Cross-posted with The Nation. Look out, Minneapolis and Portland. Long Beach is making its move, aiming to surpass you as America's Most Bike Friendly City. Does that sound odd for a city whose chief claim to environmental fame has been its massively polluting port and offshore oil facilities -- a city that, like the rest of Southern California, has long been in thrall of the car? Bike racks in Long Beach help attract customers to local businesses.Photo: Umberto Brayj Well, all that's changing, and the change is coming from the top. Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, who says he tries …

Sir Richard Branson in his WhiteKnightTwo aircraft.Photo: Dave Malkoff This story has been corrected and updated since its original publication. See below for details. Here's a new idea for how to deal with climate deniers: Blast them into space. The proposal came yesterday during a freewheeling panel discussion among California Gov. Jerry Brown, Virgin Group Chair Sir Richard Branson, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chair Rajendra Pachauri. Kicking off a conference on "Extreme Climate Risks and California's Future" held at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Brown pledged to protect his state from the "huge problems" posed …

The Emerald City -- green in more ways than one. This post is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard's new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. If you're a Seattleite, come meet Hertsgaard at a Grist Happy Hour and see him talk about the book at Town Hall Seattle on Feb. 3, 2011. As a father living in the era of global warming, I have my good days and my bad days. The bad days you can probably imagine. Writing this book has taught me more than I'd like to know about our climate dilemma: about how drastically …

Cross-posted from The Nation.Students in Portugal.Photo: 350.org From the standpoint of human survival, it makes no sense: Our media and political systems are losing focus on climate change long before the problem is solved -- indeed, while it manifestly continues to get worse. You can help change that on Oct. 10. That's the date of a Global Work Party intended to celebrate climate solutions and press governments for change. Some 4,483 actions (and counting) are planned in 174 countries, says Jamie Henn of 350.org, one of the groups coordinating the event. "To build a grassroots movement that can challenge Big …

This article is adapted from Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, which will be published in January 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It first appeared on Huffington Post. My daughter Chiara, age five, is a member. So is my goddaughter Emily, age twenty-two. So are the thousands of Pakistani children now suffering after record monsoon rains left 20 percent of their country -- an area the size of Great Britain -- underwater. In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988 belongs to what I call Generation Hot. This generation includes some two billion young …

We can’t all go cold turkey.This article is part of a special issue of The Nation magazine about green energy, "Freedom From Oil."  PORT SULPHUR, La. -- Captain Pete, as everyone in town calls him, has been an oysterman nearly his entire life. He started as a boy, learning the trade from his father, who had learned it from his father. Working fourteen-hour days from leased oyster beds in Barataria Bay, 40 miles south of New Orleans, Captain Pete's family supplied the city's premier vendor, P&J Oyster Company. When P&J closed its doors on June 10, it was front-page news …

John Williams has been making wine in California's Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will affect Napa's world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted. "You know, I've been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we need to keep this issue in perspective," he told me. "When I hear about global warming in the news, I hear that it's going to melt the Arctic, inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people, spread tropical diseases and …

COPENHAGEN -- The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao will meet one-on-one with President Barack Obama soon in Copenhagen to try to reach agreement on a new international climate treaty, according to He Yafei, the vice chairman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. "Yes, I believe so," responded He in the hallways of Copenhagen's Bella Center late this afternoon, when he was asked if Wen and Obama, the heads of government of the world's two climate superpowers, would meet to resolve outstanding differences. Wen, whose country is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases on an annual basis, arrived in Copenhagen yesterday for …

Cross-posted from The Nation. Big news from Copenhagen today, where the divide between big emitters and at-risk nations deepened, threatening the prospects of reaching a climate deal for President Obama and other heads of state to sign when they arrive at the summit next week. In a day of major developments, the Alliance of Small Island Nations put forth a radically tougher proposal for confronting climate change than the U.S., China and other major emitters favor. The AOSIS proposal, which calls for temperature rise not to exceed 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, ran counter to a separate text released …

"Oh, shit."They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment -- an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, ground-breaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered Sept. 22 at the U.N. Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment.  It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known …