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A majority of Congress remains undecided, at least publicly, about President Obama's plan to launch a military strike against Syria.

Not Minnesota Rep. Rick Nolan. The 69-year-old Democrat is a firm "no" vote.

He's characterized the administration's evidence of a chemical attack as "sketchy and confusing at best." He remains unconvinced that it was Syrian President Bashar Assad, and not the al-Qaida-linked rebels, who ordered the use of chemical weapons that killed 1,429 Syrians, including 426 children. During a Monday briefing on the situation, he got into a vigorous exchange with Secretary of State John Kerry.

"A careful examination of the evidence in this case shows a profound neglect in exploring the other possibilities," Nolan said Tuesday. "We do know is that this whole thing will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and we'll kill a lot of people as well."

Nolan, who was first elected to Congress in the 1970s on an anti-Vietnam War platform, is emblematic of the resistance in the Democratic Party's liberal wing.

One of an estimated 50-plus left-leaning Democratic House members expected to vote against Obama's plan to strike Syria, Nolan is dead set against the use of force, arguing that the role of the U.S. is "not the policeman of the world."

"I've had the good fortune to vote to end several wars that we ought not to have gotten into," says Nolan, who declined to run for re-election in 1980 but was sent back to the House last fall after a 32-year hiatus. "I'd like to be on the front end of stopping one before it got started."

Nolan says he can't get into the specifics of the contretemps with Kerry because it occurred during a classified meeting. He summed it up this way: "He obviously hasn't read the same documents that I have — but he has invited me to meet with him in his office to go over the ones he has." The meeting is being planned.

Strange Bedfellows

The liberal Democratic congressman finds himself in the unusual position of being aligned with fellow Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the conservative founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, who also adamantly opposes military action.

Some characterize the opposition to intervention in Syria as libertarian, ultraconservative or ultraliberal. Nolan explained it this way during a Tuesday radio interview in his home state: "I think it's just good common sense."

Yet for all the chatter about liberal anti-interventionists like Nolan teaming up with libertarian or conservative anti-interventionists like Bachmann, history — and especially recent history — is not on their side.

The closest such a coalition came to victory recently was a vote on a bipartisan House amendment that would have restricted the NSA's power to collect domestic phone records. The amendment, sponsored by libertarian GOP Rep. Justin Amash and liberal Democratic Rep. John Conyers, both from Michigan, attracted votes from both parties but failed 205-217. Bachmann voted against the amendment; Nolan voted for it.

Could the unlikely coalition against military action in Syria produce a different result?

"I would love to be proven wrong because President Obama promised us no stupid wars," says Michael Heaney, a former House committee staffer under Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. "But you don't see any coordination across these groups, and you would need to see that to build a winning coalition."

"Given the polarization in Washington, I don't see it being built — to build a majority, you really need coordinated opposition across both parties," says Heaney, who has written extensively about what he calls the "demobilization" of the anti-war movement since Obama won the White House.

"My prediction is that there will be opposition from both political extremes, people who are fairly marginal in American politics, but most in the middle will support the president," he says.

There is at least one wild card, however: House leaders of both parties have designated the Syria vote one of individual conscience, meaning members will not be pressured by the leadership team to vote a certain way.

"When you have a free vote, or a conscience vote, members have to make up their own minds," says Keith Poole, a political scientist who tracks U.S. politics and polarization at the University of Georgia. "This vote will separate the serious from the unserious, and that's why it's so important."

It's a situation where it will be difficult to predict votes based on previous positions, says John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, a progressive organization that advocates for the control of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

"This is a new situation for everyone," Isaacs says. "Congress is like the dog that chases the car — now they've caught the car, what do they do?"

Slim Prospects For No Vote?

On Tuesday, the chances of the no-on-Syria movement appeared to dim as House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor issued strong statements of support for the president's plan to launch a military strike.

And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who along with Obama, opposed the Iraq War in 2002, has continued to stand by the president.

In a letter Tuesday to Nolan and his fellow House Democrats, Pelosi said that a military response to the use of chemical weapons is "in the national interest," and evidence of the use of chemical weapons is "clear, convincing and devastating."

The rallying that's occurring around the president's plan points to the difficulty that unlikely coalitions face when trying to put together a win.

Nolan concedes the uphill nature of his fight. Even he'd bet on the "power of the presidency and the military-industrial influence on Congress" to ultimately extract a yes vote for Obama's plan.

One reason is that the fervor of those opposing war during the Bush administration was all but extinguished by Obama's election, says Heaney, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, where he and a colleague have tracked the modern anti-war movement.

"It's not easy," Nolan says of his anti-war efforts. "The president has a very formidable PR machine."

He also tweaked major media outlets, suggesting that they have failed to balance the voices of advocates for the strike against Syria with contrarians.

"These wars of choice," Nolan said Tuesday in Minnesota, "are bankrupting the country."

