Climate Politics
All Stories
-
![]()
![]()
Barcelona outcome: White House strategy is plea for more time
As climate talks wrapped up in Barcelona, the picture wasn’t nearly this pretty.Photo: MorBCNIt’s been 30 years since scientists gained a clear understanding of the dangerous consequences of continuously adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This week during five days of negotiations in Barcelona, the world learned again that the formula for solving global […]
-
Feed-in tariffs — the new school of thought
As a boy growing up near the Louisiana Gulf Coast, I remember looking out of the car window at times and seeing gigantic flames over the bayous: gas flares. Around 1970, the flaring of natural gas peaked. Oil prices were so low back then that marketing gas would not have been profitable. Today, far less […]
-
The ‘party of no’ becomes the ‘party of slow’
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room and co-written with energy team interns Jaren Love and Michael McGovern at the Center for American Progress. Senate Republicans are demanding lengthy economic analyses of progressive clean energy policy, despite having spent careers voting for and against major energy legislation without such delay. This week the Republican members of the […]
-
![]()
![]()
Kay Hagan (D-N.C.)
Kay HaganKay Hagan, junior senator from North Carolina, is not a shoo-in on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill, but she appears to be leaning toward supporting it. When asked in mid-October if she would support a climate bill with cap-and-trade, the senator replied, “We’re certainly talking about it. The Kerry-Boxer bill is … out there but […]
-
The Climate Post: The gods must be crazy
Fist things fist: If this section’s heading doesn’t look quite right it’s because there are a few r’s missing. That was true this week of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, a panel of Democrats whose Republican sparring partners boycotted work on the climate bill co-sponsored by Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. John […]
-
![]()
![]()
Soda lobby gets its game on
HuffingtonPost has a piece up detailing the food lobby’s full court press over a federal soda/sweetener tax: During the first 9 months of 2009, the industry groups stepped up their lobbying in Congress. They have spent more than $24 million on the issue of a national excise tax on sweetened beverages and on other legislative […]
-
![]()
![]()
Consumer Reports finds BPA traces in common canned foods
Bisphenol A, commonly abbreviated as BPA, is vile stuff–not the kind of thing a smart species knowingly introduces into its ecosystem. And if a species were to willfully foul its nest with BPA, it would at least be wise to keep it out of direct contact with food. That’s because BPA is an established endocrine […]
-
![]()
![]()
Blowing up our clean energy future
Last week, blasting began on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. This is a part of the country where dynamite routinely goes off—turning the region’s historic mountain ranges into dust for the tiny coal seams that lie beneath their surface. But Coal River Mountain is special, or, rather, you can decide whether it becomes special. […]
-
![]()
![]()
Climate psychology in cartoons: clues for solving the messaging mystery
Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CREDFor the climate-change message to finally sink in, for the 64 percent of Americans who don’t believe in the problem (according to a recent Pew poll) to start changing their minds, the place to begin might be the local high-school gym. Have a respected teacher—maybe from the science department—lead a public presentation. […]
-
![]()
![]()
What does recent Senate drama on the climate bill mean? Peak Boxer
There’ve been some weird goings-on in Congress around the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill over the past few days. So let’s take a step back and try to get a handle on how the story is unfolding. In the House, the development of the Waxman-Markey bill was a relatively orderly process. Waxman took control of the […]
