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Wal-Mart gobbles up local produce

You thought you took home a haul at the farmers market last week, but you’ve got nothin’ on Wal-Mart. The big-box retailer has become the nation’s largest buyer of local produce, planning to purchase and sell $400 million worth of locally grown fruits and veggies this year. Wal-Mart says it works with “hundreds” of individual […]

McCain just not that into Amtrak

Over at the Boston Globe, columnist Derrick Z. Jackson does an excellent job of highlighting John McCain’s beef with Amtrak: For years, McCain, in the comfort of cheap gasoline for autos and airplanes, made Amtrak a personal whipping boy. Despite the fact that governments in Western Europe and Asia zoomed far ahead of the United […]

Umbra on exerting yourself in traffic

Dear Umbra, I bus, bike, or walk to work 98 percent of the time. I was wondering, when I’m biking (or walking, for that matter), am I inhaling more pollutants than those around me who are emitting them from their gas-guzzlers? Your answer won’t change my habits, since I’m not going to drive to work […]

Investment in renewable energy skyrockets

Global investment in renewable energy was a record $148 billion in 2007, jumping 60 percent from 2006, the United Nations reported Tuesday. About one-third of the investment went to wind power; solar power was the fastest-growing clean-energy sector from 2006 to 2007, with investment nearly doubling to hit $28.6 billion. Investment in biofuels dropped in […]

Sen. Grassley: Screw conservation, let’s grow more corn!

Here in the U.S., our grocery bills are rising faster than they have since Gerald Ford bumbled about the Oval Office. Across the globe, the recent surge in crop prices is putting sufficient food out of reach of millions of people. The dismal human dimension of the food crisis has been amply (if sporadically) covered […]

Harry Reid passionately disses fossil fuels, goes viral on YouTube

This video of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) talking about fossil fuels on the Fox Business Network was one of the “most viewed” on YouTube yesterday: It’s been viewed 351,710 times so far, largely because it was linked to from the Drudge Report. As Politico reports, “Senate Republicans are sending around the video as […]

California wildfires mucking up state’s air quality

California’s raging wildfires, which have burned some 660 square miles in the last few weeks, are also significantly worsening air quality, causing high levels of soot, and aggravating asthma patients. “Our waiting rooms are full of people with sore throats, itchy eyes, and sniffles,” said a respiratory therapist with Fresno’s Sequoia Community Health Center. Already […]

Climate policy isn’t a pill to swallow, it’s a way off a sinking ship

This Ezra Klein post echoes what has rather rapidly become conventional wisdom among progressives on climate legislation, and it makes me want to tear my hair out. The idea is that climate legislation will inevitably hurt people financially in the short-term, in order to secure environmental benefits in the distant future, so the only way […]

A possible consensus perspective on the tax vs. cap debate

Last revised: 07/10/2008

In his recent Congressional testimony, James Hansen talked about a "perfect storm" of climatological tipping points that may soon converge to yield global cataclysm. But another kind of perfect storm is brewing: a technology storm that could rapidly displace fossil fuels and restore global climate sustainability.

Effective regulatory policy could provide the kind of incentives and stable investment climate that are needed to facilitate the clean-energy revolution. Unfortunately, the "caps and standards" approach that is currently in vogue cannot provide the economic backbone for a rapid and orderly transition to a sustainable global economy. Emission caps and performance standards are rarely if ever set at levels that represent true sustainability, and are generally biased toward extreme cost conservatism. Regulators try to second-guess markets in setting targets and schedules, while markets try to second-guess regulators; the instability and unpredictability of carbon prices deters long-term investment in clean energy.

A carbon tax like the one advocated by Dr. Hansen and many economists would provide price stability, and could theoretically be five times more cost-efficient than cap-and-trade, but taxes are politically verboten. Industry interests oppose taxes because of their alleged high regulatory costs and cap-and-traders won't let go of their hallowed "environmental certainty."

So the tax-versus-cap debate goes round and round, never resolving and never converging on a credible climate stabilization strategy. But the debate could be resolved if policy makers -- and the economics profession -- could put aside their dogmatisms and recognize several basic principles of climate policy:

White House disses Supreme Court, kills $2 trillion savings

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

The Wall Street Journal published new material ($ub. req'd) on the White House's emasculation of last year's Supreme Court global warming decision: The court told the EPA that the Clean Air Act requires it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The White House seeks to nullify that decision by stuffing the EPA document down a memory hole and substituting antithetical language. The WSJ has seen the EPA's draft document and reports:

The draft ... outlines how the government, under the Clean Air Act, could regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from mobile sources such as cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats, and from stationary sources such as power stations, chemical plants and refineries. The document is based on a multimillion-dollar study conducted over two years.