Latest Articles

Opposing Clean Energy Hurts GOP

Part 1 examined how conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy. This is how the GOP shrinks itself. Here, I’ll look at how, by abandoning clean energy, the GOP is taking the side of the Luddites and leaving this hugely popular issue entirely to the Democrats.  As Mark Mellman, […]

DOE sending out Recovery Act funding as states promise efficiency improvements

 DOE has been rolling through approvals of state energy plans and releasing huge chunks of the $3.1 billion available through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act for State Energy Programs. All told, 29 states and several territories have received approval and substantial portions of their funding. This funding will be used for weatherizing low income […]

MoveOn’s Masterful Move

Most every major advance in civic climate action has originated outside the envelope of U.S. climate politics as practiced by major environmental organizations and funders. The problem was first identified by Jim Hansen and other climate scientists, first brought to wide attention by journalists Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, and popularized by New Yorker writer […]

What Role for U.S. Carbon Sequestration?

With the development of climate legislation proceeding in the U.S. Senate, a key question is whether the United States can cost-effectively reduce a significant share of its contributions to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations through forest-based carbon sequestration.  Should biological carbon sequestration be part of the domestic portfolio of compliance activities? The potential costs of carbon […]

Ford, Toyota, GM all to help meet Obama’s goal of 1 million plug-ins by 2015

Major car companies are starting to vote on their choice for the “car and fuel of the future” with big bets on manufacturing capacity.  The winner, no surprise, is going to be highly efficient plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and pure electric vehicles (see, for instance, “Everything you could want to know about plug-in and EV […]

What’s going down, Down Under?

Australia is the canary-in-the-coal-mine koala-in-the-bushfire for climate change, since it is the most arid habited continent (see “Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040” and “Global Boiling: Australia’s hellish black Saturday of extreme fire“).  Prime Minister Rudd has been “moving forward with an imperfect but positive climate policy agenda that […]

The epic battle for the Senate, Part 1: What we can learn from the House vote.

A few moderate senators in both parties hold in their hands the fate of climate legislation — and hence the possibility that the nation and the world might have a realistic chance of averting catastrophic climate impacts.  That’s because The GOP has made the fateful — and fatal — decision to cast its lot with […]

Must-read NOAA paper smacks down the deniers

Nothing occupies global warming deniers more than trying to prove that the U.S. temperature record — a tiny portion of the global temperature record — is not reliable.  Now NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center has issued an excellent Q&A, “Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?” that should settle that question for any objective observer. The […]

Lamar Alexander (R-TN) calls nuclear “the cheap clean energy solution”

Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is somewhat bizarrely called a Senate “fence-sitter” by the E&E News analysis (which I’ll blog on shortly). If you’re watching the Senate climate hearing, then you just heard the most uninformed endorsement of nuclear power ever offered in the U.S. Senate. One can say many things about 100 new nuclear power plants […]

France imports UK electricity as summer heatwave puts a third of its nukes out of action

To avoid maxxing out on my July quota of irony in the first week of the month, I will simply report this as a straight news story.  The UK Times reports: With temperatures across much of France surging above 30C this week, EDF’s reactors are generating the lowest level of electricity in six years, forcing […]