has a chance to provide an arena in which economic, environmental, and even racial conflicts can be resolved without physical violence.

Opposing police spying on legitimate political groups and dissenting individuals has a strong resonance for New Mexicans, especially those who suspect they were victims of unlawful surveillance in the l980s by the Albuquerque Police Department, and peace demonstrators who have become well aware of informants in their midsts.

APD had accumulated some 35 boxes on New Mexico members of the ACLU, local lawyers and others. The secret dossiers were uncovered by a judicial investigation of APD. The boxes were destroyed before anyone could analyze their contents.

The national ACLU’s fight over basic principles, including privacy and dissent, has gone largely underground lately. But when the National ACLU Board elected Susan Herman, a New York ACLU member and Brooklyn Law School professor, president of the national board of directors, the struggle resurfaced.

To get full picture of the internal troubles, check the Web sites of the national ACLU and of Save The ACLU. Be sure to read both Susan Herman and former ACLU director Ira Glasser.

From my perspective, as a minor member of the loyal opposition, the national ACLU board and Susan Herman seem to feel that the ACLU is a “progressive organization,” as they say, that is being thwarted in its mission by internal “bickering” over what Ira Glasser calls violations of “core ACLU principles.” It’s never a positive sign when disagreement is belittled as minor squabbling, and dissent is portrayed as thwarting progress.

The ACLU, in my judgment, should be aligned to neither progressives nor conservatives, but to the Constitution exclusively, which guarantees all Americans freedom of speech and dissent under equal protection of the law.

The current national board majority seems to be waffling a bit on those core principles. It actually entertained an internal proposal a few years ago to gag board members and prevent them from publicly disagreeing with the ACLU staff and board. Though eventually cast aside, the proposal wasn’t laughed out of the room. And that speaks volumes about the current value of dissent in the organization.

All factions of the ACLU believe, I’m sure, that the Constitution holds us together as a nation, and protects us individually and collectively from authoritarian encroachments. Former members of the Soviet secret police don’t get that, of course. And their speculations on America’s future are rendered absurd, as long as dissent is honored and protected at all costs.

The recent $700 billion bailout may have helped major industries and financial institutions, but what if billions of dollars were channeled into a green stimulus plan? A federal green stimulus plan that supported renewable energy and efficiency would foster new industries, create millions of new jobs and help solve climate change.

It would also improve the health of millions of Americans.

Ed Mazria, a prominent New Mexico architect, has come up with a sound and compelling plan. By investing a relatively small amount, $170 billion, in energy efficiency for buildings over the next three years, people like you and me will save $203 billion in energy bills and 2.5 million jobs will be created. This plan can be put into place immediately, and the investment will pay immediate dividends. Equally compelling, this plan will dramatically cut our dependence on coal-generated electricity –- reducing air pollution and slowing global warming.

Coal plants currently account for more than one-fourth of our nation’s global warming pollution, and emissions have been linked to birth defects, heart attacks, strokes, asthma and other respiratory diseases. Particulates formed from power plant emissions are responsible for nearly 24,000 premature deaths annually, more people than are killed by drunk drivers each year. And in New Mexico, 26 rivers and lakes currently have fish consumption advisories as a result of mercury emissions from coal plants.

The threat to public health from mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides is serious enough to warrant immediate action. Yet this threat pales in comparison to the financial and health costs from unchecked global warming. With American coal plants alone adding over two billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, we must ask ourselves: what are the costs of not quickly enacting climate change legislation and investing in a new energy economy?

As we consider the future prospects for our economy, we should be asking our policy makers: What are the costs of more frequent extreme weather events like Katrina or an increasingly unstable food supply? What are the costs to New Mexicans posed by a major loss of fresh water due to reduced snowpack from global warming? Can we afford a resurgence of malaria and other infectious diseases? Is there a dollar amount that can be attached to the likely extinction of a quarter of the world’s land species?

If we want to avoid runaway climate change and jumpstart the economy, we need to phase out coal. We know we can do this by investing in efficiency and renewable energy — green industries that will create millions of jobs and protect public health.

The New Year, the new Congress, and the new President offer enormous hope and possibilities for our nation. This is a critical time for our nation. We can address and solve our biggest challenges, simultaneously transforming them into our biggest opportunities.

Editor’s note: This commentary was also signed by Norty Kalishman MD, Larry Schreiber MD and Robert M. Bernstein MD.

The secretary of the Interior, as the head of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Mineral Management Services, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and enforcer of the Endangered Species Act, is the most important federal position tasked with the protection of America’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This is not a trifle. In my opinion, Sen. Ken Salazar is not a great choice for that position. Here is why:

1. Mr. Salazar has done little to halt oil and gas drilling on Colorado’s Roan Plateau. Yes, he has protested. Yes, he has “discouraged” the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from opening the area to drilling. But this falls far short of what is needed. Salazar has failed to introduce or support federal legislation to protect this area from destruction and protect the local people from the toxic effects of the drilling. This is a crying shame. The Roan is one of the most incredible places in my home state. That it will be industrialized is nothing short of a calamity.

2. Mr. Salazar strongly supported former Interior Secretary Gale Norton when George W. Bush nominated her to the post. Norton, a former lobbyist for the lead-paint industry, is the source of all the problems Interior faces today. Those problems include Interior employees having sex with oil company executives in exchange for oil and gas leases. And worse. This was a decidedly poor judgment call on Salazar’s part (he also strongly supported Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, as Time magazine recently recalled, “even escorting Gonzales into the U.S. Senate on the first day of his nomination hearings.”)

