Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks, weakened bridges and eroding pipeline supports. Sounds like a scene from one of those uber-dramatic World-Without-Humans shows that seem to debut every week on the tube these days.

Actually, those predictions come from a National Research Council report released today that says we should be prepared for some serious transportation infrastructure problems thanks to climate change. The report warns that expected sea-level rises of between 7 and 23 inches this century could wreak havoc on road, pipelines and airports in coastal areas of the U.S.

The NRC, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, says that the current transportation system was built using historical temperature and precipitation data that -- thanks to climate extremes -- are becoming unreliable. Engineers and planners need to consider the effects of climate change on everything from bridges to drainage systems.

NRC officials said that major transportation hubs like New York City's LaGuardia Airport, are in low-laying coastal zones that vulnerable to flooding from rising seas. In addition, More rainstorms will result in delayed air and ground traffic, flooded tunnels and railways, and eroding road, bridge and pipeline supports. Conversely, more heat waves means requiring load limits at hot-weather or high-altitude airports, as well as thermal expansion of bridge joints and rail track deformities.

But hey, it's not all bad news. The report notes that marine transportation is about to get a lot easier once all that pesky ice has melted in the Arctic Ocean.

It's turning into "Update on Bears Day" here at EnviroWonk.

You may recall how we told you in January about how the Fish and Wildlife Service missed a deadline on whether to declare the polar bear threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. And you may remember how this move appeared to be suspiciously coordinated with a Minerals Management Service plan to open a large area of Alaska's Chukchi Sea to oil and gas leases.

At the time, a few environmental groups threatened to sue over the delay. Well, today they did just that. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace have asked the federal court in San Francisco to order Interior Department officials to make the decision, which at this point is more than two months late.

Administration officials have blamed the delay on complexities arising from the fact that it's the first time climate change has been a factor in proposing a threatened status for any U.S. species. But the Interior Department's inspector general isn't buying it, and late last week launched a preliminary investigation into why it's been taking so long.

Asked by Reuters to respond to today's lawsuit, Interior spokesman Shane Wolf said -- apparently without irony -- that the department would respond "in a timely manner."

Last month we ranted a bit about John McCain's odd decision to take a worthwhile grizzly bear DNA study and turn it into one of his favorite go-to examples of wasteful government spending and the need for earmark reform. We're all for eliminating inane pork projects, but still don't understand how the Montana bear study ended up lumped together with Alaska's bridge to nowhere and Hillary Clinton's Woodstock Museum earmark as a punchline for McCain's campaign rhetoric.

[Astute EnviroWonk readers may also have noticed that ever since we ran that post, McCain advertisements about this exact subject have regularly showed up on these pages.]

Anyway, we loved today's 2,000-word Washington Post story in which reporter Joel Achenbach traveled to Montana and interviewed field biologists working on the bear project. While not allowed to directly respond to McCain's jabs, Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project leader Katherine Kendall makes it clear that the study is worthwhile and may lead to changes in the protection status of the grizzly.

"There's never been any information about the status of this population. We didn't know what was going on -- until this study," she said.

There's a lot to like in this story, particularly this nugget that the GOP nominee probably won't be adding to his campaign speeches anytime soon: "[McCain] didn't try to block the grizzly funding by offering an amendment to remove it from the 2003 appropriations bill. And ultimately he voted for the bill."

It's a dicey time for utility companies hoping to expand their generation capacities. Uncertainty over the possible extent of greenhouse gas regulations, a changing political climate and rising construction costs have made the future very murky.

So we're not really surprised to hear that several lending institutions have recently said that they will require utilities to begin factoring in climate change and associated regulations when applying for private funding. Those factors have led the Rural Utilities Service, a small agency under the USDA charged with providing cheap loans to rural utilities for plant construction, to put an indefinite moratorium on new loans, citing risk and uncertainty. Seven proposed power plants under consideration have been directly affected by the moratorium, and no new loans will be considered for at least two years.

It's impossible for an EnviroWonk to not regard this decision without a bit of elation. Nobody wants to see rural residents' power become inordinately expensive or unreliable as a result of this decision, we also can't help but see this as something of a first bellwether of change in American energy policy. Coal isn't on its way out for a good while now, but to see the first real indicators of climate change abatement and a changing attitude towards energy development is, well, encouraging.

Adding to the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune being directed at EPA administrator Stephen Johnson these days, unions representing many EPA employees have withdrawn from cooperative agreements with their appointed administrators.

The strongly-worded statement accuses Johnson and his fellow appointees of "abuses of our good nature and trust", of ignoring principles of scientific integrity when politically expedient, and of a punitive attitude towards whistleblowers that has chilled efforts to make the agency more accountable and transparent. Leading their list of specific complaints was Johnson's decision to deny California's waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which went against the recommendations of agency specialists.

