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Climate politics scoop and question of the week

Okay, I don’t know if it is a scoop, heck, I don’t know for certain it is true, but a very reliable source tells me that speaker Pelosi wants the climate bill on the House floor the last week in June. That is consistent with what Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said (see “House Majority Leader says […]

Can human rights be the climate movement’s moral guide?

Courtesy of Three DegreesI’m spending this Thursday and Friday at the Three Degrees conference on climate change and human rights, hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. Some 40 speakers—mostly legal scholars, but also public health experts, NGO leaders, trial lawyers, and political organizers—are gathered to debate the future of the law as […]

Oceans’ alarm: what the sea is trying to tell us

Recently, I read about a professor at Columbia who teaches a course about the signs of the apocalypse. With the financial collapse and threats of a swine flu pandemic in mind, he told the New Yorker he decided to create the class because “now seemed like a good time.” I don’t know if Professor Taussig’s […]

From “local” Lays to Oprah’s KFC promo, hypocrisy abounds in the food world

War is peace, junk food is real food….Nobody likes hypocrites, despite the fact that everyone is a hypocrite to one degree or another: the smoker who tells her kids not to smoke; the closeted politician who works against gay rights; the police officer who throws the book at stoners but who himself gets high. But […]

From Rapping to Wrapping

Willing.i.amThis Black Green-eyed Pea wants a White House job. If hired, we imagine his boardroom beats might go something like this: “Yo ‘Bama, (boom boom boom) we gotta get-get this climate bill signed!”   (Click below to see the next item in this week’s Grist List—or view them all on a single page.)     […]

New ads target three House members who voted against climate bill

The League of Conservation Voters, VoteVets.org, and the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO are running new ads targeting two Democrats and one Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee who voted against the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill last week. The ads target John Barrow (D-Ga.), Mike Ross (D-Ark.), and Roy Blunt […]

So how much would a $20/ton carbon price really cost?

First I said that we shouldn’t confuse wealth transfers with economic pain. Then I said that a $20/ton carbon price works out to a 1.4 cent/kWh rate increase. Astute readers may have noticed a disconnect. (Isn’t 1.4 cents/kWh economic pain?) Which brings me to the third and final part of this little series. Carbon prices […]

The Climate Post: Something wrought in the state of Denmark?

The word “Copenhagen” hangs over climate discussions everywhere from Washington to Wagga Wagga. That’s because in December the world travels to the Danish capital for the 15th Conference of Parties meeting, affectionately referred to as COP15. There, nations large and small hope to reach a new international agreement that would ratchet down global emissions beginning […]

An interview with the innovators behind ioby.org

We’ve all heard that eating locally is one way to reduce your environmental impact. But what about donating locally? In the urban wilds of New York City, a new non-profit is betting that locally based, small-scale giving can have a big eco-impact. Ioby, whose name stands for “in our back yards,” connects people working on […]

Congressional leaders head to China to make nice on climate

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.XinhuaHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in China this week leading a congressional delegation to discuss, among other things, climate change and environmental protections. But despite the public displays of unity on climate, there remain some strong divisions between the two countries on what needs to happen in […]