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Key Obama advisers on climate and energy

Track the debate and take action >>> UPDATED: 16 Sep 2009 President Barack Obama’s key advisers on energy and climate issues include a former top aide to Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, a governor, and a gaggle of former members of Congress. Here’s a rundown:     Carol Browner Assistant to the President for […]

The scoop on climate and energy bills in Congress

What are the U.S. House and Senate doing about climate change and energy?  Here’s a rundown on legislation proposed in Congress this year. In the House … • American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 A comprehensive climate and energy bill sponsored by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), this has more momentum […]

Write your members of Congress about climate change

Help us find out where members of Congress stand on climate change–they haven’t all been clear on this. Send the message below to your U.S. senators and/or representative, then post the lawmaker’s reply in comments below or email it to us. Dear __________: I am writing to learn more about your views on the important […]

The Unsettling Case of Shell Nigeria

After thirteen years and countless hours by lawyers, community members, and activists around the world, Royal Dutch Shell finally settled the Wiwa v Shell case in a New York court for $15.5 million. Plaintiffs in the case, which included Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., and the families of other Ogoni men hanged in November 1995, charged that […]

Former PepsiCo exec to take helm at Seventh Generation

Entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender launched a mail-order catalog business 20 years ago and nursed it for more than a decade before it became profitable. That company is now Seventh Generation, and there’s no more catalog, but there certainly is a ton of recycled toilet paper — and all-natural cleaning supplies and non-toxic personal-care products. It’s a […]

Will Big Ag plow under Waxman-Markey?

Waxman and Markey prepare for the ag lobby. As the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill moves forward in the House, Big Ag interest groups are circling their plows and sharpening their pitchforks. Some of the largest corporations in the agribusiness sector–including the GMO-and-herbicide giant Monsanto–are pushing to control how agriculture would fit into the bill’s […]

Transparency at the Bonn climate negotiations

You might think that the international global warming negotiations are occurring in some backroom, filled with smoke, and outside the view of the world.  That is after all, what some opponents to global warming solutions would have you believe. But that is the farthest thing from the truth.  Let me give you some examples from […]

Agriculture: A necessary complication in the climate negotiations

Despite a sense that the international climate change negotiations, convened in Bonn, Germany this week, are grinding forward at a painfully slow pace, there is a momentum to the process that makes adding new ideas very difficult. It took several years of behind the scenes technical work and at least two years of carefully planned […]

Why are milk prices plummeting?

Dairy farmers are in deep trouble. Milk prices have fallen by half since last year, dropping to a 30-year low. Consumption has fallen in light of the slowing world economy and now there is a huge milk surplus, or so the “experts” tell us. It’s a nice theory: surplus equals low prices. Easy to explain […]

Do dirty coal plants make us more vulnerable to swine flu?

Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu — and it’s a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at […]