In the bowels of one of the House of Representatives office buildings sits the crown jewel of Nancy Pelosi’s Green the Capitol initiative. It’s a big green piece of machinery known as a waste pulper. It extracts water from discarded food, cardboard, and other organic waste. Should you take a wrong turn from the basement cafeteria and end up on the loading docks, you can watch it do its magic, spitting out a kind of rancid confetti. The confetti will be shipped away and left to compost. In 90 days, you should have topsoil.

It’s a pretty neat machine, and it is featured on a tour conducted by Campus Progress, a liberal activist group, highlighting the efforts to make the House of Representatives the “first carbon-neutral legislative body in the world.” But the waste pulper is just the beginning. The House is doing everything from selling only fair-trade coffee in its cafeteria, to purchasing carbon offsets for the Capitol power plant, to using carpeting and paint made of low-volatility organic compounds. In fact, hundreds of changes are under way.

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This is all overseen by the House’s Green the Capitol office, which is staffed mostly by eager young Ivy League grads billing themselves as “sustainability experts,” according to one of the business cards being handed out. The most notable member of the Green the Capitol office is one Allison Rogers. Ms. Rogers does her darnedest to appear thoroughly businesslike in her official portrait, but the Harvard grad is probably best known for an extracurricular achievement: Miss Rhode Island 2006.

It seems only natural that climate change is the 21st-century equivalent of “world peace” among the pageant set. Rogers used her reign to promote global-warming awareness. As a beauty queen, she made a point of walking the entire length of every parade she appeared in, because riding in the back of convertibles isn’t terribly fuel efficient.

As you might expect, she gives a competent and chipper presentation prior to leading the public tour into the basement to look at the waste pulper and the House cafeteria’s “greenovation.” Unfortunately, under the impression that she’s speaking to an entirely friendly audience, she reveals herself to be uncomfortably close to a nonfiction version of Tracy Flick.

At one point she mentions that she majored in religion at Harvard, and her view of environmentalism proves to be awfully dogmatic. When asked whether she has experienced any resistance to the sweeping environmental overhaul of the House, she declines to go into specifics, but her answer is revealing nonetheless. “The naysayers are putting up roadblocks, whether it’s personal or emotional issues you’re working out,” she says.

Come again? So if you work for a congressman and your job is reading legislation in ten-point type all day, and you object to some do-gooder replacing your trusty incandescent desk light with one of the 10,000 eyestrain-inducing compact fluorescent lights Green the Capitol has already installed, well — get thee to a therapist!

At one point during the Q&A, a self-identified congressional staffer spouts a litany of environmentally unsound practices she has witnessed among her colleagues, from leaving office lights on at night to giving members plastic water bottles for use in committee hearings. The whole thing has the air of a precocious child demanding that the neighborhood association fine Mom and Dad for violating the housing development’s codes, covenants, and restrictions. Rogers takes notes and puts on her Serious Concern face.

Still, Rogers insists that the mandate for making the House of Representatives carbon-neutral is there — largely because the Speaker of the House said it is. “We need to make sure the House is walking the talk before I feel comfortable asking the American people [to make environmental changes],” Rogers says, recounting what Pelosi told her. Of course, the House isn’t paying for all these changes — American taxpayers are. In effect, what Pelosi is saying is: I want to spend your tax money to show you that you need to spend money we haven’t already taken from you.