Latest Articles
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Conservativeclimate.org lauds Reagan as climate hero
Courtesy Reagan Library via Wikimedia Commons“While liberals will never admit it, Ronald Reagan was one of our nation’s greatest climate champions,” argues the new site Conservativeclimate.org, a joint project of ConservAmerica and Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP). It’s clear that no freedom-hating liberal graphic designers were involved in the creation of the site. David Jenkins, […]
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Obama's Oil Plan: Something For Nothing? Or Nothing For Something?
Forgive me if my Outrage-O-Meter registers low today despite the President’s coastal drilling announcement. Candidate Obama announced his willingness to compromise on coastal drilling quite dramatically during the campaign. And the Senate climate bill talks have been premised on expanded coastal drilling ever since last year’s New York Times op-ed from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) […]
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A Representative Senate?
When I consider the hurdles to reforming state or federal constitutions, I’m reminded of the tale about the lost traveler who called out for directions to a farmer in a field. “If I were going there,” the farmer eventually hollered back, “I wouldn’t start from here.” Richard Rosenfeld, in Harper’s writes of how deeply embedded […]
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Energy Independence Through Greater Addiction
According to President Obama, the only path to energy independence is greater addiction! Or something: Reversing a ban on oil drilling off most U.S. shores, President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced an expansive new policy that could put oil and natural gas platforms in waters along the southern Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico […]
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Scrounging for a green angle to the Large Hadron Collider experiment
Courtesy SBARTSTV via Youtube.Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, yesterday succeeded in smashing subatomic particles together at 99 percent of the speed of light, which is more than three times the highest levels previously recorded. This is a big freaking deal that could revolutionize the study of particle physics, according to people […]
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Post-truth politics
During this strange lull in the (endless) development of the federal climate bill, I’ve been mulling over a few political notions. First: voters don’t generally know much about politics or policy. They have things they do know a lot about (American Idol, baseball teams, accounting software, scrapbooking), but for most voters, politics and policy aren’t […]
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Understanding the allure of ‘drill baby drill’
President Obama’s decision to expand offshore drilling leases seems to affirm the power that the “drill baby drill” battle cry holds in the American energy conversation. Turns out a short, simple, much-repeated slogan holds more currency than detailed policy arguments from clean-energy advocates. I want to tease out a connection between “drill baby drill” and […]
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Is Obama’s offshore drilling plan winning any GOP votes?
The consensus, among People on the Internet anyway, is that Obama’s far-reaching offshore drilling expansion is a bid to win Republican support for clean-energy legislation. More offshore drilling is a major Republican energy priority, after all. So how are GOP leaders responding? House leaders John Boehner and Mike Pence attack the plan as a job-killing […]
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House of Commons exonerates Phil Jones
We believe that the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced…. In the context of the sharing of data and methodologies, we consider that Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community…. Likewise the evidence that we have seen does […]
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Pre-order my new book, "Straight Up"
Anyone who has specific ideas for marketing the book or knows someone who might need review copy should email me at the address here. My new book doesn’t come out until the week of April 19th. But you can pre-order it on Amazon.com (click here). You know you want to after getting all these Climate Progress posts […]