Climate Climate & Energy
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The good and bad news from the Tianjin climate change negotiations
Countries meeting in Tianjin, China are trying to make final progress before the world comes together in Cancun. There are some essential elements that need to be agreed in Cancun to prove that this process can deliver real action, to begin to implement key elements of the international response to climate change, and to lay the foundation for further commitments beyond Cancun. So how are we doing a little over one week into the Tianjin session? We have mixed results.
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Plastic bag bans sweep cities across nation
Cities in states across the union (including Texas) are enacting plastic bag bans. Only the "Save the Plastic Bag Coalition" stands in the way.
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China and U.S. Cooperate To Deploy Advanced Coal Technology
TIANJIN, China – Though Chinese workers this week celebrated the 61st anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, a holiday season as significant as July 4 in the United States, a swarm of construction laborers at China’s GreenGen coal-fired gasification power plant were busy welding pipes, fitting massive joints, and bending steel […]
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Two Senior Diplomats Frustrated By Pace of Tianjin Climate Conference
TIANJIN, China — Two of the significant participants in the UN climate change conference here, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres and chief U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing, have made it known they are increasingly unhappy with a tangled negotiating process that seems unable to move beyond producing more snags. Over the last 18 hours or so, […]
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Coal companies charged with massive violations of water pollution laws in Kentucky
Environmentalists took the first step toward bringing a lawsuit against three mining operations in Kentucky for a huge number of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act.
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Oklahoma Town Fights Coal Ash
This post is the latest in our series of community coal ash profiles. It was written by Sierra Club Apprentice Flavia de la Fuente. When a company named Making Money, Having Fun LLC (how’s that for Orwellian?) applied for a permit for a commercial disposal facility to dump coal ash (along with waste oil and […]
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Prop 23: Green Jobs vs. Dirty Energy
In our moments of hope, we look to and count on our elected officials to make the right decision. In our moments of cynicism, we fear that they will instead make wrong decisions in order to make nebulously defined “special interests” happy. So when our elected officials take bold action on critical issues, it’s important […]
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Conserving and rebuilding soils in the U.S. and around the world
Shelterbelts, strip cropping, and no-till practices are helping to keep American soil from blowing away, and African countries and China are planting "green walls" to keep the desert at bay. But overgrazing is going to be a problem.
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How air-conditioning is baking our world
Q & A: Stan Cox explains in his new book, Losing Our Cool, how AC is a big driver of global warming and unsustainable development.
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The polluters' newfound concern for the poor
Oil companies think they will deliver the masses from poverty and the World Bank seems to agree. But do their projects actually support the poor?