It's a longstanding joke among people who sell land. The closing is over, signatures secured, the deed transferred, and after a final handshake, this off-hand comment is delivered over-the-shoulder:

By the way, you'll need water.

That's become the story of corn ethanol in the US, and it's no laughing matter.

Those who deny the validity of climate science -- in particular the Nobel-prize winning IPCC work -- and deny the need for urgent action, like to call themselves "skeptics." I recently wrote about why the most accurate label for these people is "denialists," and have encountered push-back from two quarters: from the denialists themselves, who bristle at the implication that they are in some way equivalent to Holocaust deniers, and from Climate Progress, which makes an argument in favor of the term "delayer" instead.

There's a folktale called The Chinese Mirror that tells the story of a Korean peasant who returns to his village from China and brings home something no one has ever seen before: a mirror. All the villagers who look into it fail to recognize themselves, leading to all kinds of amusing misunderstandings and chaos.

Now tuck the tale in the back of your mind as you consider this disturbing news from the pages of The Washington Post. The headline: Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China.

In his immortal hit New York, New York, Frank Sinatra croons:

And if I can make it there, I'm gonna make it anywhere

He doesn't sing about the other possibility, which is the oblivion of failure that New York can also confer -- as it did last week upon the Heartland Institute and its International Climate Deniers Conference.

They swaggered into town on the back of an expensive full-page ad in the New York Times and a favorable editorial preview provided for free by fellow-travellers at the Wall Street Journal -- and skipped town three days later exposed, ignored, ashamed and ridiculed.

They didn't make it here, and making it anywhere has now gotten that much harder.

For more than 15 years, the Environmental Working Group has been active protecting public health and the environment with public information. Their latest tool: an interactive map of editorials from newspapers around the country demanding reform of the Farm Bill which Congress is reauthorizing without much change.

The editorials unmask the economic unfairness of the farm bill and show a nation ready for a break from record-high commodity prices, rising rates of obesity and diabetes, and growing concern about industrial agriculture’s contribution to global warming and other environmental perils.