Nearly 500 corporate leaders and institutional investors representing $20 trillion in capital met at the United Nations Thursday to discuss the risks and opportunities presented by climate change. The gathering called itself the largest ever meeting of investment types specifically convened to discuss climate change. Attendees mused about how they could continue to make money in a climate-changed future, set a price for carbon that wouldn't hurt them financially, pressure the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to endorse disclosing climate-related risks, and prompt the United States to adopt legislation slashing its greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 90 percent from 1990 …

Prince Charles warned in a speech on Thursday that if a "courageous and revolutionary" approach to tackling climate change is not undertaken, "the result will be catastrophe for all of us but with the poorest in our world hit hardest of all. In this sense it is surely comparable to war." Also this week, Virgin Group big gun Richard Branson suggested at a United Nations conference that an "environmental war room" be set up to combine "entrepreneurial muscle, the best possible data, and the power to mobilize resources and influence policy." OK, so we're at war with the climate; the …

When will the media stop calling McCain a straight-talker and realize he is a pathological doubletalker? I realize the "L" word is frowned upon in politics, so instead of using that word, which, in any case, doesn't do justice to the full range of doubletalk in the political arena -- let's just imagine there is an agreed-upon objective scale from 1 to 10 of veracity (with 5 being half-true) that goes something like this: (10) Fred Thompson, December 2007: "I'm not particularly interested in running for president." (9) Bush, May 2000: "I think we agree, the past is over." (8) …

Planktos, the company that proposed fending off global warming by seeding the ocean with iron dust, has failed to get enough funding to go forward with planned tests. Under the Planktos business plan, iron fertilization would encourage phytoplankton blooms, which would suck up extra CO2, allowing the company to sell carbon offsets. But it was not to be: According to the Planktos website, "A highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the environmental world." We can just see 'em, shaking their iron fists at us.

It is now less than four weeks until the EPA announces its decision on whether to change current national standards for ozone or smog. And things are getting very interesting behind the scenes. Officially, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget website, the EPA has not yet transmitted its plan to the White House for review. The truth is, the EPA is obviously being picked at by the OMB already. The Bush administration is just trying to keep the details of this matter as secret as possible. (Some business lobbyists have heard that the EPA is pushing …

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. ----- The energy bill passed by Congress last December originally contained a beneficial, if temporary, set of financial incentives to spur the growth of renewable energy technologies in the United States. The bill included a renewable energy portfolio standard (RPS) that would require states to acquire part of their electric power from renewable resources. The RPS would have guaranteed a market for these technologies -- one of the ways to help a new industry establish a foothold in the economy. The energy bill …

This is the second in a series; the first is here. We've covered two reasons Environmental Defense is pushing for passage of climate legislation in 2008 -- the politics will be very much the same in 2009, and we don't want to gamble away a good bill on the chance of a perfect one someday. Today I'll look at a third reason: The price of waiting, even a year or two, is simply too high. Carbon dioxide concentrations are higher today than they've been in 650,000 years, and our emissions rate is increasing. It's crucial that we start aggressively cutting …

General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz is not only cranky, but willfully ignorant: D Magazine reports that Lutz declared to journalists that global warming is a "total crock of shit."

The following is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. ----- There are moments when a choice of pathways shapes the future -- and makes success either feasible or impossible. In light of the fact that all of the remaining leading presidential candidates call for some kind of action on global warming, and the Lieberman-Warner bill is already working its way through the Senate, almost everyone recognizes that sometime in the next few years the United States will limit the amount of global warming pollution that our transportation system, power plants, factories, and other sources …