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  • “Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up

    James Cameron’s eco-pic has become the top grossing film of all time (see “Post-Apocalypse Now“).  And that did not endear him to the anti-science crowd.  Glenn “brainless frog” Beck said Cameron “is officially running for Antichrist.”  Cameron has now responded, as Brad Johnson reports in this repost:   Avatar director James Cameron thinks global-warming deniers […]

  • Global cooling bites the dust: Hottest January followed by second hottest February.

    Last month, NOAA reported the world experienced the warmest January in both satellite records.  And NOAA just reported (here) that it was the second warmest February on record in both satellite records.  Now the UAH satellite data shows record-smashing temperatures in the first half of March: The yellow line is the 20-year average temperature, the […]

  • Pledge to End Mountaintop Removal in 2010

    From Nell Greenberg. I have spent the last two years working to end the devastating, unjust practice of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). This is a practice that requires dynamiting the tops off of ancient Appalachian Mountains and contaminating families’ drinking water for a tiny tiny amount of our nation’s coal. I don’t live in […]

  • Popular thoughts about climate change

    Weather you’re a conservative, an American, or everyone else, we fear you may feel like just another statistic in this wryly scientific graph. —————————————————————————————————————————————————– Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of pun-usual green news just like this, sent out every Friday.

  • How Energy Efficient is a Doublewide? (Not very)

    Have you ever stopped to think about the energy efficiency of a doublewide?  DOE is about to do just that, having initiated a rulemaking to develop mandatory standards for manufactured homes (basically a building code) under order from Congress to finish by 2011.  I just drafted and submitted NRDC’s comments to the docket. Most people […]

  • How the West is Winning Against Coal

    There is so much good news coming out of the western U.S. these days on coal and clean energy. First up – another domino fell for the Blackstone Group. Blackstone had been funding the construction of three new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. (I’ve written about them before). Last month the River Hill plant […]

  • LA Turns Lights on Deadly Coal, Bright Clean Energy Future

      As I drive down the crowded LA freeway this evening, I will consider these facts: According to a fairly recent study, California’s costly dependence on faraway coal-fired plants in Arizona and Utah results in an estimated 67 million tons of global-warming carbon–“the global warming pollution emanating from these smokestacks is equivalent to the emissions […]

  • Halting tropical deforestation is in the U.S. interest

    Click to enlarge. “Want to Protect Farms and Ranches Here? Protect them there. Ending deforestation in the tropics isn’t just some tree-hugger’s cause.” Those are the opening lines of a new advertisement campaign run by the Ohio Corn Growers Association and Avoided Deforestation Partners which stresses the need to protect tropical forests in order to […]

  • Without major capital investments, this generation of Americans will short change the next

    From 1980 to 2007, total U.S. electricity consumption increased by a factor of 1.8, but total generation capacity increased by only 1.7 times. In other words, demand out-grew supply. For a while, that was fine — we had more toys than we needed, and real power prices declined for two decades as we made better […]

  • Without affordable clean alternatives, South Africa turns to coal

    South Africa’s finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has an op ed in the Washington Post that illustrates the multi-faceted challenges facing developing nations as they struggle to provide the affordable access to modern energy needed to pull citizens out of poverty. The piece highlights the current tension between such objectives and simultaneous concerns about the environmental […]