He wants Assad's fate to be placed in the hands of the International Criminal Court — despite the fact that it's an alternative that many see as toothless on its own, especially in the face of Syria-like situations. (It took U.S.-led bombings and NATO intervention to bring Bosnian war criminals to trial, for example.)

Still, Nolan argues that courts and the rule of law should be allowed to play their roles despite their flaws.

"It's not easy, but in the progress of humanity, killing begets more killing begets more killing," he said. "I think, in this instance we don't have any friend in this conflict, on either side."

No one has ever doubted Mois Yussuroum's patriotism. As part of the Greek resistance during World War II, he fought Benito Mussolini's fascist army and then the Nazis.

"The other resistance fighters didn't know I was Jewish," he says, since he used the name "Yiorgos Gazis" in case he was captured. "But my superiors did know, and they gave me many responsibilities, including making me a garrison commander."

Now, more than 70 years after Yussuroum and other Greeks fought the German Nazis, Greece confronts the rise of the Golden Dawn party, which espouses a far-right ideology. Its members use Nazi symbolism and slogans and blame "Jewish bankers" for the country's debt crisis. They say they're patriots, not fascists, a claim that makes Yussuroum, a retired dentist who's now 94, cringe.

"Their minds are sick," he says. "They say the Holocaust is a lie, and they don't believe the Germans killed Jews."

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U.S. competitiveness among global economies suffered after the 2008 global economic crisis. Four years after the crisis, the U.S. slipped in the World Economic Forum's annual competitiveness ranking. This year it's back up a bit: The U.S. rose to fifth position overall from seventh last year, in the forum's latest survey, which was released Wednesday.

Here's what the survey says about the U.S., the world's largest economy:

"Overall, many structural features continue to make the US economy extremely productive. U.S. companies are highly sophisticated and innovative, supported by an excellent university system that collaborates admirably with the business sector in R&D. Combined with flexible labor markets and the scale opportunities afforded by the sheer size of its domestic economy — the largest in the world by far — these qualities continue to make the United States very competitive.

"On the other hand, some weaknesses in particular areas remain. Although the assessment of institutions improves this year, the business community continues to be rather critical, with trust in politicians still somewhat weak (50th), concerns about the government's ability to maintain arms-length relationships with the private sector (54th), and a general perception that the government spends its resources relatively wastefully (76th). The macroeconomic environment continues to be the country's greatest area of weakness (117th), although the deficit is narrowing for the first time since the onset of the financial crisis."

Your produce and frozen foods could soon arrive at grocery stores in trucks that release fewer emissions. Researchers are developing a clean technology to keep your food cool while it travels.

Engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working to replace refrigerated trucks' diesel-burning cooling system with fuel cells. These fuel cells mix hydrogen and air to create energy; the byproduct is water. Researcher Kriston Brooks says that means fewer greenhouse gas and particulate emissions than diesel engines.

"From the big picture of how much carbon dioxide we produce and other emissions, it's pretty small. But it's a start," Brooks says.

Brooks says hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as the diesel engines used to cool refrigerated trucks, but they can be expensive. He and his colleagues are working to make them cheaper for companies to use. The cooling system they are currently working on — which includes a fuel cell and cooling container, — costs about $40,000. By comparison, a diesel engine-based cooling system typically runs $20,000-$30,000. But, Brooks says, the price of fuel cells is quickly dropping.

He says people also get a little nervous when they hear the words hydrogen and fuel in the same sentence.

"We are working very hard on this project to include the hydrogen safety panel that [the Department of Energy] has set up to make sure that we're incorporating suggestions that they have so that it can be a safe technology," Brooks says.

Researchers will spend the next year testing the equipment in the lab. Field tests will take place in the summer of 2015, when trucks powered by the fuel cells will be used to transport groceries in California, Texas, and New York. The goal over the 400 hours of logged run time is to assess the fuel cell's durability as it rumbles down the road.

"We wanted to verify that it would work in various climates in different times of year. Certainly it's a lot more rigorous on a fuel cell and a [transport refrigeration unit] during the summertime," Brooks says.

Several grocery facilities participating in the research already power their forklifts with hydrogen fuel cells. Experiments are also being run in buses and cars, and on grid reliability projects. Researchers are also working on powering luggage transportation carts at airports with fuel cells.

The fuel cells, which are about the size of a breadbox, will save about 10 gallons of fuel per day per truck, the researchers say. That may not sound like much, but the hope is that if fuel cells can replace the diesel engines currently used to cool some 300,000 refrigerated trucks on the road in the U.S., the energy savings will soon add up.

This post originally appeared on Earthfix, a joint reporting project between Oregon Public Broadcasting, member station KUOW, KCTS 9 Public Television, Idaho Public Television, Northwest Public Radio and Southern Oregon Public Television.