Latest Articles

Defenders of Wildlife releases new ad on Palin and polar bears

Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has a new ad, this one on Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin and polar bears. It follows the group’s earlier ad on Palin’s support of aerial wolf hunting. “Sarah Palin’s active opposition to protections for polar bears is yet another example of her inability to listen and act upon scientific […]

Google offers two Halloween tools to cut household energy costs

Photo: sascha First a tool to prevent drunk emailing; now this: The smarties at Google have put together some treats in time for Halloween so you won’t be tricked by household energy waste. A list of ways to lower your energy bill includes tips to save water, cut heating costs, and reduce appliance electricity use, […]

‘Global warming comes from within’–Is heat at the Earth’s core the real cause of global warming?

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide) Objection: We all live on a thin crust that floats on a huge ball of molten iron, and at its core, the Earth’s temperature is over 5000 degrees C! It’s pretty far fetched to think a few parts per million of CO2 can have […]

Consolidation in the beef industry has gotten too intense even for the Bush DOJ

Way back in March, Brazilian beef-packing behemoth JBS finished an extraordinary lunge into the U.S. market, having snapped up Swift, National Beef Packing, and the beef assets of Smithfield — the nation’s third-, fourth- and fifth-biggest beef packers. If the deals were approved by U.S. antitrust authorities — and nothing in recent history suggested they […]

Oversight chair warns Bush administration against attempting to weaken the Clean Air Act

House Oversight Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) issued a warning [PDF] on Tuesday to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, apparently trying to head off at the pass any further attempts to weaken the Clean Air Act. There’s talk of yet another new rule soon to come from the Bush administration that would undermine the new-source review […]

Identifying one of the great misunderstandings of our political age

“In tough economic times, some people will ask whether we should retreat from our climate change objectives. In our view, it would be quite wrong to row back, and those who say we should misunderstand the relationship between the economic and environmental tasks we face.” — Ed Miliband, U.K. energy and climate change secretary

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Politico interviewed William Antholis, managing director of the Brookings Institution, about the connection between the environment and security, and among other things Antholis made this very smart observation: Q: What energy-related issues have the presidential candidates ignored during the campaign? A: What hasn’t really been fully debated, and where there is some difference between candidates, […]

Snippets from the news

• Boston waste haulers may lose licenses if they don’t offer recycling. • Dentists back sealants, despite bisphenol A concerns. • Conservationists factor climate change into land buys. • Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have strong differences on environment. • Electronics recycling industry plagued by lax rules and weak enforcement.

World needs to get crackin’ on CCS, says IEA

John McCain and Barack Obama both like to give lovin’ to “clean coal” — but how much would they be willing to pony up for it? In a new report, the International Energy Agency, assuming that we continue to head into a fossil-fuel-powered future, says that the world needs to invest some $20 billion in […]

Coal’s position in the energy market is more precarious than is generally acknowledged

As we reported Monday morning, the Bush administration is on the verge of issuing a rule that will make it even easier for mountaintop-removal mining companies to dump toxic crap in the streams of Appalachia. (They do it now, it’s just illegal, albeit never enforced.) You can read Jeff Biggers for more on why this […]