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Saudis want aid if world cuts oil use

Let’s call it The Audacity of hOPEC.  AP reported last week: Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations — demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels. That campaign comes despite an […]

Murkowski praises Kerry-Boxer

The climate train is leaving the station.  It is becoming increasingly likely Congress will pass a comprehensive energy bill that includes a shrinking cap and a rising carbon price (with a price collar).   Key swing Senators are moving away from obstructionism toward a bipartisan deal.  Those who stand on the sidelines not only risk ending […]

Brazil offer to reduce deforestation by 80%

This is really the first year since the launch in 2006 that the blog seems appropriately named!   AFP reports: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Tuesday he will offer to reduce the pace of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest by 80 percent by 2020 when he attends December’s global climate talks in Copenhagen. […]

BBC misses hottest decade on record

Existential question of the day:  How can Paul Hudson’s byline be “Climate correspondent, BBC News” when his ‘reporting‘ doesn’t correspond to the climate, which continues to warm? It is tiresome debunking yet another poor researched article by a media outlet that has historically had a great deal of credibility [see “NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling […]

NASA reports hottest June to September on Record

Fast on the heels of the second warmest August on record and warmest June-July-August for the oceans, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that this was the second hottest September on record. Unlike NOAA, which will announce its September global analysis in a few days, NASA just quietly updates its data set (here).  So […]

Friday music blogging: The Avett Brothers

I was bummed to miss FMBing last week, because last Tuesday marked one of the most anticipated events of the year for me: the release of The Avett Brothers’ new album I & Love & You. I FMBd the Avetts almost two years ago, and my gushing then still applies. They play a brand of […]

The future of storytelling?

Recently, I had the good fortune to encounter some folks who may well be the next generation of great environmental storytellers: Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele. They’re producing short multimedia pieces that are just riveting. My favorite is a five minute story about the ways that climate change is affecting reindeer herders in Norway, but there are other gems too […]

Transgressing identified and quantified planetary boundaries

Apparently, we’ve punched through three of those boundaries already, two of them big time. See here. You can read the entire paper in the journal Nature here. Now, largely because of a rapidly growing reliance on fossil fuels and industrialized forms of agriculture, human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that […]

Climate Progress is second ranked science blog

*third if you count anti-scientific websites like WattsUpWithThat, as Wikio does. But should I put their little widget near the top of CP as Watts does?  It would, of course, say ‘3′ on it (for now). I had not heard of these Wikio rankings, but I periodically check WattsUpWithThat for the latest in denier talking […]

Browner says bill without carbon cap would be a “big mistake”

At today’s Clean Energy Economy Forum, Carol Browner, Director of White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, said that it would be a “big mistake” if Congress passed a clean energy bill without a cap on emissions. Browner made clear that the country needs a comprehensive bill that creates a carbon market to […]