The unions' withdrawal from the National Labor-Management Partnership Council is largely symbolic; the cooperative agreement, a relic of the Clinton era, was intended to help address workplace and labor issues. Regardless of its actual impact, the unions' withdrawal represents the closest thing to a vote of no confidence possible, and undermines Johnson's relationship with his agency even more.

It also underlines a crucial divide that exists within the EPA between its rank-and-file -- who by and large are committed to the task of environmental protection -- and its administrators, who are subject to the whims and needs of the politicians that appoint them. Under an administration that many perceive to be actively undermining environmental protection in general and the EPA in particular, that divide is clearly yawning ever wider. At some point, it must be asked: Is Stephen Johnson, under fire from both politicians and his own staff, his job in question after the California debacle, still capable of effectively leading the EPA?

EnviroWonk writer Samantha Hulkower can now enjoy her weekend after three days of blogging from WIREC

The Washington International Renewable Energy Conference ended yesterday, and we couldn't be more thankful. Not that the conference wasn't interesting, but we didn't have the energy (pun not intended) to spend another day wandering around the windowless D.C. Convention Center, looking for decent free food and avoiding eye contact with people who wanted to exchange business cards.

We weren't alone, as the Trade Show floor was practically a ghost town yesterday compared to the hustle and bustle of the previous two days. From what we saw, the side events and business forums had far fewer attendees, and the whole thing closed up by 4 p.m.

All week there were side events at the Convention Center, covering topics such as "Clean Cities and Energy Independence," "Sustainability Criteria for Biomass," and more esoteric topics like "African Rift Valley Geothermal Initiative." From what we heard, these events were hit-or-miss in terms of their usefulness and entertainment value, so we waited until the last day to check one out.

We tried to find some sessions worth sitting in on, but passed on rooms that were less than half full or had more than 3 audience members dozing off. Needless to say, it was slim pickings.

We did sit in on a talk about "alternative" renewable energies. We braced ourselves for a discussion about nuclear power, but were pleasantly surprised to hear stuff about emerging renewable energies. There is pig and dairy cow manure that can be used to make energy from biomass, and what we found to be an excellent and surprisingly underutilized source of energy -- waste heat. A steel plant in Illinois produced 95MW of electricity just from capturing the heat radiating off the coke that was previously left to radiate out into the atmosphere.

Silicon chip production is another heat-intensive process, and a plant in West Virginia managed to produce 50MW of electricity from recycling waste heat -- allowing the plant to save money on energy costs, and invest those savings into further energy-efficient upgrades to the facility.

See, everyone wins when you recycle.

Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend. Yeah, we forgot about it too. But this is the second year that it's started in early March. Remember when Congress included the change in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, promising us that extending DST by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November would save 10,000 barrels of oil each day though reduced power use by businesses?

Well, wouldn't you know it -- researchers at the University of California – Santa Barbara have just published new research demonstrating that air conditioning and heating costs rise as lighting costs fall during DST, resulting in a net rise in energy use. The study examined households and businesses in Indiana, a state where until two years ago, only 15 of 92 counties took part in DST.

Don't get too concerned yet. According to the study, the price increase per household in Indiana totals a paltry $3.19 per year, for a total of $8.6 million, and the increase in energy use is only 4 percent.

The researchers, led by Matthew J. Kotchen, caution against dismissing DST outright on the basis of their study. However, it's impossible not to consider the carbon footprint of Daylight Savings, and we'd be interested to see if eliminating it would have a worthwhile impact on carbon emissions, and if it becomes a factor under carbon cap-and-trade programs.

Frederick Seitz died earlier this week at age 96. He was a highly honored physicist, the former president of both Rockefeller University and the National Academy of Sciences, and, oh yeah, one of the first modern-day climate change skeptics.

We have no intention to speak ill of the dead, and in fact we find Seitz's life history to be fascinating. While a graduate student in the 1930s, he helped to develop the method for calculating the cohesive energy of a metal. He led NAS from 1962 to 1969, and President Nixon later presented him with the National Medal of Science for his work on modern quantum theory.

It wasn't until the 1990s, as talk of global warming began to gain traction in the science community, that Seitz began to speak out against the growing consensus. He dismissed the chances of major global warming as "inconsequential", and In 1998, he solicited thousands of scientists to sign an eight-page petition against the Kyoto protocol. That petition led to the National Academy of Sciences taking the very unusual step of refuting one of it former presidents.

Seitz also gained notoriety for arguing that scientific evidence did not support the idea that chlorofluorocarbons damage the planet's ozone layer.

The man was obviously brilliant, and probably had more credentials to his name than the combined total of all 19 "scientists" who attended the Heartland Institute's climate change conference this week. But in the end, Seitz probably should have just stuck with physics, leaving the climatology to others.