Climate Politics
All Stories
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The dumbing and demeaning of politics is not a minor matter
In the spirit of celebrating good news wherever it appears, I would like to point out one excellent development in the presidential campaign. The candidates have flailed at each other so much about numbers — how much of that tax cut really goes to the top 1 percent? how much surplus is there really? — […]
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Al Together Now
The stomp of enviro feet leaving Al Gore‘s camp and heading toward consumer advocate Ralph Nader‘s Green Party tent appears to have put quite a fright into the vice president’s operation. The veep is spending valuable time nowadays campaigning in the Pacific Northwest and states like Wisconsin, places he should have locked up by now […]
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Questions that should have been asked in the presidential debates
Well, the “debates,” carefully controlled by the major political parties, are over. I guess it was too much to expect that hard or important questions would be asked. But the candidates are still on the road, where they might be queried by an unscripted citizen. Or by a reporter who believes that fitness to lead […]
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A Nader-do-well
If the first presidential debate was a contest to see who could memorize more numbers and offer crisper rhetoric replete with well-rounded sentences and flawless syntax, then Al Gore won. If it was an audition for national nice guy, then George W. Bush strutted out of Boston riding high. But the truth is that neither […]
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This is not what democracy looks like
I wish everyone would stop calling them “debates.” Even back when the League of Women Voters first televised confrontations between presidential candidates, they weren’t debates. At best they were stiff, unnatural political discussions. Now that the two major political parties run them, they are carefully controlled soundbite gotcha matches. Like most everything about our campaign […]
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Reid It and Weep
The annual rider battle is in full swing, with a number of lawmakers in Washington., D.C, trying to attach pieces of anti-environmental legislation to large, must-pass government funding bills. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has tacked a rider onto an Interior Department spending bill that would block federal agencies from adopting tough new rules governing hard-rock […]
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How can we make environmental laws work better?
Now that I’ve suffered under one firsthand, I can understand why people hate environmental laws. On a map of our farm filed away at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is a fateful dot. It stands for an endangered Siberian Chive, observed by someone decades ago. This dot popped up when we applied under Vermont’s […]
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Melbourne Place
Thousands of enviros and other anti-globalization activists took to the streets of Melbourne, Australia, yesterday, with the aim of shutting down, Seattle-style, a three-day World Economic Forum meeting of high-powered corporate leaders and policymakers, primarily from the Asia-Pacific region. “We have no vote on who these major world leaders are,” said Michael Gann, a protestor […]
