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Turns out it’s high

Reducing our contribution to global warming may be expensive. Global warming itself, however, is likely to be much more expensive.

A quick update

Posting from me will continue to be light for a few days, but I have some announcements of interest.

New climate change bill circulating the Hill

Via The Hill: Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is floating climate-change legislation on Capitol Hill that he plans to introduce soon. A draft version of the bill has been circulated to several Senate offices and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) will release an analysis of the proposal Thursday, according to Bill Wicker, press secretary for the […]

Green issues will be in the spotlight

The 2008 Democratic Convention will be held in Denver, Colorado. The New York Times wonders if this is a diss to the Big Apple, but I'm celebrating. Holding the Olympics of politics in the West means a spotlight on green issues that have recently helped turned Colorado blue.

Al Gore’s movie booted by wacky school board

Congrats to Seattle P-I enviro reporters Robert McClure and Lisa Stiffler for unearthing the funniest story I’ve read in a good long while. Here’s the nut: The school board in Federal Way, a southern exurb of Seattle, just put a "moratorium" on showings of An Inconvenient Truth, based largely on the complaints of one parent, […]

Year of the Draggin’

China had a cruddy eco-year, still sees big picture more clearly than the U.S. In China, officials are assessing their 2006 eco-successes. The short version: there were none. The somewhat longer version: the country saw a pollution-related accident roughly every two days. Officials got 600,000 environmental complaints, 30 percent more than in 2005. Goals to […]

All Heil Breaks Loose

Six decades after World War II, Nazi U-boat poses threat to Norway What’s scarier than a Nazi U-boat slinking along your shores? A Nazi U-boat sunk along your shores, with 65 tons of mercury still inside. In coastal Norway, residents are keeping a wary eye on a 62-year-old casualty of war that could pose a […]

Report casts doubt

A new report questions whether the 358 U.S. cities that pledged to meet Kyoto's targets will be successful. That's a fine question, but it's perhaps easy to misconstrue as an implicit criticism that the promises were meaningless.

There is every reason to think that the cities can meet the targets. (And, heck, the pledge is only 18 months old!) Portland, in fact, is already well on its way.

What the report should serve to highlight is this:

Not what it sounds like

From TP: Former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was named the ranking member of the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee yesterday. "The Democrats in the Senate have signaled they’re going to make climate change a big issue," said Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "We need to have […]

We will wonk you

DR: You’re a big supporter of hydrogen, which is a storage medium for electrical energy. Moving our transportation infrastructure to hydrogen means offloading the power burden from oil and liquid fuels to electricity sources — predominantly natural gas and coal. How is that an environmental gain, to go from oil to coal? TT: It isn’t, […]