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Copenhagen 101: The essentials on the climate talks

Welcome! It’s not too late to get up to speed on the climate-change jamboree that begins Dec. 7. Here’s a short primer. What is this Copenhagen thing? It’s a gathering of negotiators from every United Nations member country who will try to come up with a plan to protect the world from catastrophic climate change. […]

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

The following is a Plan B Update by my colleague Janet Larsen, the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute, about the connection between the increase of wildfires and rising temperature. Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009, […]

A Penny Saved Is…

California is at it again. State regulators just set energy efficiency standards for new TVs, mostly the big flat panel models that gulp kilowatts. As a result, consumers will save about $8 billion in the next decade in the form of lower electricity bills and carbon pollution will drop equal to removing 100,000 cars from […]

The Climate Post: You heard it here first — Copenhagen a success

First things first: A week of anticlimaxes saw President Barack Obama conducting a less-than-exuberant swing through China, the international community conceding a binding climate treaty at the COP-15 negotiations in Copenhagen, and U.S. lawmakers postponing to the spring of 2010 consideration of climate policy — even as talk of a legislative “plan B” surfaced. A […]

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

Paul Bakus in a ruined pumpkin patch.Photo: Wonk Room Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. Our increasingly extreme climate is devastating American agriculture. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, strengthened by global warming, caused $1.6 billion in agriculture damage in Louisiana alone. Now it appears that a Thanksgiving mainstay — pumpkin pie — is next on the global […]

A tasting of four meatless “turkeys” for the holiday table

Can such a “turkey” make your holiday feast soar?Photo courtesy of Jason HoustonGiven the ire I provoked in last year’s turkey column, it’s high time that this Grist columnist acknowledges that: A. Meat-centric holidays such as Thanksgiving can be challenging for vegetarians and evoke all kinds of emotions — including, but not limited to, extreme […]

If Cousteau went to Copenhagen

As we grapple with global warming, ocean acidification, and the possibility that life on earth really is doomed, it is with considerable chagrin that we recall how Jacques Cousteau sounded the general alarm thirty years ago. The celebrated underwater filmmaker, co-inventor of scuba diving, television star, sage of the environmental movement, and bon vivant died […]

NYT: U.S. Chamber has not expressed support for any proposals to cap emissions

John Broder has an illuminating story in today’s New York Times, “Storm Over the Chamber” discussing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s climate crisis and how Thomas Donohue’s style exacerbates it. Tellingly, the story begins with an anecdote that suggests where the U.S. Chamber gets its tin ear. BACK in the 1990s when Thomas J. Donohue […]

API and ACCCE spend the big bucks

Coal companies and the nation’s biggest railroad association accounted for 50 percent of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity’s (ACCCE) $47 million budget in 2008, according to ACCCE’s tax return, E&E News reported on Wednesday. Yowza! Arch Coal, Peabody, and Consol each put in $5 million; Foundation Coal put in just $3 million. Meanwhile, […]

Reflecting on the lameness of my profession

For the past few weeks there has been the appearance of a flood of news about the Copenhagen climate talks and the clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate. Standing in that flood it’s easy to get caught up in the atmospherics of frantic action and constant crisis. But step out for a while and […]