Climate Climate & Energy
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LCV calls out Chevron hypocrisy
The League of Conservation Voters beat me to punch in trashing Chevron’s recent greenwashing ads, with "I Will Point Out Hypocrisy": In train stations, at bus stops, online, even on our coffee cups, Chevron ads are trying to convince us that the key to ending our energy crisis is individual action. Over pictures of everyday […]
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I finally got to see Bill McKibben in action
I’ve read Bill McKibben’s work. I’ve admired Bill McKibben’s work. Hell, I’ve even been lucky enough to edit Bill McKibben’s work. But not until Friday did I meet the man in person. A featured speaker at Greenbuild, McKibben — tall, slight, and soft-spoken — held a crowd of hundreds in thrall as he outlined the […]
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Carbon is forever
Nature reports that a quarter of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels hang around, essentially, forever. If humanity is to avoid sending the climate into a runaway chaos state, we have to emit far less carbon, fast.
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The New York Times blows the bark beetle story
The so-called paper of record ran a major story Tuesday on the country’s most infamous climate-driven pest, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West.” Great story, other than neglecting to mention climate change. It’d be like an article on an outbreak of avian flu that left out any discussion of birds. So […]
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Europe, pioneering ways to fubar a carbon trading system
For the first years of the European Union’s cap-and-trade program (the EU ETS, for acronym lovers), permits were given away to polluters for free. Not only were they given away, but they were wildly overallocated based on inflated baseline numbers, meaning that the early years of the program produced far less in the way of […]
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Big drop in U.S. electricity consumption confounds utilities
Big drops in electricity consumption across a range of U.S. markets have utilities sweating, scratching their heads, and rethinking their business plans. U.S. electricity consumption, especially household consumption, has typically grown by some 1 to 2 percent a year, but in markets from Colorado to Minnesota, household energy use has dropped anywhere from 3 to […]
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NOAA: Second warmest October on record
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reports: Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the second warmest on record for October and ninth warmest on record for the January-October year-to-date period. Given that this report is just out, I’m assuming they have sorted out the data entry issues that […]
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Shell Oil can’t drill in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea, says appeals court
Shell Oil’s plans to drill in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea have been shot down by a federal appeals court. The Minerals Management Service failed to take a “hard look” at the impact of drilling on whales and subsistence hunters, the court ruled, and there remain “substantial questions as to whether [the plan] may cause significant harm […]
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Cash from U.K. carbon auction may not go toward fixing climate
The United Kingdom held the E.U.’s first carbon-permit auction this week, raising some $80 million — but has angered environmentalists by socking away the funds into general coffers instead of promising to put the money toward tackling climate change.
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Climate activists take heart from Obama’s remarks
It was snowing in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday morning as hundreds gathered to ask for action — the kind of omen that those of us who obsess about global warming look for. Maybe the incoming Obama administration really is ushering in a new climate to our nation’s capital! The president-elect certainly sent a strong […]
