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Earth screwed, but small Japanese towns happy

“We are seeing a flicker of light after long darkness. We never imagined coal would actually make a comeback.” — Michio Sakurai, mayor of Bibai, Japan, a coal mining town being revived by the international surge of demand for coal

Looks like …

… the coal battle in Kansas is over for the time being. Score: Coal-0; earth/Sebelius/Kansas ratepayers-1

Italy wants to reverse ban, move forward with nuclear power

After banning nuclear power for two decades, Italy has announced plans to build a new wave of nuclear plants. Concerns about oil prices, energy security, and fossil-fuel emissions contributed to the about-face by the world’s largest net importer of electricity. “Only nuclear plants safely produce energy on a vast scale with competitive costs, respecting the […]

But soon we will be mad for $6-7 gas

Normally, I would listen to Robert Hirsch and the legendary Charlie Maxwell, over CNBC's "Mad" Jim Cramer. But Hirsch and Maxwell are making headlines for saying $12-15 gasoline is around the corner, based on Maxwell's projection of oil "reaching $180 a barrel in 2015 and $300 a barrel in 2020."

Sorry, guys -- every extra $40 barrel is another dollar a gallon or so at the pump. Don't quite know how they did the math, but they did it wrong.

Select Committee and White House reach deal on release of documents

It seems the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has reached some sort of agreement with the White House to obtain documents from the Environmental Protection Agency on their internal workings. The decision preempted the committee’s plan to hold a vote today finding EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson in contempt. The Select Committee […]

Yes we can! (ride bikes)

“It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation. That’s the kind of solution that we need for America.” — Barack Obama, speaking to a rally in Portland, Ore., where an estimated 8,000 out of 75,000 attendees arrived […]

After blunder, the legislation slouches back to limbo

For the first time in its long process, the 2008 — née 2007 — farm bill was going according to script. Congress finally came up with a final version. Bush vetoed it, just as he had promised. The House overrode the veto, just as everyone knew it would. Next stop: the Senate, where Bush’s veto […]

New pro-LW ad from EDF

EDF has a new ad out supporting the Climate Security Act: The Act does indeed tell polluters they can’t pollute for free — in fact, it offers them $1 trillion [PDF] for their efforts!

Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?

I don't believe 'em. But should you?

You can't read everything or listen to everybody. Life is just too short. I debated Christy years ago, so I know he tries to peddle unscientific nonsense when he thinks he can get away with it.

But some of the comments in my recent post "The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP" can't seem to get enough of the analyses by these two scientists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville who famously screwed up the satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.

In the interest of saving you some time, which is a major goal of my posts, let's see why these are two people you can program your mental DVR to fast forward through. First off, they were wrong -- dead wrong -- for a very long time, which created one of the most enduring denier myths: that the satellite data didn't show the global warming that the surface temperature data did. As RealClimate wrote yesterday:

If you support the standards but not the certifiers, then what?

At my local Saturday farmers market, I stopped to buy some coffee at the local roaster's booth. I was eying the wares when I noticed that the spendy bags of coffee ($9 for 12 oz.) labeled "Fair Trade" didn't have the any independent certification of that fact.

I asked the guy behind the booth, and he said, "Well, it is fair trade coffee, and the owners pay the fair trade price, but they don't want to pay for the label mark because it just pays people here in the U.S. -- it just raises the price of a bag of beans, but none of that money goes to the farmers."

So I asked, "But how can the system work to certify fair trade buyers if consumers don't pay for that assurance? I'm sure you're actually paying a fair price, but what keeps the next guy and the supermarket from saying the same thing? Besides, what does it add to the price of a bag, anyway?"

He repeated his bit about the owners not wanting to spend the money on certifiers, and he said that going the certified route would have added a dime to every bag sold.

I said that I would have been willing to pay a dime more for a certified bag, and that I hoped he would tell the owners that, unless they could come up with a way to have truly independent but in-country certification (so the money spent on certifying compliance with fair trade practices went to the country of origin), I wasn't buying their beans or their argument about where the money goes.

I've been thinking about it more this week, while I drink some Bolivian certified organic, shade grown, certified Fair Trade coffee.