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Not So Starry-Eyed Anymore

Oh why can’t you see It’s my life that’s at stake When you sell out our world You are stealing my future. Can you look in my eyes As you gamble our lives? When will you stop the lies So that we can survive? If you represent me Not the fossil fuel industry You must […]

One Year After BP Oil Spill: Communities Lead While Congress Fails

An urban garden in New Orleans.One year ago today, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling unit exploded in the Gulf of Mexico — a catastrophe that most Americans will never forget. 11 people lost their lives. According to Good, roughly 5 million barrels of oil gushed uncontrollably into the Gulf – eventually covering more than […]

Silver Buckshot

Wars in the Middle East and oil rig blowouts in the Gulf have given us gasoline in the range of $4 to $5/gallon. Growing concerns over asthma-inducing pollution from coal fired power plants, not to mention mercury pollution in food supplies and greenhouse gas emissions, have resulted in the termination of numerous coal projects and […]

Obama hosts Facebook town hall, because what could go wrong when you combine politics and Facebook?

Listen up, Facebook nation: Obama would like you to stop friending and unfriending each other for a second and pay attention. He's hosting a Facebook town hall today at 4:45 Eastern, in order to, you know, get down verbally with the youth. The subject is "Shared Responsibility and Shared Prosperity," which sounds like a great excuse to bring up questions about energy policy, sustainability, and the environment.

This Earth Week: Taking America Back From the Polluters

Last weekend, I was proud to join the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson as a keynote speaker at Power Shift 2011. There was an incredible energy; more than 10,000 young leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., to work towards two common goals – a cleaner future and a just […]

Congress Passes a Budget That Doesn't Invest Enought in International Efforts to Curb Global Warming

The long drama of whether or not the US Congress would invest in international efforts to curb global warming pollution or gut these investments is finally over – at least for the rest of this fiscal year.  Last week President Obama signed into law a budget for the rest of this fiscal year (fiscal year […]

Confessions of an international climate advocate at Powershift

I’ve just walked away from thousands of students who have taken to the streets of DC to tell the White House, dirty energy polluters, and Congress that they won’t rest until their vision of a clean energy future is realized.  It was a strange feeling, really, to walk away from all the energy and excitement […]

Coal Ash Continues to Poison Americans

This week, some of them traveled to Washington to tell their stories Mike Eslinger lives near a coal ash waste dump in Sullivan, Indiana. On some days the wind gets the ash blowing around his house so much that he cannot let his two children play outside. Curt Haven lives only 100 feet away from […]

Major victory for clean air

Earlier today the Board of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) voted to approve a settlement that provides for the single largest coal retirement announcement in the nation’s history. The settlement requires the permanent retirement of 18 coal units, totaling 2,700-megawatts of TVA’s coal fleet.  In addition, it requires the retirement or clean up of an […]

Gambling when we don’t have to

Two weeks ago, I visited the office of a friend of mine, a partner at a top cleantech Silicon Valley law firm. He and I shared a concern about the increasingly hostile, anti-clean-energy propaganda from dirty-energy-funded critics who are trying to position clean energy as expensive, subsidy-dependent, and “not ready.” The good news, my friend […]