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Obama Supreme Court pick has small but solid record on environmental rulings

President Obama today selected Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, she would become the first Latin American and only the third woman to sit on the highest court in the land. The hot topic of conversation surrounding her nomination is affirmative action, but over in Gristland, we’re wondering, […]

The United States of waste

The U.S. economy is incredibly energy inefficient, a key reason even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar. This inefficiency is summed up best in one remarkable statistic that I first learned at the U.S. Department of Energy and then reprinted in my 1999 […]

Judge Sonia Sotomayor on energy & environment

President Obama has chosen federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.  The African American Environmentalist Association has an extended discussion of her energy and environmental views, reprinted below: Judge Sonia Sotomayor [above] wrote an opinion in Riverkeeper v. EPA, 475 F.3d 83 (2d Cir. 2007), that the EPA was not permitted to engage […]

Deforestation in Waxman-Markey

I really like Title VII Part E of the Waxman-Markey bill, which puts aside some pollution permit value to reduce international deforestation. (It’s separate from Part D, Offsets.) There are plenty of set-asides in the bill for energy producers, industrials, refineries, all sorts of private interests. VII-E is one of the few set-asides for public […]

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 […]