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Anderson in the NYT today

With so much going on in D.C. today, we nearly missed this great story on our man Rocky Anderson in the New York Times today. Hey Rocky!

Bill McKibben questions thinking as usual when it comes to climate.

The old thinking, as author and thinker Bill McKibben explains in today's LA Times, goes like this: bigger is always better, growth is good no matter what, and a booming stock market is the ultimate measure of our success.

McKibben illustrates the kind of lopsided priorities that naturally flow when we're ruled by the bottom line, pointing to a scarcely-reported White House report that said the U.S. would be pumping out almost 20 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than we did in 2000, our contribution to climate change going steadily up -- against all warnings to the contrary.

That's a pretty stunning piece of information -- a hundred times more important than, say, the jittery Dow Jones industrial average that garnered a hundred times the attention. How is it even possible? How, faced with the largest crisis humans have yet created for themselves, have we simply continued with business as usual?

New thinking, by contrast, might go something like this: measure what matters.

For today anyway!

If Gore had asked me what I’d like him to emphasize to Congress, I would have said: The No. 1 most important thing to do is put a price on carbon. Carbon tax: better than cap-and-trade. Cap-and-trade: better than nothing. Cap-and-trade with auctioned permits: better than cap-and-trade without. We should be pursuing widely distributed, small-scale […]

Odds and ends

Substantively, most of what Gore said to the Senate echoed what he said to the House. There were a few things to note about the Senate hearing, though: Gore’s introductory remarks to the Senate (videos here) were a huge step down from his performance in the House. To my eye, he seemed shaky, hesitant, stiff, […]

Even by his standards, this was pathetic

I know that Sen. James Inhofe is a far-right bomb-thrower. I know he’s built a career out of saying absurd things, particularly about global warming. I know nobody expects anything different from him. Despite all that, I was astonished at his performance in today’s hearing. It’s not that he disagrees with Gore. Plenty of legislators […]

We bad

In his question/rant for Gore, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) cited a quote from Gore’s interview with Grist. It’s this: "I believe it’s appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is." The quote bounced around skeptic circles for a long time a while back. Suffice to say, it’s been yanked from […]

Liveblogging is the new black

Gore is just arriving at the Senate. The cameras are clicking! The crowd is buzzing! David is liveblogging! Join me below the fold. Sen. Boxer is looking quite stylish, no? Rules are being introduced. Hopefully it won’t take 15 minutes like in the House. Uh oh. Inhofe’s going already. Whining about getting the testimony late. […]

And they (heart) us!

You may find this hard to believe, but there are people we love even more than we love ourselves -- our readers! Especially those of you who help us fight the good fight by sending a li'l dough our way now and then.

And how do we show our love in return, aside from imparting daily wit and wisdom? By giving away nifty prizes to donors whose names are randomly drawn out of our recycled hemp hat!

Below, we show off a couple of unsolicited photos that came after our last fund drive. Look how attractive and intelligent and funny (and did we mention attractive?) our readers are! (And see, we really do give away those prizes!)

He was nice to Gore

One thing worth noting from this morning’s hearing: Dingell, whom I expected to challenge Gore aggressively, asked him not a single question. In fact, he was enormously respectful of Gore. And the way he attempted to pronounce Bjorn Lomborg’s name made it clear that it was not him who invited Lomborg. Maybe he really has […]

Gore errata

If you just can’t get enough livebloggin’, Brian Beutler also had a running commentary on Gore’s testimony over at his blog. Meanwhile, Inhofe and Co. are busy whining that they didn’t get Gore’s Senate testimony earlier. True statesmen. It looks like Lomborg’s testimony has been delayed so long that Gore will be in front of […]