Climate Climate & Energy
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House Dems release 1,201-page climate bill with floor debate scheduled for Friday
In the whipsawing environment that is the House of Representatives, the vote for Waxman-Markey is back on for this week, scheduled for Friday. My sources put the odds of an actual vote at 70-30. The updated American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) is here (a big PDF). E&E News (subs. req’d) reports: House Democratic leaders […]
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Deniers like Pielke keep shouting down any talk of a climate change – extreme weather link
Would the New York Times have Bernard Madoff as a business columnist? Only if they hated business. So why does the NYT let John Tierney write a “science” column? The “founding principles” of his NYT blog are the clearest anti-scientific statement you will ever find by anybody claiming to be covering science (see “here“). And, […]
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The two most important questions that both critics and supporters of Waxman-Markey must answer
First, is the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill compatible with – indeed integral to – a national and international effort to keep global warming as close as possible to 2°C? Second, what would be the outcome if the bill failed? This is the basis of the 500-word post at Yale e360, in which they […]
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Nobelist Krugman takes on the “fantasists” of the “burn-baby-burn crowd”
Nobel prize-winning NYT columnist Paul Krugman has been doing some terrific writing on the economics of climate action (see Climate action “now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump” by giving “businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities” and “Krugman strongly endorses Waxman-Markey“). Now he writes on Friday’s important […]
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The top 10 ways the House GOP are like my two-year-old daughter
The idea for this Father’s Day post came when I was putting my daughter to bed a few weeks ago, and she started to repeat, “Want tiny dog” – one of her favorite stuffed animals. The room was dark, and so I asked, “Is tiny dog in the crib?” to which she replied, “Not yet” […]
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MacCracken: “The New York Times quote did not represent my views”
When we last left the New York Times, they were burying the exclusive they got on climate science impacts report that NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco called a “game changer” (see Memo to White House: The NYT buried the “exclusive” you gave them on the landmark U.S. climate impacts report). [It was, of course, purely a […]
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The cost of cap-and-trade: What MIT really thinks
The following post was written by David Hone, the climate change adviser for Shell. It it reprinted with Hone’s permission. The experts at the MIT Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change have long been advocates of cap-and-trade as an appropriate policy instrument to drive a reduction in national emissions. They also […]
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Was the Tennessee coal ash disaster really a once-in-a-lifetime event?
A new report from an engineering firm hired by the Tennessee Valley Authority identified factors behind last year’s disaster that unleashed more than a billion of gallons of toxic ash from a massive storage pond at the federal company’s Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee. It claims that the disaster was a one-of-a-kind event — but […]
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The oil intensity of food
Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. […]
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We are what we think: Why the press fails us and how to fix it
We are what we think. With our thoughts we create the world. — Buddha OK, first, let me hasten to say that I find myself, as most any physical scientist would, irritated by the ancient quote above. I expect a modern person to know, though the Buddha may or may not have known, that the […]
