Climate Politics
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Can EPA run a cap-and-trade program?
The Obama administration has made very clear that they want Congress, rather than EPA, to take the lead in creating a national response to climate change. Despite their oft-repeated preference for congressional action, recently, EPA head Lisa Jackson had to once again reiterate that the agency had no plans to do a carbon cap. There […]
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American Petroleum tells lawmakers it supports carbon fee because it’s easier to demonize
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The effort of Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to craft comprehensive clean energy legislation that caps global warming pollution has brought some positive words from Big Oil and their political allies. In particular, the senators are considering a proposal by ConocoPhillips, BP America, and […]
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Is it a problem that more industry groups are meeting with key regulatory officials than enviros?
Some small hope has been renewed for a climate change bill out of Congress this year. But if the legislative process fails to produce a law, Obama’s regulatory levers will become more and more important — and how they evaluate new rules will come under scrutiny. So is it a problem that industry groups are […]
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Sixty or Fifty?
60 or 50? So much depends on those numbers. The news went barely noticed a few weeks back: almost every school district in the state of Washington that put a levy or bond measure on the February ballot won voter approval. Despite the worst recession in decades, citizens stood behind their public schools and agreed […]
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Don’t buy Obama’s greenwashing of nuclear power
On Feb. 16, while President Obama was in Maryland announcing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee for Southern Company to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, inspectors at the Vermont Yankee reactor were finding dangerously high levels of tritium, a radioactive cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater near the plant. The next week, the Vermont […]
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Using behavioral science to make smarter energy policy
On Friday, journalist John Fleck made a great point, comparing coverage of two new pieces in Science. One is about the latest potential climate disaster: methane venting from the seafloor in the Arctic. The second is about a promising new climate solution: using behavioral science to influence energy use. Not surprisingly, the disaster got tons […]
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Why are women being left out of climate decision-making?
When will we finally break through this damn glass ceiling?U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced an important new climate change financing group last week, but out of the 19 people named, no women were included. This is unfortunate because women will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change and are key to any climate […]
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Why not structure climate bills to win popular support?
Mainstream environmentalists tackling the climate crisis prioritize pricing greenhouse gas emissions over alternative policies to cool our fevered planet. The ACES climate bill that passed the House would weaken renewable rules, add massive offsets, and kill much existing EPA authority to fight climate change. The “simple” Cantwell-Collins cap-and-dividend bill focuses on an auctioned permit system […]
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Murkowski to Senate: Drill the Arctic or my state gets it!
Senator Lisa Murkowski (D-Alaska) gave a long impassioned speech when she introduced her “Dirty Air Act” – a Congressional Review Act resolution that would overturn EPA’s scientific finding that carbon pollution threatens public health and the environment. One of her complaints was that the threat of impending EPA Clean Air Act implementation would force the […]
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Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?
(Photoillustration by Grist)Financial blogger Felix Salmon has an essay in Foreign Policy called “How Locavores Can Save the World” — expanded, by the way, from a wonderful blog post he wrote after attending a panel discussion on world hunger at the Davos World Economic Forum in the company of Blue Hill Farm’s Dan Barber. Salmon […]
