Climate Politics
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Memo to Congress: Don’t dawdle on climate bill
Even though the Senate hasn’t even begun debating a specific climate bill, naysayers at home and abroad are already declaring as dead on arrival the effort to pass climate and energy legislation in the United States this year. And who can blame them? Like health-care reform — and bad teenage slasher movies — the whole […]
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James Hansen on Obama, climate legislation, and the scourge of coal
Cross-posted from Earth Island Institute. A recent article in the New York Times pointedly asked whether NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen still matters. The subtext to the story was, has Hansen been too vocal and too unconventional in his criticism of Washington’s response to climate change to be taken seriously? Hansen, dubbed by some […]
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Feed-in rates: a hard sell
I really feel for the renewable energy activists in the U.S. who are trying to get the most successful policy in the world, feed-in tariffs (FITs), implemented. The problem in the U.S. is, ironically, that so many U.S. renewables advocates actually oppose the idea (because it wasn’t theirs), and even now that everyone seems to […]
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Big Ag on climate change: “What, me worry?”
Once again, topics covered at length in the pixels of Grist are slowly percolating out into the wider media world. Newsweek over the weekend posted an article by Jeneen Interlandi about the grave effects of climate change on agriculture, summed up as the triple threat of “droughts, bugs and big storms.” And once again, we […]
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Washington Post doubles down on fact-free climate denial
Is there any media outlet that enables global warming denial more effectively than the Washington Post? After today’s op-ed from one of the top deniers in the world, the latest in a long line of denial op-eds, you have to wonder. While Fox “News,” Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review all deliver […]
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G20 cans fossil-fuel subsidies, but fails to make other climate-conserving moves
Let man tear asunder.On Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama formally announced that the world’s 20 major developed and developing nations had agreed to gradually eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies. It was the only climate-specific policy directive to come out of the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh, and it fell far short in the view of […]
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Why the EPA ‘dissenter’ story needs to die
More on the spin cycle.Courtesy katiew via FlickrSay I’m a high-school drama teacher. My education and career experience are in teaching drama. I happen to have a side interest in mathematics and carry some unconventional theories about math. I tell the math department head at my high school that I want a say in drafting […]
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Climate protesters hit the streets in Pittsburgh during G20 meeting
Young activists from the Avaaz Action Factory joined the mass “People’s March” into downtown Pittsburgh on Friday afternoon, not far from the site of the G20 Summit, after holding their own climate-focused march in the morning. Their Twitter-friendly slogan is “G20 Climate FAIL,” criticizing what they say has been a lack of action toward a […]
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Does Schwarzenegger care more about tea partiers or the planet?
Like any Hollywood actor, and like any politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk a good game. And on climate, he talks a lot. He loves to promote inconsequential gab-fests like the Governors Global Summit on Climate Change. But when the rubber hits the road, will he actually, you know, do anything about it? Whether a […]
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Ontario launches comprehensive system of feed-in tariffs
Ontario, on Thursday, launched the province’s long-awaited program of feed-in tariffs in response to its ground-breaking Green Energy Act. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure George Smitherman, and Minister of the Environment John Gerretsen made the announcement against the iconic backdrop of Toronto’s cooperatively-owned wind turbine. This was the last in a […]
