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Control Your Emissions

British population think tank shames large families Got your 10-foot pole handy? You’ll need it for this story: U.K. think tank Optimum Population Trust published a report yesterday declaring that having a large family is akin to such eco-crimes as leaving lights on, driving an SUV, and tossing plastic bags in the trash. Forget carbon […]

This Land Was Paid By You and Me

Bush administration raises park fees, advocates cry foul The Bush administration is consistent-izing rates at 135 national parks, a move that will see some fees double. It will also tie future rates to inflation, raising them every three years. A National Park Service spokesperson says the shift is an attempt to simplify the current rate […]

Current Events

Wind power is controversial but should keep on keeping on, says report U.S. wind-power capacity has quadrupled in the past six years and could eventually produce up to 7 percent of the nation’s electricity. Easy-breezy? Not quite: Wind-industry growth lacks “any truly coordinated planning,” says a report from the National Academy of Sciences. Developers and […]

Interview with Pachauri

ThinkProgress has an interview with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC. Worth a listen.

The Brainstorm From Hell

Delegates gather in Germany to picture a post-Kyoto future The ongoing effort to figure out what in blazes to do when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 is getting a boost this week and next, with officials from more than 160 countries gathering in Bonn, Germany, for a two-week brainstorm. The U.N. Framework Convention on […]

Traded In His Chevy for a Cad Attack

Speaking in Detroit, Obama tells Big Auto where to go Presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) took his rhetoric to Detroit yesterday, challenging the U.S. auto industry to get with the times. “The need to drastically change our energy policy is no longer a debatable proposition,” he said in a speech to the city’s Economic […]

The RFFI way

The NYT has an update on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Northeast coalition of states establishing their own carbon market. It’s promising that they seem to have learned the two key lessons of the European carbon market experience, which stumbled coming out of the gate. The first lesson: don’t give away credits. Participants […]

It’s like riding a bike …

What happens when a major urban freeway burns down? Chaos, right? Gridlock! Except not: Traffic congestion was down Monday and Tuesday. The amount of time drivers were stuck in traffic moving slower than 60 mph was down 8 percent around the entire Bay Area, according to Caltrans data. Congestion on Oakland freeways, meanwhile, was down […]

Excellent writing

About eleventy-hundred people have written to draw my attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal about bike living in the Netherlands and Denmark. It’s worthy of the attention — it’s rare to see biking taken so seriously and written about with such an eye for detail and color, at least in a U.S. […]

Obama speech indicates new day is here

Dave gives Obama's speech short shrift. I would argue that this speech -- taking it to the automakers on their home turf, apparently to some applause -- is a big-time deal. The same could be said of the speech what Dave wrote in starry-eyed fashion when the outlines of the TXU deal became public: "The 'tipping point' concept is cheap from overuse these days, but to me this is the clearest sign yet that we have entered a fundamentally new stage in the fight against global warming."

Sure, the policy recommendations behind the speech may not be the boldest out there, but can you imagine a presidential candidate giving this speech even a year ago, let alone at this point in 2003? In 1999, Gore was running as hard as he could from Earth-in-the-Balance-like proclamations like this one by Obama today: "The auto industry's refusal to act for so long has left it mired in a predicament for which there is no easy way out."

I'm interested in others' thoughts. And keep your eyes on Grist -- as the race heats up, we will be conducting the definitive green interviews with presidential contenders.