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Grammy stars unite on new campaign

  Rob Perks at the Natural Resources Defense Council has just unveiled a wonderful website tribute to Grammy Award-winning country and rock musicians banding together to stop mountaintop removal in Appalachia. Featuring Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow and Big Kenny Alphin, the Music Saves Mountains campaign is a great reminder of the indisputable role […]

Memo to WSJ: You can do better than that

[You might try sending emails to the reporters below. My guess is they didn’t put a lot of thought into what they were writing and might be open to writing it differently in the future — since this isn’t the WSJ editorial page.] The media misinforms the public about climate science in many different ways. […]

Does Pew Center’s Eileen Claussen get the dire nature of our climate predicament?

Dr. Bill Chameides is the dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs at HuffingtonPost.com and his own GreenGrok.com, which is certainly worth reading. He just posted “Impressions from National Academies Climate Summit,” in which he drops a bombshell quote from Eileen Claussen, […]

Does carbon-eating cement deserve the hype?

I am trying to identify the plausible CO2-mitigation strategies that are scalable — that can comprise at least a half a wedge (see “How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution). So when a new process gets this much hype — as in Scientific American’s, “Cement from CO2: […]

EPA to Ethanol Lobby: Drop Dead!

For a while, I was afraid the EPA might actually bow to political pressure and raise the so-called blend wall for ethanol, i.e. the amount of ethanol that can currently be mixed into gasoline and sold at the pump.

George Will publishes global warming lies for a third time

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, shame on the media. In a move that calls into question the journalistic integrity of the entire Washington Post editorial staff — especially editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, who should be fired — the newspaper has published a third […]

Republicans as defenders of the poor

Last week, the House GOP leadership proposed a budget outline that provides an alternative to President Obama’s. Here’s Citizens for Tax Justice’s [PDF] analysis of how it compares to President Obama’s plan: Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the […]

New climate legislation overlooks a major GHG source: industrial ag

Like many others in the climate movement, I have been waiting for weeks (well, years actually) for broad and sweeping climate change legislation.  Back in January the economy captured Congressional attention and I knew global warming legislation would simply have to wait.  Finally, yesterday, Representatives Markey and Waxman introduced their “American Clean Energy and Security […]

Senate rules out using budget process to pass cap-and-trade

Prospects for using the Congress’s budget process to pass cap-and-trade legislation were extinguished on Wednesday night as the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a measure to bar that option. The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), prohibits the “use of reconciliation in the Senate for climate change legislation involving a cap and trade […]

Using markets to make fisheries sustainable

Around the world, over-fishing is leading to severe depletion of valuable fisheries. This is as true in U.S. coastal waters as it is in many other parts of the world. In New England waters, for example, after two decades of ever more intensive fishing, the groundfish fishery has essentially collapsed. But, we are not alone. […]