Latest Articles
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A Gore-aphobia
The OMFG WILL GORE ENDORSE NOW?! stories are getting almost as tiresome as the OMFG WILL GORE RUN NOW?! stories got. One of the sillier aspects of the Silly Season, I guess. Noam Scheiber speculates why Gore might keep waiting, despite the many people begging him to enter the fray.
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New tool tracks financial ties between politicians and oil companies
Check out Follow the Oil Money, a tool from the Center for Responsive Politics Oil Change International. You can find out exactly how much oil money any politician is getting (by zip code). You can also see cool charts showing the oil connections among sets of politicians. Here, for instance, is a chart of the […]
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Aspirational green
The general public doesn’t seem as fired up as one might like. I’m starting to think that the thing to do is pivot completely from global warming to one-earth living. Global warming creates the condition of necessity. It is background. Foreground the positive opportunities: reducing energy bills through efficiency and green building; generating clean energy […]
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Canadian sportswriters better than 99.9 percent of U.S. media
It's truly depressing to find a better, more solid treatment of climate change and peak oil in the fricking sports pages of a Canuck paper then you will ever find in most U.S. papers. This sports writer schools the NHL and educates readers with a technique unheard of down here: assuming the readers aren't morons! What a nefarious trick!
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Dept. of Energy paints different picture of clean coal than president’s SOTU
Over at Solve Climate, David Sassoon is taking a nice leisurely stroll through the Dept. of Energy’s Carbon Sequestration Technology Roadmap and Program Plan (2007). Some astonishing sights await! First, he notices that despite some big talk in recent press releases, the DOE road map says frankly that "as a technology and a research discipline, […]
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The quest for the Perfect Late-Evening Repast is over; I win
You only have so many peak experiences in one lifetime, so it seems worth sharing the good news that I have found the perfect late evening repast. As with all the best snacks, this one begins at Trader Joe’s. In the North Seattle branch, they are featuring, and I quote, "dark chocolate almonds, made with […]
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Green sporting news for all you athletic supporters
Photo: Marco Scala via flickr Below lies another linky catchup post. I’m going to get more current in the future, I swear. (Current in the future? Is that even possible?) First, your Olympics roundup: Beijing 2008: Amid consistent concerns over air pollution, some 20 countries plan to hold their pre-Olympic training camps in Japan instead […]
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The state of play on green incentives in the stimulus bill
The following is a guest essay from Josh Dorner, deputy press secretary of the Sierra Club.
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Greens were heartbroken last year when a package of tax incentives for clean energy and renewables fell short in a 59-40 vote during December's energy bill battle royale in the Senate. Greens, renewables folks, and the Democratic leadership have been looking for a clear path forward ever since. As these particular incentives actually do stimulate the economy, attaching them to the economic stimulus package now being debated is attractive both on the merits (more on that below) and for political reasons.
First, some stimulus package is all but guaranteed to pass and be signed by the President (an increasingly rare outcome for legislation these days). As the Democrats have been pretty strict about offsetting new spending with cuts somewhere else, attaching green initiatives to this package sidesteps the issue of the finding the money to pay for them.
(For reasons unclear to anyone of sound mind, taking the money out of Big Oil's hide bedeviled the energy bill's clean energy tax package. Only in Washington could the idea of shifting tax breaks and subsidies away from Big Oil toward renewables -- even as ExxonMobil reports a record $41 billion profit -- not be a shoo-in.)
After the economic stimulus package negotiated between the White House and House leadership failed to include the energy incentives, the fight moved to the Senate. Sen. Maria Cantwell deserves major kudos for leading the charge. Though Senator Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, initially expressed skepticism about including the incentives in the stimulus package, Cantwell marshaled the support of nearly 40 other Senators -- including key Republicans.
In addition to the support she pulled together, key players like Bingaman, Domenici, and Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Finance Committee, also weighed in favorably. Support became so strong that instead of offering the incentives as an amendment, a bipartisan deal was struck to simply incorporate them into the package prior to Wednesday's markup. In the end, it was approved by the Finance Committee 14-7.
The $5.7 billion package includes quite a few goodies:
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Bar codes for salmon and shark-free moisturizer
Scientists found that up to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen washes off swimmers annually, and that the sunscreen contains chemicals that lead to bleaching corals. They estimated that up to 10 percent of corals were threatened by sunscreen-related bleaching ...
... the Central Valley, Calif., chinook salmon run, which had historically been one of the West Coast's strongest, fell to record lows this year, prompting concerns about collapse ...
... researchers in North Carolina studied how to raise fish for consumption in tanks ...
... a seafood consumer center in Oregon prepped for a program that would attach bar codes to salmon, allowing consumers to learn who caught the fish, where it was caught, and how it traveled to market ...
