Latest Articles
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Vote early and often
I don’t usually pay much attention to the Weblog Awards, but it has come to my attention that the odious skeptic blog Climate Audit has marshaled its flat earth fanboys to push it in the lead for “best science blog.” That just ain’t right. Unless you want to hear Glenn Beck repeating a new talking […]
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Food companies damaging climate through deforestation, says new report
The makers of such familiar products as Pringles, KitKat, and Philadelphia cream cheese are contributing to deforestation and climate change, says a new report from Greenpeace. Companies like Unilever, Kraft, and Nestle use palm oil from Indonesia in their products. And guess what happens in Indonesia when the palm-oil peddlers come calling? Virgin forests are […]
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America’s Climate Security Act goes before Boxer’s Environment Committee
Well, so much for enjoying Boxer's continued grilling. Early in the hearing, after one brief but blistering round of questions, she had to depart for votes on the Senate floor. She passed the gavel down to Joe Lieberman, who also had to leave, and down it went until it reached Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who closed up the hearing -- a brief one by Senate standards.
Sanders remains the only member of the committee asking serious questions about renewable energy. He pokes the most significant holes in the skeptic argument that drastically decreasing our carbon consumption will also drastically decrease our standard of living.
It's nice having heroes, but he needs more support.
Here are links to opening statements from Chairman Boxer (D-Ca.) and Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Ok.) and testimony from the witnesses, submitted for the record:
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Clinton, Daley to green Sears Tower, other Chicago landmarks
The tallest building in North America is officially going green, along with a few of its Windy City counterparts. At a green building expo in Chicago yesterday, former President Bill Clinton and eterna-Mayor Richard Daley announced a partnership to retrofit landmarks including the Sears Tower and the Merchandise Mart, the nation’s largest commercial center. Using […]
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America’s Climate Security Act goes before Boxer’s Environment Committee
Today is the first hearing on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill in the full Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Now that we're out of subcommittee, the expert witnesses aren't all cleverly selected special guests of the bill's authors. So we're hearing, right now, from people like Anne E. Smith, vice president of CRA International, which represents some, shall we say, unsavory anti-environmental companies.
This is not a mark-up hearing, so the bill won't be changing shape today. Events like this are in large part Kabuki theater -- events with the patina of a fact-finding mission, meant to provide members who already plan to vote "yes" or "no" on the legislation with the expert cover they think they need to do so. But there is, I suppose, the off chance that people like Smith and Dr. Margo Thorning of the American Council for Capital Formation will knock an on-the-fence senator away from supporting this or other, stronger bills.
More likely, though, it will just create an opportunity for Boxer to smack Smith around for not disclosing the fact that her company works on behalf of Arco, Haliburton, Exxon Mobil, and on and on, and for Jonathan Pershing of the World Resources Institute to make people like Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) look like idiots.
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Obama condemns mining reform package as too hard on the mining industry
Barack Obama is ticking me off. First he opportunistically attacks Clinton for not being enthusiastic enough in her support for corn ethanol — which he knows perfectly well is an environmental dead end. Then … this: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he does not support mining reform legislation that recently passed the House of […]
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Seattle-area voters tied the knot
In the Seattle metro region, voters just sank an $18 billion transportation megaproposal that would have built more than 180 lanes miles of highway and 50 miles of light rail. But so far, the mainstream press has missed one of the most important stories of the year. The real story isn't tax fatigue, it's this: perhaps for the first time ever in the U.S., a critical bloc of voters linked transportation choices to climate protection.
In the run-up to the vote, a surprising amount of the debate centered on the package's climate implications. (The state has committed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and many cities, including Seattle, have been national leaders on climate.)
The opposition argued global warming. So did the measure's supporters. If you don't believe me, see, among others, the Seattle P-I (yes), The Stranger (no), the Yes Campaign, the Sierra Club's No Campaign, the right-leaning Washington Policy Center (no), and even the anti-tax/rail No Campaign, which oddly enough kept trumpeting the Sierra Club's opposition as a primary reason to vote no.
The turning point may have been when King County Executive Ron Sims suddenly withdrew his support. He cited the climate-warming emissions from added traffic as one of his chief objections -- he was thinking about his granddaughters, he said, not just the next five years.
The funny thing was, there was a heap of confusion and disagreement over the proposal's true climate impacts, mainly because no one had conducted a full climate assessment of the measure. But climate clearly weighed as a factor for a critical bloc of voters on both sides of the issue. In fact, Prop 1 may be the last of its kind, at least in the Pacific Northwest: a transportation proposal that lacked a climate accounting.
Obviously, there were more factors in play than just the climate. Taxes and traffic congestion mattered too. But what ultimately may have tipped that scales is that Puget Sound voters are reluctant to expand roads because they lock us into decades of increased climate pollution.
It's pretty well accepted that Seattle-area voters are receptive to environmental messages -- and in this case there were smart and well-informed greens on both sides of the debate. But green or not, the biggest problem for a certain segment of voters may have been that there was no comprehensive accounting of the climate impacts of the project -- one that included the roads, the rail, and the probable effects on land use.
So what's the lesson?
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Misleading Shell Oil ads removed from British media
Shell Oil has removed ads from Britain’s media after the country’s Advertising Standards Authority criticized the company’s claim to consumers that “we use our waste CO2 to grow flowers.” A complaint from activist groups estimated that perhaps 0.325 percent of Shell’s emission of poor, misunderstood CO2 emissions are used to grow flowers.
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Fiji Water announces plan to become carbon negative
A bold new plan to bypass carbon neutrality and become carbon negative has been announced by, of all things, a bottled-water company. Fiji Water has announced specific goals to pursue renewable energy, forest preservation, and water conservation, and will buy carbon offsets to cover 120 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Which is good and all, […]
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