Latest Articles

New allies in fight against Obama’s pesticide lobbyist nominee

I’m sure many of you have seen the various petitions zipping around the Internet encouraging opposition to President Obama’s nomination of pesticide lobbyist Islam “Isi” Siddiqui to the Office of the United State’s Trade Representative. The argument against him goes something like this: The White House has nominated Mr. Siddiqui for the position of chief […]

Three models of social change

Can we change fast enough? When thinking about the enormous need for social change as we attempt to move the world economy onto a sustainable path, I find it useful to look at various models of change. Three stand out. One is the catastrophic event model, which I call the Pearl Harbor model, where a […]

Simple people

I don’t dislike No Impact Man. He is more intentionally political than his detractors portray him to be, and I think his yearlong stunt of living without toilet paper in NYC has been eye-opening for a lot of people, and amusing for many others. I admit that the “happy green” genre of books that are […]

El Niño-driven sea surface temperatures are soaring.

Last week I noted that the weak El Niño appears to be strengthening, as expected, so record temperatures will continue. The warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific is typically used to define an El Niño — sustained postive sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific […]

Climate change and God

There’s a great new book out called How the West Was Warmed (www.howthewestwaswarmed.com), about responding to climate change in the Rockies. It’s got intros and conclusions from two of the nation’s leading implementers/rock stars of the new green economy–Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. It also offers readers a candy store […]

One year after his election, Obama on verge of audaciously fulfilling his promise as the green FDR

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change then all presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so. In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in the year since he […]

Jon Tester (D-Mont.)

Jon TesterThe junior senator from Montana, Jon Tester has stayed relatively quiet on climate legislation and thus remains in the “fence-sitter” category. In late October, Tester expressed interest in Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-Wash.) climate bill, which thus far hasn’t gotten any traction in the Senate: “I’d like to see what Maria’s got. I’m not real […]

Geoengineering: Plan B for when Copenhagen fails? eek!

Some scary prospects of where people are turning – geoengineering, the false solution that once seemed like science fiction, is actually being taken seriously. Seriously? Diana Bronson, ETC Group We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. – Albert Einstein As global climate negotiations in Barcelona enter into […]

Copenhagen reality check: Gov’ts concede new climate treaty unlikely until 2010

Now it’s out in the open. Key government leaders and U.N. officials are finally, publicly admitting what they have long privately believed: there is no chance of concluding a new climate treaty in Copenhagen next month. For a full two years the world has been committed to finalizing a new agreement to succeed the present […]

Africa returns to Barcelona talks, while U.S. resists giving up the numbers

The African nations that walked out of the climate negotiations on Monday, just hours after the Barcelona meeting started, returned late yesterday. The point of the day-long demonstration was made. Delegates of the 192 nations gathered here to make significant progress on a new climate treaty next month in Copenhagen are frustrated, terribly frustrated with […]