Photo: The White HouseIn a newly released interview, President Obama told Rolling Stone magazine that he wants to make energy and climate "one of my top priorities next year," but that "we may end up having to do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive legislation." Approached with resolve and creativity, this chunk approach has the potential to produce near and mid-term gains equal to or even surpassing those achieved by comprehensive climate legislation. Indeed, as World Resources Institute noted in a recent study, a combination of EPA regulation and state action can reduce emissions somewhere between …

We need a new face in the Oval Office.Photo: The White HouseI confess that when I initially heard of it, I thought Bill McKibben's drive to return solar panels to the White House was essentially a waste of time: of all the things to ask the president, it seemed like the smallest, most insignificant, and easiest. It certainly wouldn’t solve the climate crisis. And it would allow President Obama to cloak himself in a symbolic green action that let him cover a rapidly worsening environmental record. I realize now that its very simplicity made the solar panels a masterstroke that …

The world's breakfast eaters are about to get a hot, steaming serving of climate change with their bagels and croissants. In response to the climate change-fueled fires sweeping the Russian bread basket, Russia on Thursday banned grain exports, driving global prices to $7.83 a bushel, almost double their June low. This is the real climate change tax -- higher food prices, higher air conditioning bills, skyrocketing firefighting expenses, and it's way more costly than the relatively modest investments it will take to reduce the climate pollution exacerbating these global natural disasters. This isn't just a one-off effect. A team led …

Environmentalists and their allies have expressed “disappointment” at the failure of the Senate to cap carbon pollution this year. A few bold voices have even suggested, gingerly, that President Obama might bear just a teensy bit of responsibility for this failure by not aggressively lobbying the Senate to take action or launching a consistent public campaign for action. Meanwhile, the White House isn't shying from putting the blame squarely on environmentalists. "They didn't deliver a single Republican," a White House official told Politico, speaking about environmental groups. "They spent like $100 million and they weren't able to get a single …

I’ve always loved Amanda Little’s writing – and her news-breaking, hard-hitting interviews. But her latest incarnation as a “pro-drilling environmentalist,” while clearly well-meaning, is so divorced from the economic and political reality of oil that it deserves an open plea to escape what is clearly too much time spent in the barrel of Big Oil’s echo chamber. After all, to hear Amanda tell it, you’d think the folks at the Power Shift youth climate conference should be screaming “Drill Here, Drill Now” as their new green rallying cry – and that’s a sad future indeed for the environmental movement.   …

This post was co-authored by Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. As oil and gas continue to spew out of a broken pipe at the BP spill site in the Gulf of Mexico, those of us who rode on the health care reform bandwagon have to wonder if we should have tackled energy and climate change first.  Lack of access to health care is a moral imperative - but inadequate health care is responsible for only a small fraction of the unnecessary loss of life that occurs every year in this country.  If the …

This post was co-authored by Andrew Stevenson of Resources for the Future and Climate Advisers. The EPA analysis of the American Power Act shines a light on a key fact about climate policy: strong rainforest protections, especially in the short run, are essential to keeping costs low and emissions goals strong. The analysis finds that excluding rainforest offsets from APA would increase emissions allowance prices 23 percent. Excluding international offsets entirely would increase the cost to households a whopping 31 to 114 percent. That’s no surprise: stopping rainforests from going up in smoke is one of the most affordable ways …

UPDATE: Thousands more people are now being employed in the "restoration economy" to clean up the oil spill. Jobs are just one more reason why we need a national effort to restore the Gulf ecosystem. There's a new economy springing up around the country -- but it's operating almost entirely in secret. It's called "the restoration economy" and it's remaking America's landscape while putting millions of people to work. This economy is devoted to restoring what's been lost: degraded forests, watersheds, oceans, cities, communities, buildings, transit -- and it's the product of a major turning point in our history that's …

To offshore drilling advocates, the oil-soaked birds washing up on the Gulf shore are a regrettable sacrifice in our pursuit of a higher calling: energy independence. Oil is a nasty business, they admit, but to them, offshore drilling is better than continuing to buy our oil from hostile countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. They imply that we have a choice between dirty bombs and dirty oil. Nothing could be further from the truth: offshore drilling has never and will never make us less reliant on Saudis, Iranians, or Venezuelans. Whether we like it or not, oil from those …

An endangered unicorn protected by one of the imaginary offsets created if Kerry-Graham-Lieberman raids funds for tropical rainforests.In the ongoing negotiations over the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill, different polluters are clamoring for cash to compensate them for not fouling the atmosphere quite so much. One of their targets: the legislation's set-aside funds for reducing tropical deforestation, which is responsible for at least 15 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions (more than all the cars, trucks, ships, and planes in the world). Outside of all the myriad benefits of protecting tropical rainforests for the planet, raiding this "Climate Forest Fund" seriously threatens the …