Now let's see if I’ve got this straight. Thanks to two very expensive wars, tax cuts for people who don’t need them, and assorted combinations of malfeasance and corruption, the federal budget deficit is at an all-time high and growing like kudzu.

So what's the response to the financial and monetary crisis? Why bailouts, of course. A new stimulus package. Where's the money coming from? That's what I can't figure out. Printing presses, I guess. Pretty soon we'll be like those Europeans in the famous Depression-era photographs with, literally, wheelbarrows full of paper money headed off to buy a loaf of bread.

I'm no economist, but spending our way out of a shortage of money reminds me of Dave Brower’s deathless line: "That's like sobering up on martinis."

So what will this incredible development mean for the earth? Time will tell, of course, but we here at Tom's Turn are quite optimistic, both because of and in spite of what was said in the campaign.

The first thing to watch, as always, is the appointments—Interior, Energy, EPA, climate czar if there is to be one, and the under secretaries and assistant secretaries and others in the supporting cast. When Bill Clinton won the first time, he hired quite a few people from national environmental groups, as did Jimmy Carter. You can bet resumes are pouring into the Obama transition team right now. I, for one, have heard no rumors on that score so far.

Have they no shame? (Hint: No.)

We speak of the current band of varlets and scoundrels just ending their eight-year reign of terror in our nation's capital. With both presidential candidates lambasting Mr. Bush and his henchmen daily, the lame ducks are hell-bent on wreaking as much havoc as they can in these last not-quite-three-months of their joyride.

One particularly odoriferous episode is still seeping out from under the backroom doors of the Interior Department—an attempt to rewrite Endangered Species Act regulations to remove the requirement that the Forest Service and other agencies consult with the scientific agencies before they undertake projects that might affect protected species. Another change would preclude the agency from considering global climate change in its decision process.

Now pay attention: this is incredible.

So the fate of the Roadless Rule is now in the hands of three judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, at least its immediate fate, following a hearing this week in San Francisco.

The Forest Service, represented by the Justice Department, wants the three judges to overturn a Sept. 2006 decision that found the rule the Bush administration cooked up to replace the original rule illegal.

The late Dan Luten was sneakily brilliant, somewhat iconoclastic, and possibly a maverick had that word not been so debased lately. In his fifties, he left a job as a chemist with Shell Oil to teach geography at Cal and became deeply involved in conservation. He served on the board of Friends of the Earth, which is how I got to know him pretty well.

One bon mot he tossed off that stuck with me was, "The country does not exist to serve its economy."

Chevron has long been a leader in image advertising, spending an immense amount of money on print and television ads explaining to the public just how utterly wonderful the company is. Years ago, their tag line was "People Do," in answer to rhetorical questions like, "Do people really care what happens to our precious wetlands? People do." These tended to appear when the company was angling for permission to drill wells in sensitive marshes.

Well, the company is back with a series that is running on public tv (I keep seeing them right before The News Hour), where they'd rather not be called ads, I guess.

Another story the other day, this time from the San Jose Mercury News, showing the perils of importing predators to control pests.

This time it's the mosquitofish, a guppy-sized fellow, brought into California from the East Coast in the 1920s to control, you guessed it, mosquitoes. The fish are voracious—can eat 500 mosquito larvae in a day. This is very good, especially since West Nile virus hit the state in 1999. Mosquitofish have helped keep the virus, which is frequently carried by birds and then transmitted by mosquitoes that bite the birds, in relative check.

It's not all that often that front-rank political leaders call for civil disobedience, but that's just what Al Gore did in New York on September 24 at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. "I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," the ex-veep and planetary crusader said, "to loud applause," according to Reuters.

Earthjustice has been accused of being many things, including preferring birds over people (which reminds me of a fine old quote. Charles Callison, a stalwart of the Audubon Society, was once asked whether he liked people or birds better. He said, "I like the people who like birds.").

We've been called elitist. We've been accused of having little sympathy for working people. And we're not the only ones. The entire environmental movement is regularly derided by its opponents as secretly planning to destroy the economy and to lock up the great outdoors for its own private pleasure.

Just last week, we were attacked by name in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, accused of filing scores of lawsuits in a simple and effective effort to block offshore drilling and make people miserable. In case you missed it, I commend Trip's commentary on this subject. The article itself is here.

I heard Al Gore on "NPR Science Friday" a few weeks back talking about what it would take to get us out of the climate catastrophe that's bearing down on us. The biggest single step, he said, would be to convert the entire U.S. vehicle fleet to electricity. He said that is possible within 10 years if we—industry and government in the main—mount an effort akin to what we did for World War II.

All well and good, but government and industry almost never move that fast.

Until now. The Wall Street-mortgage-Fannie-Freddie-Merrill-AIG-who's-next crisis has politicians, bureaucrats, and captains of industry moving faster than they ever have before, and we're about to see a $700 billion bailout that may not even work.

Just think if those same forces took the climate crisis seriously enough to do something similar on that score. We could turn the climate mess around in Al Gore's 10 years, easy. And everyone would be the better for it, including Wall Street.