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Better ways to spend $1 million on plastics

The American Chemistry Council will spend more than $1 million to fight a 20-cent fee on plastic shopping bags in Seattle, hoping voters reject the proposal in August. Or send the Bag Monster and all his friends to Copenhagen this December!Photo by Bag Monster via FlickrIf it seems absurd to spend a cool mill defending […]

USDA study finds that climate bill will benefit farmers

Photo: Dog CompanyThe climate and energy legislation that the House passed in June would increase revenues for farmers, according to a preliminary analysis released by the United States Department of Agriculture on Wednesday. The study contradicts claims from some major agriculture groups that the bill would be economically catastrophic for farmers. Instead, the study predicts […]

Terrorism laws are wrongly being used to round up eco-activists, says author Dean Kuipers

Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, during Rodney Coronado’s radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to […]

Can trade policy and climate policy work hand-in-hand?

This past weekend, while traveling in India, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received the message, courteous but firm, that India has no intention of capping carbon.  The rationale provided is that India has low per capita emissions.  This is, to be sure, India’s best argument.  Her overall emissions are soaring as her population spirals upward–India, […]

The Climate Post: Smalls steps and giant leaps

First Things First: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India last weekend to inch forward collaboration on regional security, global business, nuclear power, and climate change. U.S. papers played up the real-time meltdown between Clinton and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. The two appeared before cameras on a trip to a new, energy-efficient office building […]

Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global […]

“Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 — 20 cents per kWh!

Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has published a blockbuster study, “Realistic Costs of Carbon Capture.” The paper concludes that First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) carbon capture and storage plants are going to be much more expensive than most people realize: 1.  The costs of carbon abatement on a 2008 basis for FOAK IGCC plants are […]

Money can’t buy YOU love — but it can buy the fossil fuel industry the GOP loves

Oil companies, electric utilities and the coal industry have poured more than $250,000 this year into the coffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House fundraising arm that has played a lead role in attacking Democrats who supported climate legislation. All told, political action committees for various fossil fuel industries have given at […]

Congress reverses Chu’s decision, flushes $100 million down the toilet pursuing hydrogen cars

Honda’s FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell car: yours for only $100,000!There are only three sure things in life — death, taxes, and you’re never going to buy a hydrogen fuel cell car.  Congress should stop wasting your money pursuing Bush’s phony dream. The fundamental problem with hydrogen as a transport fuel is one that no […]

Nobelist Krugman: Fear of carbon markets and speculation is “99% wrong and bad for the planet”

There are many obstacles to taking action on climate change. Most of those obstacles have deep roots: there are powerful interest groups that don’t want market prices to reflect true costs, and there are ideologues — financially supported by these interest groups — who don’t want to admit that sometimes the government has to intervene. […]