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Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets
Todd SternAs Dave lamented last week, most of the predicting and posturing preceding the Copenhagen climate talks amounts to little more than Some Person Guessing. You might consider the weekend news from the UK Observer — which reported the Obama administration’s intention to set a provisional target for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — to be more […]
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Treat energy efficiency like a utility
With David Leonhardt’s piece on a new weatherization program/jobs bill nicknamed “Cash for Caulkers” generating buzz, as well as questions, it seemed a good time to resurrect a post I wrote about a year ago on the general subject of energy efficiency improvement. I had been inspired by a lengthy Grist post on a post-carbon […]
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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
If the Obama administration is unwilling or unable to stop the massive environmental destruction of historic mountain ranges and essential drinking water for a relatively tiny amount of coal, can we honestly believe they will be able to phase out coal emissions at the level necessary to stop climate change? –Dr. James […]
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Environmental education in Guinea Bissau
The Presidential Palace. The Presidential Palace in Guinea Bissau lies derelict and burnt out. You can walk amongst the shards of broken crockery, blackened banisters, and singed carpets. Its empty rooms are a fitting metaphor for this failing state. Teachers in the public sector have not been paid in years. Portuguese, the official language, is […]
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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing — use nothing!
Courtesy AdbustersFor twenty years, the people behind Buy Nothing Day have been pleading with consumers to avoid the frenzy inherent in “Black Friday,” the no-holds-barred shop-o-rama that comes the day after Thanksgiving. This year, they’re ramping things up and calling for an all-out Wildcat Strike against the “capitalist consumption machine.” Socialists, you say? No, just […]
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AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated"
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before. […]
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In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”
A bunch of illegally hacked UK e-mails storm the anti-scientific side of the blogosphere at the same time as an uber-extreme weather event hits Britain. I guess when it rains, it pours — literally: Forecasters said the rainfall was unprecedented. Britain’s Meteorological Office said a record 12.3 inches of rain fell in 24 hours […]
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Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”
I had previously blogged on the anti-mature (ante-mature?) antics of the Senator from Oklahoma (see Sen. Inhofe explains he’s going to Copenhagen so that when Sen. Kerry says “Yes. We’re going to pass a global warming bill” then “I will be able to stand up and say, ‘No, it’s over. Get a life. You lost. […]
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Toward a medically defensible energy policy
Pollution from coal is not only unhealthy for the environment — it also hurts the human body and contributes to four of the five leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory disease. So concludes a new assessment of coal’s health effects from Physicians for Social Responsibility. Titled “Coal’s […]
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Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail
The answer to the question “where the heck is global warming?” is “precisely where you would expect,” as we will see. Wired has done some excellent reporting on one of the supposed start-dumping-your-clean-energy-stocks e-mails — the one by Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in […]
