Articles by Joseph Romm

‘Purpose,’ McCain’s new energy ad, features wind turbines he voted against

McCain has a new ad titled "Purpose":

The AP critiqued it with a piece titled, "McCain energy ad short on specifics." Okay, mainstream media, half credit.

The ad has a much bigger problem than lack of specifics -- McCain is trying to get a political boost by claiming he will champion popular clean energy technologies that he, like President Bush and most conservatives, has consistently opposed:

Framing the energy revolution like the computer generation

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Kari Manlove, fellows assistant at the Center for American Progress.

This week's issue of the Economist features a commemorative piece on Bill Gates, who stepped down from his position as Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft last week.

Gates had an arguably turbulent career, due to his aggressive or monopolistic business tactics as the lead in the industry, but one that has been inconceivably successful and world-changing. Among the many legendary attributes the Economist article points out is Gates' determination and eventual responsibility for personalizing computers in the form of desktops. Gates made the technology accessible to individuals, homes, and businesses rather than keeping giant computers centralized.

White House disses Supreme Court, kills $2 trillion savings

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

The Wall Street Journal published new material ($ub. req'd) on the White House's emasculation of last year's Supreme Court global warming decision: The court told the EPA that the Clean Air Act requires it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The White House seeks to nullify that decision by stuffing the EPA document down a memory hole and substituting antithetical language. The WSJ has seen the EPA's draft document and reports:

The draft ... outlines how the government, under the Clean Air Act, could regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from mobile sources such as cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats, and from stationary sources such as power stations, chemical plants and refineries. The document is based on a multimillion-dollar study conducted over two years.

Satellite images show rapid deforestation in Papua New Guinea and Amazon

The following post is by Ken Levenson, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

Pushed from center stage by the expected record arctic ice and permafrost melt, tropical rain forest destruction has been elbowing its way back through the smoke and into view. This Mongabay article, "Papua New Guinea's rainforests disappearing faster than thought," is one such look:

Previously, the forest loss was estimated at 139,000 hectares per year between 1990 and 2005. But now?

Using satellite images to reveal changes in forest cover between 1972 and 2002 ... Papua New Guinea lost more than 5 million hectares of forest over the past three decades ... Worse, deforestation rates may be accelerating, with the pace of forest clearing reaching 362,000 hectares (895,000 acres) per year in 2001. The study warns that at current rates 53 percent of the country's forests could be lost or seriously degraded by 2021.

Stunning. Adding insult to injury -- the good news as reported last Thursday in the New Straits Times: