Latest Articles

CCX sells rip-offsets

Richard Sandor and his Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) may be doing more to destroy the credibility of the carbon trading market than anyone in the world, as the Wall Street Journal makes painfully clear. I urge anyone considering throwing their money away on rip-offsets to read the entire piece, “Pollution Credits Let Dumps Double Dip: […]

New Scientist on how our economy is killing the earth

The graph above comes from the introduction to the New Scientist‘s special report: "How our economy is killing the Earth." It takes the following as its central premise: A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic […]

Green infrastructure spending is a win x 4

I’ve been inveighing for weeks that greens need to get involved in the coming battle over fiscal policy — to argue that the economic crisis militates for big, immediate (green!) public spending rather than the belt-tightening Beltway pundits reflexively demand from candidates. As I’ve been documenting, it seems elite opinion is generally swinging in the […]

EPA overstates pollution enforcement, says GAO

It’s no secret that the Bush administration has slashed fines for polluters: The U.S. EPA issued $137.7 million in penalties in 2007, down from $240.6 million in 1998. But even that level of enforcement is overstated, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The EPA publicly reports the penalties it slaps on egregious […]

Fermi who?

Last week, Jeff Young of Living on Earth spoke to one of the top dogs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, Alex Flint. Read the following exchange and see if it fills you with confidence: FLINT: No, the Fermi plant operates very safely. YOUNG: That’s Alex Flint, the Nuclear Institute’s senior vice president for government affairs. […]

Breaking the mental habit of selective fiscal conservatism

“And if people ask how we’re going to pay for [renewable power and infrastructure investments], you tell them that if we can spend $10 billion a month in Iraq, we can spend some money to rebuild America.” — Sen. Barack Obama, to a crowd of 100,000 people in St. Louis on Saturday

Where the presidential candidates stand on public-lands issues

We’ve heard the presidential candidates talk a lot about energy and a little bit about climate change on the campaign trail this year, but there hasn’t been much discussion about a whole host of other environmental concerns. Here we look at the statements and platforms of Barack Obama and John McCain on public-lands issues.   […]

The Governator gets it

“We must not give in to those that say that environmental goals should take a back seat until our economy comes back. It’s backwards thinking and just plain wrong.” — Calif. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking to the Solar Power International conference

New report offers five different pictures of life in 2030

Forum on the Future recently released a report, "derived from published studies and consultations with more than 60 climate-change specialists," that describes five possible scenarios for how climate change might affect our collective future. Here’s the happy one, as described by AFP: ENERGY EFFICIENCY: A swift, peaceful transition to a consumerist economy where heat-trapping carbon […]

The odd lies of Sarah Palin

Andrew Sullivan is tirelessly cataloguing and regularly updating the "odd lies of Sarah Palin" ("odd" because unlike normal politicians’ deceptions, they’re not exaggerations or misdirections or fuzzy interpretations — they’re just flat out denials of settled, documented fact, easy to debunk with a google search). Gristians may be particularly interested in lies four (endangered species), […]