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White House hopes new climate report is a ‘game-changer’

Hey, remember the Florida Keys? You might have to, considering they won’t be there much longer if we continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at current rates. Have plans to check out the Lone Star State? Well, you might want to get there soon, as Texas can expect up to 100 days of temperatures […]

Stand up for rural America while you still can

The assault on rural America continues unabated. For the past six months dairy farmers across the country have suffered a historic drop in milk prices while operating costs remain high. Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has plunged over 50 percent, the largest single drop since the […]

NYC sends veggie carts to underserved areas — and they’re a hit

New York City took a baby step recently towards a state role in distributing healthy food. It significantly expanded a program to bring fruit and vegetable “carts” to low-income neighborhoods that lack good food options — so-called “food deserts.” And if the early response as reported by the NYT is any indication, the program looks […]

What the U.S. climate report says about your state

Sarah van Schagen recounted how climate change will mess with salmon, skiing, and other essentials of life in the Pacific Northwest — according to the Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report released today. As we say in Seattle, um… I don’t think we have a local saying for “oh crap.” globalchange.govLest you […]

Obama’s voice absent from release of big climate report

The podium awaits you, sir.Courtesy JoshBerglund19 via FlickrOn a day when the executive branch released a major report on the effects of climate change already underway in the United States, where was President Obama? Not at the official release of “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.” Two of his top science officials, John […]

Congress is the problem

Felix Salmon blogs at Reuters about the seeming exhaustion of Obama’s political capital — on both climate change and financial regulations, he just can’t seem to get what he wants out of Congress. I think Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent both have the appropriate response: the problem here is not Obama, but Congress. Indeed, the […]

The faint silver lining of the Waxman-Markey clean-energy-mandates cloud

The Waxman-Markey bill would require that 20% of the nation’s power supply come from clean energy (15%) and efficiency (5%) by 2020. But wouldn’t the U.S. have reached those mild targets without any government intervention, through natural market growth? Would the bill’s mandates have any effect at all? A spate of recent analyses have argued […]

Gaia proponent Lovelock says it’s time to adapt to inevitable global heating

James Lovelock speaking at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in 2007Courtesy Jon and Lu via FlickrWhat is it with Preeminent Thinkers and intensely bleak public lectures? Two weeks ago Earth Institute economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an address at the Asia Society in New York, argued that climate change cannot be averted without massive use of […]

Pacific Northwest says goodbye to salmon, skiing; hello to heat waves

The new U.S. climate change impacts report — on which we’ve been reporting all day — includes some hard-hitting regional data. For example, did you know that annual average temperatures in the Northwest rose about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century — with some areas seeing increases up to 4 degrees? And the rising […]

Lots of great green stuff in the latest issue of The Atlantic

I haven’t read The Atlantic much lately, but I picked up the latest issue at the airport and it is superb. Three pieces are worth particular note. First, Joshua Green has a piece on “The Coming Green Economy” that is as good as anything I’ve ever read in popular media about the contours of the […]