Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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Coal ash sites kept secret, while industry works to prevent regulations
This week’s blog post is co-written by Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. If you lived near a dump site where the hazardous waste was so toxic it could increase your cancer risk to as high as a staggering 1 in 50, wouldn’t you want to know about it? […]
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Audit finds Tennessee Valley Authority misled on ash spill disaster
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Inspector General released a critical audit this week on the federal company’s response to last December’s massive ash spill disaster at its Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee’s Roane County. The incident involved a failure in a coal ash containment pond that released more than a billion gallons of toxic waste […]
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Daring protesters target mountaintop-removal sites
Four daring protestors accomplished something today that no high ranking member in the Obama administration involved in the recent mountaintop removal mining policy decisions has ever bothered to do: These four American patriots made an actual visit to a mountaintop removal site. They also went beyond the call of duty. Scaling a towering 20-story dragline […]
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Raining on the climate parade
At the Bonn climate talks, environmental groups showed their displeasure with Japan’s proposed carbon emissions cuts by comparing Prime Minister Aso with former U.S. president George W. Bush.Climate Action Factory via FlickrEven the skies wept last week when the latest cold front slammed into the ongoing effort to draft a new international climate treaty. The […]
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Bonn was disappointing, and Copenhagen will be too. Who to blame?
Photo: rolandFirst up, the climate talks are not going very well. After a rousing start in Rio in 1992, from which we returned with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the negotiations have been anything but inspiring. 1997’s Kyoto Protocol defined the rich-world actions – the first steps – that would put meat on […]
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The NYT buries White House “exclusive” on the landmark U.S. climate impacts report
The big story featured on the NYT website at 11 am Tuesday ain’t about climate: “With consumers in revolt, it was almost a relief that Tracey Ullman did not shy away from a bit of a roast at American fashion industry’s annual awards night” (see photo below). This is the NYT as People magazine, except […]
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“We’ll get the votes”: One more day to finish talks with farm state Dems
We would appear to be closing in on a final deal and ultimate passage of the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill by the House. E&E News Reports (subs. req’d): House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) yesterday said he expected a floor victory, although he added that no scheduling decisions have been made. “I think […]
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NOAA: “Business as usual” means scorching over inland US
If humanity stays near our current greenhouse gas emissions path, then Americans face hell – every state will be red: The thermometer in this landmark U.S. government report puts warming at 9 to 11°F over the vast majority of the inland U.S. – and that is only the average around 2090 (compared to 1961-1979 baseline). […]
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What the U.S. climate report says about your state
Sarah van Schagen recounted how climate change will mess with salmon, skiing, and other essentials of life in the Pacific Northwest — according to the Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report released today. As we say in Seattle, um… I don’t think we have a local saying for “oh crap.” globalchange.govLest you […]
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Gaia proponent Lovelock says it’s time to adapt to inevitable global heating
James Lovelock speaking at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in 2007Courtesy Jon and Lu via FlickrWhat is it with Preeminent Thinkers and intensely bleak public lectures? Two weeks ago Earth Institute economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an address at the Asia Society in New York, argued that climate change cannot be averted without massive use of […]