3. Mr. Salazar has consistently supported the interests of the oil and gas industry above the need for conservation and alternative energy sources. He maintains very strong industry ties. He voted (like Obama) for the appalling 2005 energy bill. He voted to end the offshore drilling moratorium; he voted against the repeal of tax breaks for Exxon-Mobil and voted against increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

4. Mr. Salazar has consistently supported corporate welfare for the ranching community to the detriment of the environment. He has, again and again, pushed rancher subsidies. He has fought endangered species protection. As Colorado attorney general, he threatened to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for even thinking about listing the black-tailed prairie dog as endangered.

5. Mr. Salazar voted against a very popular bill that would have forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider climate change impacts when planning water projects.

6. Mr. Salazar got the American taxpayer stuck with the bill for cleaning up the Summitville Mine Superfund site.

7. Mr. Salazar supported the bill to allow guns in national parks. Ugh.

8. Native Americans have never been too impressed with Mr. Salazar. Interior has a big impact on Native American populations, and they will need a strong advocate in charge at Interior.

9. Finally, Salazar pushed for the elevation of William Myers III to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Myers, a long-time lobbyist for the ranching industry, is widely considered to be one of the most anti-environmental judges around. This is a guy who argued to allow a company to mine cat litter on ground considered sacred by Native Americans. This was a guy with Abramoff connections. This is a guy who sees the Clean Water Act as some sort of fascist pronouncement.

To be fair, Obama could have chosen worse. Salazar has a decent score with the League of Conservation Voters. He has voted for wilderness bills, and he has supported tax breaks that encourage conservation on private lands. While we already see agribusiness and mining groups praising the choice, at least the Republicans won’t be able to call him an environmental extremist. That must be worth something.

What concerns me is Mr. Salazar’s judgment. We know how things work in D.C. We know that the oil and gas industry will have unfettered access to the secretary of the Interior while citizen groups will have to go through the low-level staffers to get their message heard. Will someone who supported Alberto Gonzales and Gale Norton have the ability to make wise decisions when it comes to protecting water, air, wildlife and public lands?

Mr. Salazar is not a visionary. He is not a change agent. Mr. Salazar has a very interesting and compelling story as a fellow Westerner. However, from my viewpoint, he has little interest in protecting biodiversity and even less interest in a fossil fuel-free economy. This is not the change we need.

The best we can hope for now is that Mr. Salazar will prove us wrong.

Please Mr. Salazar, prove me wrong.

Jim O’Donnell is a fourth-generation Coloradoan from Pueblo. He is a former oil and gas industry employee and was a leader in the fight to protect New Mexico’s Valle Vidal. He lives near Taos, N.M., where he is a principal in the firm Collaborative Green.

Familiar, yes, but with variations — the Rocky is losing money and some Rocky staffers have created a web site (iwantmyrocky.com) to rouse reader support.

Where they’re not dying, many American newspapers are retrenching. Even as I was noodling this comment, there came breaking news -– the Washington Post will share content with its nearby competitor, the Baltimore Sun, owned by the bankrupt Tribune Company. (Tribune is teetering partly because real estate magnate Sam Zell bought it with little cash and big debt.)

Readership is down as young people gravitate to the Internet (where they often read newspapers or opinion based on papers). Newspaper advertising revenue was eroding even before the financial crisis; now it’s plunging. Newspapers’ old business strategies are dying; new rationales are unborn or infantile.

To prolong life, some newspapers mutilate themselves. In Silicon Valley, the Mercury News cut news staff from 400-plus to below 150, dropped its movie reviews, science and book sections and chopped two-thirds of its business section.

It’s in that context that I read and evaluate the Albuquerque Journal. I have no reason to believe it’s in imminent danger, but the local economy is slowing. Mervyn’s and Linens ’n Things are leaving town. American Furniture will close all but one Albuquerque location. Jackalope just vacated its Old Town outlet. And rumors say the Journal contemplates layoffs.

I would be devastated were the Journal to falter, relying as I do on Roll Call (how our Senators and Representatives voted), the New York Times crossword, comics (thanks, Dan Herrera, for Frazz’s sweetness and Non Sequitur’s cynicism), David Steinberg’s Stakhanovite labor on books and music, Dan Mayfield’s tracking of Tortillawood, the frustrating Trivia feature, editorials (so reasonable most days in contrast to adjacent Op-Ed ravings); reviews of plays, music, dance and art; Gene Grant’s complexity, gardening advice and more.

This doesn’t mean the Journal should be forgiven its Op-Ed narrowness or Republican partisanship. Nor its sloppy editing –- there’s no need, really, to attribute the morning sunrise. It’s “fewer” drunk drivers, not “less,” even in New Mexico.

And there’s no excuse for what looks like bias. The headline on an AP report on the VP debate (October 4, page A4) provides a not- isolated example. The lead of the five-paragraph piece said John McCain and Sarah Palin “played up” her performance as polls showed voters judged Biden the winner. The headline ignored both those ideas. It read, “Polling: Winner Biden less likeable.” Finding Palin’s likeability edge required going to the last graph, three lines from the bottom. Sad.

Thanks to recent outbursts of energy, the Journal is a better newspaper overall than it was, say, two years ago. But, as noted above, it’s still hobbled by old, complacent habits.

That’s why, mindful that newspapers are an endangered species, we owe Journal management the gift of criticism, positive and adverse. Here’s to their choosing excellence as part of a strategy for prosperity in the New Year and beyond.