Latest Articles
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EPA will develop industry regulations for carbon sequestration
Setting aside questions of technical challenges and commercial viability, the U.S. EPA has announced that it will develop industry regulations for carbon sequestration by power plants. By next summer, expect exciting new regulations to “ensure there is a consistent and effective permit system under the Safe Drinking Water Act” for injecting captured carbon dioxide deep […]
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Can the House and the Senate agree on energy legislation?
The prospects for a successful reconciling of the House and Senate energy bills remain as iffy today as they were last month. How sad such failure would be at a time of record oil prices and a growing consensus of the need for urgent action on climate change.
The big obstacle right now is that Senate Republicans oppose a House-Senate conference. E&E News (subs. reqd.) reports:
"It looks like Senate Republicans are not going to agree to a conference, so we will probably see the same process on this bill that we saw with several other pieces of legislation this year," [Henry] Waxman [D-Calif.] told reporters after the meeting.
What is this alternative process?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) intends to reconcile the House and Senate energy bills without convening a formal conference committee.
Even this approach is no guarantee of success, as many roadblocks remain in Congress and the White House:
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Al Gore and the IPCC win Nobel Peace Prize
It’s official: Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change,” the Nobel committee said. The former vice president was […]
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Al Gore and the IPCC jointly win peace prize
Photo: Stephen Lovekin/WireImage Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Here’s the press release. Here is […]
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Friday music blogging: Vampire Weekend
The music blogs are all abuzz about a new band called Vampire Weekend, based on a three-song EP (the full album comes out in Jan. ’08). I don’t think you can get the EP at stores, but you can stream the songs on their website. I like it pretty well. It’s squaresville for sure — […]
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A conversation with Michael Pollan
In his 1996 book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the great food anthropologist Sidney Mintz concluded that the United States had no cuisine. Interestingly, Mintz’s definition of cuisine came down to conversation. For Mintz, Americans just didn’t engage in passionate talk about food. Unlike the southwest French and their cassoulet, most Americans don’t obsess and […]
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My Nobel Peace Prize prediction
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be jointly won by Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC. You heard it here first!
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Musicians put together anti-nuke video, petition
In an effort to excise a nuclear-power provision from the Senate’s energy bill, a group of musicians including Bonnie Raitt and Ben Harper has put together a short video and petition. Check it out: Also, it looks like Raitt and some of the other anti-nuke campaigners will be attending the Boxer event tonight. I wonder […]
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Gore’s effort to focus attention on climate change supports the goal of preventing wars
This is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. It was originally published on Salon.com.
What's world peace got to do with global warming? Perhaps everything. Or it will if things don't change fast -- if, in 10 or 20 or 40 years devastating floods and droughts displace millions of refugees and spur nations and tribes to desperate bloodletting. At which point, no one will have the slightest doubt why members of the renowned Scandinavian foundation thought former U.S. Vice President Al Gore was an obvious choice for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Speculation has been growing that Gore will be chosen for the prize on Friday. Regardless of the outcome, Gore is, quite simply, the indispensable player in the drama of mankind's encounter with the possibility of destroying the climatic balance within which our civilization emerged and developed.
As anyone who read the book or watched the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" knows, Gore has been troubled by and fascinated with the science of climate change since his undergraduate days at Harvard, where he first encountered the theory that carbon emissions are slowly causing the planet to overheat. He began holding congressional hearings on the subject the moment he hit Washington in the early '70s and has not let up since -- perhaps because he understood instinctively that it was not a question of whether changing the atmosphere's chemical balance would disrupt climate, but when, and how fast.
He recognized, too, that the incredibly hard task of turning around the world's energy economy would become impossible if we waited for global warming to announce its presence, stage left, with alarum and hautboys as Shakespeare might have scripted.
So for years he accepted the thankless role of Cassandra, the Greek prophet no one would heed. But unlike Cassandra he did not sit by to watch fateful tragedy unfold. Once, when I was particularly frustrated by challenges I faced in my job at the Sierra Club, Gore heard me out and replied: "Never, ever give up." That would seem to be his motto, as reflected in the thousands of speeches he has delivered, the Live Earth concert he built from scratch, the naysaying he has endured, the movement he inspired.
What's all that have to do with peace? Look at Iraq, Darfur or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- bloody sites that have engendered three Nobel Peace prizes. Twenty-first century conflicts seldom feature stable governments colliding, but rather collapsing societies attacking themselves. These are much harder to solve with diplomacy or peacekeeping troops. Prevention is the key.
The Nobel Committee has recognized this in recent years, awarding its prize to such previously unlikely winners as Iranian feminist Shirin Abadi, and Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of microfinance for the poor.
A quick list of trouble spots that climate chaos could ignite would include:
