Climate Climate & Energy
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Game Changer: EPA Asserts Tar Sands Pipeline Environmental Analysis is Inadequate
This post was co-written by Lena Moffitt, Washington Representative for the Sierra Club Dirty Fuels Campaign. This week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) blasted the State Department’s draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline – asserting that the EIS is “woefully deficient” because “the Draft EIS does not provide the […]
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CSI: Climate scene investigator
How do we know that human activities are responsible for warming the planet? Because just like criminals, climate change culprits, such as smokestack or tailpipe emissions, leave behind distinctive signatures or patterns. All climate investigators have to do is look closely enough, and hardly anyone has been looking longer or more carefully than Benjamin Santer.
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Amanda Little Needs to Rinse the Oil Out of Her Brain
I’ve always loved Amanda Little’s writing – and her news-breaking, hard-hitting interviews. But her latest incarnation as a “pro-drilling environmentalist,” while clearly well-meaning, is so divorced from the economic and political reality of oil that it deserves an open plea to escape what is clearly too much time spent in the barrel of Big Oil’s […]
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Imminent UN vote on the right to water
On July 28, after years of grassroots pressure, the United Nations’ General Assembly will consider and debate a resolution supporting the right to “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation”. Maude Barlow, former Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly described the denial of access to clean water as […]
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Global CO2 emissions fall in 2009, but the past decade still sees rapid emissions growth
The temperature’s rising; can the big carbon-emitting countries take the heat? In 2009, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in China — the world’s leading emitter — grew by nearly nine percent. At the same time, emissions in most industrial countries dropped, bringing global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use down from a high of 8.5 billion […]
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How trains replaced solar-powered transport and gave rise to the Farm Belt
Greens like me tend to fetishize trains. And for good reason. Why risk your life in a private, energy-intensive pod, negotiating traffic and the dubious decisions of hundreds of other drivers, when you could be comfortably reading on a subway? Who would endure the indignities of the airport for a short flight, if a high-speed […]
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BP Fails to Make Top Ten
Fingers crossed. BP’s oil leak has apparently stopped shy of 200 million gallons spewed into the Gulf of Mexico and a few million more burned off into plumes of toxic smoke. Many have dubbed it the worst environmental disaster in American history. In my view, it’s not even close, but shares a great deal in […]
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Energy ministers meet in U.S. to discuss clean energy
Who will lead the global race for the clean energy future?Photo courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard via flickrThe race for the clean energy future comes to Washington, D.C. today — only symbolically if the U.S. doesn’t seize the moment. Energy ministers from 20 countries that account for over 80 percent of the world’s global […]
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The problem with ‘green group’ bashing
As Democrats in D.C. and their allies struggle to cobble together a meaningful climate bill, many are lining up to bash green groups. Some recent pieces have been excellent: Johann Hari’s ‘The Wrong Kind of Green‘ in The Nation. Others have been predictable: the folks at the Breakthrough Institute have stayed on message. Now here […]
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Ethanol gets skewered by recent CBO assessment
In its calm and measured way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just delivered a blistering assessment of the environmental value of corn-based ethanol. The CBO had been charged by Congress to calculate just what the public is getting for its investment in ethanol production: specifically, the $0.45/gallon tax credit that gasoline blenders get for mixing […]
