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Aviation industry proposing solutions to solving their global warming pollution?

Photo: The Shane H via Flickr While most of the climate negotiations in Bonn have been focused on key issues around the overall agreement, as I’ve discussed here and here, there has also been some side discussions on other key issues. I’ve been involved in a couple of discussions (outside the formal negotiations) around how […]

Friedman uses perch at Gray Lady to push for carbon tax

Tom Friedman says cap-and-trade is in truth a form of taxation. But taxes don’t suck. Why don’t Dems and the adminstration just tell it like it is and push for something more straightforward: a carbon tax. Such a tax, he goes on to say, should be pitched as a way of renewing the American economy […]

Granholm tries to convert Michigan “from rust to green”

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) is trying to rescue her state’s tanking economy by taking it “from rust to green.” On Monday, Granholm signed a law that will channel $220 million toward tax credits for the development and manufacture of electric-vehicle batteries, on top of $335 million in credits the state approved in January. “This […]

Energy politics shouldn’t depend on whether you’re Republican or Democrat, says Chu

“We have a problem and we’ve got to get it solved. The politics of energy are such that it actually shouldn’t be a political question. Let’s get to a different point in the discussion about what American needs, and what this country really needs is something where it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a Republican […]

Where's the national outrage on Blair Mountain?

When Walmart recently announced its intention to build a super-center near the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia, filmmaker Ken Burns and a host of Pulitzer Prize-winning historians denounced the move for its obvious offense to our national heritage site.

We need that same outrage for another battlefield under assault.

Moving beyond vintage-differentiated regulation

A common feature of many environmental policies in the United States is vintage-differentiated regulation (VDR), under which standards for regulated units are fixed in terms of the units’ respective dates of entry, with later vintages facing more stringent regulation. In the most common application, often referred to as “grandfathering,” units produced prior to a specific […]

Amid a sea of troubles, ethanol now has an antibiotics problem

Hard times for corn fuel Photo: Todd Ehler I’ve been writing for a while now about problems with distillers grains, the leftover mash from the corn-ethanol process. A third of the corn that goes into ethanol winds up as distillers grains. Finding a high-value use for this “coproduct” is absolutely vital to the corn ethanol […]

McDermott’s cap and trade alternative may have unintended consequences

Washington’s Congressman Jim McDermott just released a new climate plan, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it. It gets some things right, but it may cause some relatively serious problems too. Here’s how he described it in a recent blog post: In brief, here’s how it would work: Producers of products and resources […]

Washington Post reporters call out George Will for lying in Washington Post

[SEE UPDATE BELOW] Today, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan have a piece on the alarming decline of Arctic sea ice. In and of itself the story isn’t that surprising: scientists have known for a while that the ice is declining; new data just confirms that it’s happening faster than originally estimated. […]

A teaching moment at the G20 summit

Logs being transported out of the Amazon rainforest. Shazari via Flickr It was a mistake, I know, to try to cross the street last Thursday evening. There I was, not far from the Tower of London, hoping to get across the main road east to the city’s former docklands. But every time I tried to […]