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Coal Decliner

Idaho legislature passes two-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants In a two-for-one snub of President Bush and Idaho Gov. (and likely future Interior Secretary) Dirk Kempthorne (R), Idaho’s Republican-controlled legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill last week that would put a two-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in the state. The bill — which says […]

Cap in Hand

California bill would mandate serious greenhouse-gas emissions caps California will jump (farther) into the lead on state-level action to combat global warming if a soon-to-be-introduced bill requiring stiff emissions caps becomes law. The measure would mandate greenhouse-gas pollution cuts to 1990 levels by 2020; that’s 25 percent lower than they would otherwise be by that […]

Umbra on plants and global warming

Dear Umbra, My simple understanding of global warming is that we are introducing long-buried carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is shifting the balance, leading to a host of undesirable issues. CO2 is consumed by plants, so here’s my thought: Could we grow crops that consume a lot of CO2 (I’m thinking bamboo here, which […]

How’d they do it in the ’70s?

Today, it's a good bet that if you consider yourself an environmentalist, you lean left politically. That's especially true here in D.C. But it wasn't always. Once leaders in both parties fell all over each other competing to be known as champions of the environment.

Recently I had a chance to speak with the former chiefs of staff for both Democrat Ed Muskie and Republican Howard Baker -- the dynamic duo whose early-1970s Senate subcommittee produced the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, among other landmark environmental laws.

My basic question: How'd ya do it?

Leon Billings, Muskie's staff director, said one thing that didn't grind meaningful action to a halt was waiting indefinitely for more data to roll in: "We know so much more about the science of global warming now than we knew about the science of leaded gasoline and auto emissions in 1970 when we wrote Clean Air Act," he said.

His counterpart, Republican Jim Range, says: "Once we had identified the problem, there was a commitment on both sides of the aisle not to agree on everything, but to agree that you would work together until you had addressed the problem."

In other words, just sitting on your hands wasn't an option.

Let's hope we're fast approaching the day when Washington takes the same approach toward global warming. We can't afford to wait much longer.

An NYT profile of climate modeler Gavin Schmidt

The New York Times makes climate modeling the very essence of urban chic in a glowing profile of Gavin Schmidt, founder of RealClimate. Don't hate him because he's beautiful, people.

Not a helpful turn in the global warming conversation

The "Death of Environmentalism" boys are at it again. In an op-ed piece in the April 1, 2006 New York Times, Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue that we should stop arguing about the causes of global warming and start talking about adaptation.

Environmentalists and their opponents have spent far too much time debating whether global warming is caused by humans, and whether the transition to cleaner energy sources will be good or bad for the economy. Whatever the causes, warming is a genuine risk.

If the earth's temperatures continue to rise, we can expect to face melting glaciers and rising sea levels, warmer ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes, more frequent droughts and other extreme weather. Is the government ready?

No. Which is why we need a Global Warming Preparedness Act.

My first reaction? It reads remarkably like White House talking points circa 2002, when the U.S. Kyoto delegation tried to shift the conversation from prevention to adaption. You remember how it went: Why squabble over who's to blame? What we should really be doing is looking at how to adapt.

But perhaps -- and this is just supposition here -- the real purpose was a kind of media judo. You know, co-opt your opponent's momentum and use it against them. Under this theory, once people have to go through the scenarios of how to deal with global warming's effects, they'll take it more seriously. If that's the reasoning behind this framing I think it falls down on several points:

• Once you start talking about adaption, you implicitly concede the battle of prevention. It's very hard to go back.
• Who's to say the adaptation scenarios will scare? I guarantee you that should their "Global Warming Preparedness Act" be enacted, we'll see a raft of reports about the benefits of increased temperatures to American agriculture, the boon to the economy from the uptick in the flip-flop and airconditioner industries, etc.

For people still interested in working on prevention, this is an unproductive way to take the conversation.

Rebranding “global warming”

As reported in the most recent Daily Grist, a New York-based marketing firm announced that it will help with the rebranding of global warming. As we're all armchair marketers from time-to-time, how would you rebrand "global warming"?

Share your thoughts in comments and we'll send them to the experts.

Our Poverty & the Environment series comes to an end, but our concern doesn’t

The sun sets on our poverty series. Photo: Clipart. There’s something a little odd about ending a series on the subject of poverty — as we at Grist are officially doing today — when the issue itself will stubbornly continue to exist. That might seem, at first, like a laughable sentence. Of course poverty will […]

A virtual walking tour through an L.A. neighborhood with activists from Pacoima Beautiful

The tiny community of Pacoima, at the north end of Los Angeles, suffers from nearly every imaginable obstacle to a healthy urban environment. That means, for starters, lead paint, freeway traffic, airports, landfills, diesel trucks, chemical manufacturing, power plants, heavy industry, and overcrowding. It also means the linguistic and cultural differences that have historically defined […]

Defending the author from an unfair review

Sorry for the egregious lack of blogging this week -- a bit swamped with other stuff. Once I get that clone in the mail next week things should pick up around here.

I thought twice about whether to post on this -- I don't make a practice of kvetching about our own content -- but I must say I found Naomi Schalit's review of Richard Louv's new book rather uncharitable. Crabby, even. Lamentable.

Of course the idea that it's good to get kids out into nature isn't going to come as a revelation to a committed environmentalist. The book isn't written for them. But I'd wager even plenty of parents who self-identify as environmentalists find themselves, and their kids, stuck inside way more than they'd like. They face the same problems other parents do: restrictive neighborhood covenants, sterile suburban development, litigiousness, TV and video game ubiquity, and media-driven fear of the danger kids face if left unsupervised. The structure of modern life exerts a pull indoors.

To parents just trying to get by -- not "environmentalists" -- it's not a simple thing to take a step back and question something fundamental about the way life is structured. When you're in the trenches, those kinds of things are invisible, taken for granted. Sometimes it takes somebody digging up that instinct, that intuition, and validating it: Yes, you're right, it really is bad that your kids never interact with nature. More importantly: Here's what you can do.