Climate Climate & Energy

What’s wrong with what we eat

Powerful stuff.

The Climate Policy Paradigm has reached its endgame

It takes effort to suit up in the quasi-business/academic garb of the professional environmentalist and enter the lion's den of DC politics or the state houses. Our beliefs are so fundamentally at odds with the very fabric of civic life that it requires an effort of will, particularly in the early years, not to scream bloody murder and run for the door.

Over decades, layers of accommodation and polite behavior have built up by accretion, while our rough edges have been worn down. The net result is a worldview -- we may call it the "Climate Policy Paradigm" -- that is so universally accepted that it goes unnoticed, yet its power is so great that we have abandoned the precautionary principle, environmentalism's central guide for action, with barely a murmur when the two came in conflict.

Two hundred people turned out to hear Ross Gelbspan speak at the Jamaica Plain Forum a couple months ago. He gave us an hour of unvarnished truth, summarized recent climate science, and drove home the reality that nothing short of immediate, transformative, global action is sufficient.

Climate campaign staff followed up at a "Global Warming Café," presenting our standard three-part story:

• first, we can turn things around, indeed we are already starting to do so;
• second, sound energy policy is good for America, because it will reduce dependence on foreign oil and create green jobs; and
• third, there are two things individuals can do: urge members of Congress to support emissions reduction bills and reduce our own carbon footprints.

The audience joined in small group discussions, contributing their own tips on mulching and insulating hot water pipes, but the disparity between the terrible picture Ross painted and the flimsy action activists were invited to take left a palpable pall in the auditorium.

Kentucky taxpayers pony up $400,000 a year for coal industry ‘educational materials’

Some crackerjack reporting by John Cheves in the Lexington Herald-Leader finds that the state of Kentucky sinks about $400,000 of taxpayer money a year into public campaigns that promote coal and even mountaintop-removal mining: The money is funneled through non-profit groups controlled by the coal industry … The money is used largely for statewide classroom […]

Clean energy kills

“You try to cap emissions and you kill more people than die if you don’t cap emissions. We will have killed people. We care about this issue the same way why we care about abortion. It kills people.” — Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of […]

ACEEE on the carbon-free energy source no one talks about

What if there were a source of carbon-free energy that in a single year in the U.S. drew $300 billion in private investment, supported 1.6 million jobs, and generated 1.7 quads of energy, roughly equivalent to the total energy required to run 40 mid-sized coal plants? We would drill anywhere, dig up anything, go to […]

Suing energy companies for global warming damages

I don’t have strong opinions on suing energy companies over global warming, but the notion does seem somewhat suspect. For starters, they don’t really have enough money to materially compensate the affected class of people — namely, everyone in the world. Legal liability taken with any seriousness at all would quickly bankrupt them. I’m all […]

Thinking the unthinkable

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune wonders: The end of coal?

Animated map shows changes in a warming world

Gotta see it to believe it? Behold: Climate Change in Our World, a project from Google Earth and British environmental and meteorological offices that gives a visual representation of what we’ve got in store. Using NASA satellite images and medium-case climate scenarios, the project uses time-lapse animation to illustrate predicted planetary changes through 2100. Viewers […]

Agitprop, enemy of the human race edition

A nice roundup of the clean coal PR campaign over on Salon.

California concludes majority of emission reductions will come through regulation

No state has done more to study the nitty-gritty of reducing emissions than California, and the California Air Resources Board recently revealed some of its thinking on how to achieve the state’s ambitious emission goals. Its conclusions should spark some serious discussion among those who — like John McCain — think cap-and-trade is going to […]