Latest Articles

Did environmentalists get played on cap and trade?

Although it’s not his regular beat, Kevin Drum blogs sensibly about carbon policy from time to time. Recently, though, in an otherwise agreeable post about the fecklessness of opponents of climate change legislation, Drum offers up a narrative that is both fairly commonplace and also riddled with misconceptions: It also goes to show how fleeting […]

Happy Save the Frogs Day

Hoppy Save the Frogs Day!As I’ve mentioned before, frogs and other amphibians are doing about as well as the global financial system. The good news is that even though the Year of the Frog (2008) is over, we still have the first annual Save the Frogs Day to get hopped up about the plight of […]

What does Specter’s party switch mean for climate and energy?

The big news today is Sen. Arlen Specter’s announcement that he’ll be switching parties from Republican to Democrat. For the best analysis of why he did it (basically, he was fated to lose the upcoming primary), see Eric Kleefeld at TPM. The boss man asked me to weigh in from Paris on what it might […]

Pollution taxes work

The Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp threw down the gauntlet to carbon taxers in the Wall Street Journal last month: Environmental taxes have worked well to raise revenue, but without a cap they inevitably become a license to pollute in unlimited amounts. No air pollution problem has ever been solved except by imposing a legal […]

Dingell joins Republicans in calling cap-and-trade an ‘energy tax’

It’s not just Republicans who are calling a cap-and-trade program a tax. “Nobody in this country realizes that cap-and-trade is a tax, and a great big one,” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said at last Friday’s hearing with Al Gore on the House climate bill. Dingell, who until last November chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, […]

The environmental inverted pyramid, corrected

538.com’s Nate Silver noted that a recent survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication “reveals part of the problem that advocates of more aggressive measures to curb climate change may be encountering as they seek to push forward initiatives like cap-and-trade”: The survey, conducted […]

Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial agriculture?

Several days after news broke of a possible link between Mexico-based hog CAFOs and the rapid spread of a novel swine-flu strain, what have we learned? • Clarifying details about respiratory ailments in the Perote area of Vera Cruz State — where U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods raises nearly a million hogs a year in […]

Deniers are just one off from the truth

I give a lot of talks on climate change and what we should do about it. Invariably, at the end, some smug white haired guy in his sixties raises his hand and says something like this: “I’m a smart guy (Phd, engineer, whatever—he lays out the credentials) and I’m a critical thinker. (of course!) and […]

Obama’s first 100 days of coal

“If you’re going to lead my country,If you’re gonna say it’s freeI’m gonna needa little honestyJust a few honest words” — Ben Sollee, “A Few Honest Words” With those proverbial first 100 days coming to a close, here are ten moments–some good, some confusing, some hair-raising–in the short swift time of coal in the Obama […]

Tidbits from the first day of the Energy Efficiency Global Forum

The problem with conferences like this is that interesting tidbits — factoids and insights — come flying at you continuously. An Official Journalist is supposed to weave these tidbits into a narrative story, but in my experiences those stories tend to be fairly boring — the only reason to read them is to pull out […]