Latest Articles
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In lead-up to Bonn climate talks, U.S. and U.N. leaders are cautiously optimistic
Climate leaders in both Congress and the United Nations are optimistic about making landmark progress on an international climate accord this year, but hopes that an agreement will be finalized in 2009 seem to be dimming. Yvo de Boer, the U.N. climate chief, and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee […]
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Coal mining industry fights back with deceptions about jobs and the economy
If you’re a reader of Grist then you are almost certainly aware that the Obama Administration signaled a major shift yesterday in how mountaintop removal coal mining will be regulated. In brief, Obama’s head of the EPA, announced a decision to delay and review permits for two mountaintop removal mining operations, an action that calls […]
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Supreme Court decisions bode well for global warming-related preemption cases
In the tricky legal world of “preemption” — the principle that federal law “preempts,” or trumps, state law — two recent Supreme Court decisions bode well for ongoing, seemingly unrelated global warming litigation. The first of these decisions, Altria Group, Inc et al. v. Good et al., concerned a class-action lawsuit brought by smokers in […]
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On cap-and-trade, Evan Bayh follows Smokey Joe Barton’s and Rupert Murdoch’s agenda
Originally published on the Wonk Room. On Hardball yesterday, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) worried that a cap-and-trade system to prevent catastrophic global warming and drive green economic development might “suck money” and jobs away from coal-intensive states: Cap and trade, you’ll probably need 60 votes because it affects so many states economically that if you […]
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New study quoted by Cato Institute deniers in ad concludes global warming is getting worse
RealClimate has an excellent post (here) on the Cato Institute’s efforts to get signatories for its new global warming denial ad. But they missed one especially ironic point — a key study Cato uses to argue we may see much less warming than the models predict comes to exactly the opposite conclusion. The Cato Institute […]
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French government interested in solar because it uses less water than nukes
A year or so ago, I spoke at a solar conference in France — a country that produces 78 percent of its electricity with nukes. A couple of folks told me that the government’s interest in solar stemmed from the fact that during the previous summer’s heat wave, river levels dropped to the point that […]
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Why conservatives hate green jobs
This post will debunk “7 Myths About Green Jobs” and the longer version, Green Jobs Myths [PDF]. The internal inconsistencies and general illogic of these articles are staggering: Progressives will be quoting from them in defense of our positions for years to come (see debunking of Myth 6). These two articles survey and critique the […]
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Drinking water: Toilet to tap — get used to it!
In the future, your drinking water is going to be recycled from your toilet — believe it. As the population grows and global warming drives desertification and the loss of the inland glaciers (see here), fresh water will become increasingly in short supply. As the AFP reported recently: Surging population growth, climate change, reckless irrigation […]
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Hit the switch for Earth Hour this Saturday
CFLs everywhere will go dark Saturday night for the global Earth Hour event scheduled for 8:30 p.m. local time (wherever your locality happens to be). The aim of the annual effort — brought to us by the folks who invented Outback Steakhouse — is to make a “statement of concern about climate change,” rather than, […]
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Reinventing the trailer park
Trailer parks get a bad rap, especially in the post-Katrina days when we’ve come to see them as North American refugee camps slowly poisoning their displaced inhabitants with formaldehyde fumes. But the trailer park, done right, actually holds great potential as a development model. MiniHome: a big idea. Sustain Even in its current form, with […]
