Latest Articles

Arctic sea ice is refreezing quite slowly. Go figure!

When records were being set for loss of summer Arctic sea ice area (2007) and sea ice volume (2008), the deniers spent all their time talking about how quickly the ice refroze in the ensuing months.  Now, they are strangely quiet on the remarkably slow refreezing we’re seeing. Why the slow refreezing this year?  I’ll […]

Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) [UPDATED]

Ben Nelson Sen. Ben Nelson doesn’t believe a cap-and-trade climate bill can pass Congress this session, he said on Oct. 30 — and he doesn’t intend to do anything to help it. “I haven’t been able to sell that argument to my farmers, and I don’t think they’re going to buy it from anybody else,” […]

Washington governor isn’t falling for big geoengineering fixes

There is no silver bullet. There is only golden buckshot. –Washington Governor Christine Gregoire on her all-hands-on-deck cleantech philosophy, speaking at the Cleantech Open‘s Pacific Northwest Regional Awards Gala Oct. 29. She was quoting Blue Marble Energy CEO Kelly Ogilvie.

Polluted Southern communities ask EPA to address environmental injustice

Environmental justice leaders representing more than a dozen polluted communities from six Southern states met with Environmental Protection Agency leaders this week and asked them to take action to better protect the health of low-income communities and communities of color.

The long and wind-powered road

The Danes have an enduring relationship with wind. This is symbolized by the big, honking wind turbine that looms like a bird of prey over the parking lot outside the Bella Center, the venue for the U.N. Climate Change Conference Denmark is hosting in December. It was a Dane, physicist H.C. Oersted, who discovered electrical […]

2009 polar melt season: The stats are in

The 2009 ice melt season has just been completed at the northern polar cap, and observations confirm that the decay of the arctic ocean ice cover is continuing a steady decline.

Grass people invade Congress as Senate hearings wrap up

The third and final day of the hearings on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill wrapped up in the Senate Environment and Public Works committee today. We’ve been collecting the best reactions an d analysis on our aggregation page. Here’s a quick rundown of where things stand. The wrap: Really, not much exciting news came out of […]

Energy Trust and the Big Hope

If you’re like me, and spend a lot of the day drinking coffee and getting increasingly paranoid with the creeping suspicion that solving climate may not be possible, it’s good when you find glimmers of hope in the wreckage. One of those glimmers (actually more like a tractor beam) is called Energy Trust, an organization […]

Disappearing beaches in Gambia

Hotel managers in Gambia say without the beach the tourists will not come. But the beach in front of the country’s two landmark hotels is disappearing pretty fast. It is a very serious state of affairs for a country that derives a major percentage of its income from tourism. Beach erosion is clearly visible at […]

University of Kentucky dorm renamed Wildcat Coal Lodge despite student protests

In a throwback to 19th century backroom deal making, University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and several members of the UKY Board of Trustees refused to consider any formal student statements this week during their meeting to barter away the name of a Wildcat basketball dorm for Big Coal donations, and then fled […]