Who's Been Naughty and Nice?

It won't be all sugarplums this Christmas, although I have to admit Santa's helpers are going to be busier baking than I thought at the beginning of the year.

But there will be some lumps of -- appropriately enough -- coal for folks who just don't get it.

One lump goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose insistence that somehow the magic number "nine" is written in invisible ink in the Constitution and prevents juries from awarding punitive damages to victims of outrageous corporate negligence if those damages exceed the direct monetary losses by a factor of more than nine. As a result, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just slashed in half the jury award of $5 billion against Exxon-Mobil for its negligence in the Prince William Sound oil spill. (So, more lumps to the Circuit Court and to Exxon itself, which decades later has still not paid a penny to the fishing families who lost their livelihoods.) There is, however, a small silver lining -- perhaps Exxon will finally pay the $2.5 billion penalty that the 9th Circuit alllowed to stand. (To catch up on this whole sordid story, you can watch the Sierra Club Chronicles episode, "The Day the Water Died."

And another lump goes to the Bush Administration, for once again allowing America's chemical industry to recklessly expose its neighbors to threats from terrorism, by refusing to adopt the safest possible technology to produce its products. Instead, the Administration has announced that it will implement a fig leaf, allowing factories to make their own determination of what security steps are necessary. In fact, this fig leaf is actually more like a poisoned nettle -- since the weak federal standards have been designed to help prevent states from adapting tougher and more meaningful regulations of their own. Democratic Rep. Ed Markey said the regulations are not strong enough and that the new Democratic-controlled Congress ''will be looking to close the wide-open security loopholes'' at the 15,000 chemical facilities in the United States. (Sugarplum to Markey.)

Now for the sugarplums:

To folks in Atlanta, particularly the Sierra Club's Building Environmental Community team, for conducting an enormously successful version of the Sierra Club's Energy Film Festival -- culminating in a fêted screening of An Inconvenient Truth for more than 400 guests at Atlanta's magnificent Temple, the oldest and largest Jewish place of worship in the Southeast. Before the event officially kicked off, Rabbi Fred Reeves talked about the great strides the congregation has made to reduce carbon emissions, such as the installation of solar panels and compact fluorescents, and then invited attendees to join him in their sanctuary as they changed the Eternal Flame's bulb to a compact fluorescent. After our panelists answered questions from the audience, postcards thanking Atlanta Mayor Franklin for signing the U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement and asking her to bolster the pledge by appointing an Environmental Officer for the City were signed by the attendees, the first 100 of whom got a free compact fluorescent.

To the European Union, for sticking to its plans to insist that airlines do their share to reduce carbon dioxide pollution in the face of the usual bullying from industry and the Administration which, with transparent cynicism, argued that only a "global" agreement was workable. The U.S., of course, has sabotaged every recent international negotiation on the environment by asserting that global agreements were in principle unacceptable. But Europe wasn't fooled.

And the final holiday sugarplum of the year goes to the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, for becoming the last city of the year to adopt the U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection goals -- thereby becoming a "Cool City."