Latest Articles

Cap & trade: Carbon tax or wealth transfer?

It’s an article of faith that cap-and-trade will raise our energy costs, but it’s not necessarily true. The ubiquity of this faith makes clear that the Smart People who write, talk, and vote about CO2 policy don’t really understand the issues. A quick discussion, and then some math to clarify. There are two core problems […]

Nicholas Kristof on African hunger

Nicholas KristofNicholas Kristof, the much-celebrated columnist for The New York Times, is essentially a Victorian-style moralist. In a typical column, he alights on some harsh scene–a slum in an Indian megopolis, a dirt-poor village in Cambodia–and delivers a heart-wrenching report. He then prescribes an extremely narrow “solution” to the problem he has uncovered–one that typically […]

Duke Energy: We can ‘decarbonize’ without painful electricity price hikes

Major coal utilities are now publicly endorsing electricity decarbonization, an all but unimaginable position even 12 months ago.  And although Duke is a member of USCAP, which was the basis of Waxman-Markey, it remains remarkable that the company has joined the call for strong climate action (see How does Duke CEO Jim Rogers sleep at […]

Toles on GOP global warming denial

And a shout out to Toles for his shout out to Dust-Bowlification (see “NOAA stunner:  SW faces permanent Dust Bowls” and “Climate change drives SW Dust Bowl sooner than expected“).

Memorial Day, 2029

The two worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise, Hell and High Water.  But another impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly than either […]

Congress reconsiders regulatory exemption for gas drilling

This story was written by ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten. From left, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Rep. John Salazar, Rep. Dianna DeGette and Sen. Bob Casey are all trying to leave their mark on how natural gas is drilled in the U.S. Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublicaFour years after Vice President Dick Cheney spearheaded a massive energy […]

House Majority Leader says climate bill will see fast action

Enjoy the Memorial Day holiday, readers, because when members come back from their week-long break, the pace of action on climate and clean energy legislation is going to accelerate.  The House leadership wants to vote on Waxman-Markey before the August recess.  I certainly hope they can stay on that schedule since the ideal time to […]

Obama’s new CAFE standards keep the pressure on Congress to act

It’s an annual rite as familiar as April showers; Americans again jumped in their cars in droves this past weekend to celebrate the unofficial start of summer. It was fitting that last week President Obama took a major step, announcing regulations that will increase fuel efficiency within a few years. With this move, Obama ensured […]

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein gets climate bill wrong

In a laudable attempt to draw more elite media attention to the Waxman-Markey bill — which, like all things “environmental,” has not exactly been a preoccupation of the political cable/blog/op-ed axis — Washington Post business writer Steven Pearlstein makes a hash of a few important facts. Pearlstein says the Waxman-Markey bill will create “create dozens of […]

What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system

In a recent New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten published a lucid, entertaining essay on the financial collapse. Titled “The Death of Kings,” it focuses on the hedge-fund managers, stock gurus, and private-equity wizards who reaped billions from the credit bubble.Is Big Ag running the food system into the ground the same way Wall Street wrecked the […]