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Hillary Clinton struggles to explain away her previous opposition to corn ethanol

Over the years, Hillary Clinton has voted against subsidies and mandates for corn ethanol in the Senate a number of times. If you know anything about corn ethanol, you know that’s a good thing. When Clinton released her (otherwise excellent) energy plan this week, it contained a whole boatload of … subsidies and mandates for […]

Colleges and universities team up with Clinton Global Initiative to green their campuses

This morning, at the US Green Building Council’s Greenbuild International Conference, hosted by Greenbuild 365, Bill Clinton made a significant announcement: Signatories to the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment — of which there are 427 at last count — will join the purchasing pool for energy efficient products and services that was established […]

How should the presidential candidates convey the issue of climate change to the public?

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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We've seen in Part I that the political climate is changing. How should presidential candidates talk about climate in the 2008 campaign?

My advice to the candidates is to love the global warming deniers and delayers to death and to handle the economic issue head-on. Invite them into constructive discussion. Elevate the dialogue. Emphasize without stopping or deviation that climate change is not a partisan issue, and it should not be a political issue. Talk about the massive new global markets awaiting innovative American technologies, about climate change as the next great challenge for the nation's genius, about how tackling climate change is our path to security and prosperity in the 21st century. It happens to be the truth.

Follow Barack Obama's example of truth-telling. He had the guts earlier this year to tell the Detroit Economic Club that we need to raise CAFE standards. He won praise from Time columnist Joe Klein this week for refusing to pander to voters.

Klein spent a day with Obama in Iowa and watched him handle a question about global warming. Obama talked about the need for a cap-and-trade regime to reduce carbon emissions, then said: "One of the themes of this campaign is to tell voters what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear ... So I've got to tell you there will be a cost to this -- and the utility companies will pass it along to consumers. You can expect a spike in electricity prices." Then he added the critical message: new technologies will eventually bring prices back down.

Obama also could have said this:

Lieberman introduces bill to designate Arctic Refuge as wilderness

Part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be designated as wilderness under legislation introduced today by Sen. Joe Lieberman and 25 colleagues. Wilderness designation for the 1.5-million-acre coastal plains region would rebuff seemingly nonstop attempts to drill for oil and gas there. Says Lieberman in a stroke of analogy genius, “America’s strength is not […]

How high a price on carbon is needed to make renewables competitive?

I’ve argued before that electricity cost comparisons are, in Walt Patterson’s memorable phrase, "an artifact of prior decisions otherwise concealed" — i.e., based on unstated moral, social, and economic assumptions. Most of those assumptions, for reasons of habit, custom, and occasionally pecuniary interest, are weighted toward the traditional way of doing things: a hub-and-spoke electricity […]

Planktos update

Remember Planktos, the company that was going to sail into the Atlantic ocean and dump a bunch of iron ore, hoping it would stimulate CO2 absorption and profit the company via carbon offsets? Well, Andy Revkin brings news that the company has set sail. Guess the cat’s out of the bag! (Planktos has been criticized […]

Politicians here and abroad are refusing to listen to arguments against biofuels

Gristmill reader KO has directed me to George Monbiot's latest article in the Guardian. You folks out there with "biodiesel / no war for oil" stickers are accused of perpetuating a crime against humanity. The article is a (concise and articulate) compilation of my most recent rants against biofuels. Some money quotes:

A call for moral boldness (and decentralized grids!)

Over at Rolling Stone‘s blog, Tim Dickinson says of this video: It just may change your opinion about John Edwards — in particular about how compelling a combination it is to be both a Southerner and an unabashed progressive. He starts his bit on global warming about halfway in. Decentralizing the energy grid gets a […]

Umbra on cats and birds

Dear Umbra, I have three cats, and live in a close-in suburb of Boston. I love the cats dearly, and let them outside during the day to wander about, and generally not have to live an indoor, sedentary, boring life. My question concerns their hunting instincts: I haven’t had any luck with any particular way […]

Oregon voters roll back destructive property-rights legislation

Sheepish Oregon voters have approved Measure 49, which significantly scales back development rights under the state’s Measure 37. When voters passed Measure 37 three years ago, it was the farthest-reaching legislation in the U.S. in terms of protecting individual property rights, requiring Oregon to compensate landowners for property-value changes brought on by state land-use decisions. […]