Climate Politics

See You Later, Regulator

Bush victory portends big and enduring changes in environmental regs U.S. EPA chief Mike Leavitt is touting last week’s election as “a validation of our philosophy and agenda,” and his agency and others that oversee environmental matters are expected to move aggressively to relax mandatory regulatory limits in favor of market-based systems and voluntary targets. […]

Rhymes with “ditty” too

The radio program "Living On Earth" had some hack from the Wall Street Journal editorial page on, along with Grist contributor Bill McKibben, to discuss what Bush's victory means for the environment.  It's interesting (and like Shalini, what I mean by interesting is "makes me reach for a noose").  You can read the transcript here.

Solution Dilution

Bush admin opposes recommendations in Arctic climate-change report Last week, details emerged about a comprehensive study on the accelerated and destructive effects of global warming on the Arctic, involving more than 300 scientists from eight nations and six indigenous tribes. Now some members of an eight-nation negotiating team are accusing the U.S. of working to […]

Cya-nara

State rejects attempt to repeal cyanide mining ban Voters in Montana decisively rejected Initiative 147, which would have repealed the state’s 1998 ban on open-pit cyanide leach mining, a highly destructive and polluting gold-mining technique that extracts small amounts of gold and silver diffused through large amounts of rock. Some 98 percent of the money […]

Sorry, No Vacancy

Washington initiative blocks further nuke-waste dumping at Hanford By a more than a 2-to-1 margin, Washington state voters passed Initiative 297, which blocks the U.S. Department of Energy from sending more nuclear waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the southern part of the state until current waste at the former nuclear-weapons facility is fully […]

Colorado Rocky Mountain High

Colorado passes renewable-energy initiative Colorado voters approved Amendment 37 yesterday, marking the first statewide renewable-energy portfolio standard in the U.S. to come directly from a popular vote rather than through the legislature. The state’s largest utilities will now be required to generate 3 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2007, and 10 percent […]

Irrelevance: The New Relevance

How did the environment play in the election? Funny you should ask … Remember all that earnest debate about whether environmental issues would play a significant role in the presidential election? Well, as it turns out … not so much. And in the Senate races we’d been keeping an eye on, one would also be […]

Moral values

Perhaps the most galling thing about last night's catastrophe was the news that higher turnout ultimately benefited the right, and what drove the turnout, the top issue for a majority of Bush voters polled, was "moral values."

In this context, "moral values" is code for "being freaked out about gay people getting married," though most in the media don't have the balls to say it.  Nearly a dozen states had initiatives banning gay marriage on the ballot, and the social conservatives turned out in force.

In our current political world, "moral values" has come to mean homosexuality, abortion, and professions of religious faith.  In other words, when we talk about morality we talk almost exclusively about private behavior.  How did this happen?

Environmental leaders and thinkers on what comes next

What do we do now? That’s the question one early riser asked Grist in a letter to the editor right after the election results rolled in. Faced with another four years of the Bush administration — an administration that has been roundly denounced as the most environmentally destructive in the history of the nation — […]

Bush appointee charges that EPA tried to thwart lawsuits against polluting power plants

It scarcely raises an eyebrow nowadays when the Bush administration’s environmental record is characterized, yet again, as a relentless attack on decades of protections for air, water, and wildlife. But the latest such charges come from a loyal soldier of the GOP, appointed by the Bushies to head up the enforcement office of the U.S. […]