Climate Politics
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Enviros cringe as Senate committee approves energy bill
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved an energy bill on Wednesday that has the environmental community up in arms. The plan, enviros say, relies too heavily on fossil fuels and doesn’t do enough to advance renewable energy. The American Clean Energy Leadership Act was approved by a vote of 15-8. The bill passed […]
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House ag chief Peterson: what, me worry about a warming planet?
Peterson, right, with combine rep: With climate change and big diesel-guzzling combines, we can grow lots of corn!After researching my story last week about the ag lobby’s attempt to turn Waxman-Markey into a cash cow for the agrichem and ethanol industries, I assumed that Waxman would quietly make some unspeakable deal with House ag chief […]
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It’s time to act “after many years of dithering and delay”
The Administration has put together a terrific new website, globalchange.gov, on its landmark 13-agency report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. Every possible summary and graphic you could want is there – heck, they even have the embed codes for their slideshow: GlobalChange.Gov-US Impacts Summary [vodpod id=Video.16092247&w=425&h=350&fv=] If you didn’t catch the live […]
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Who, really, is inciting Americans to violence today?
NYT columnist Frank Rich has a terrific column on the hate-mongering being pushed by the some of the right-wing media these days, “The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers“: WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the […]
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Week of Aug. 3 planned for cap-and-trade markup, given “50-50 or better odds”
Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to wait until the week of Aug. 3 to mark up climate change legislation in order to have a series of hearings on the issue and the bill first, she said today. This timetable, reported late last week in E&E News PM (subs. req’d), is […]
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White House hopes new climate report is a ‘game-changer’
Hey, remember the Florida Keys? You might have to, considering they won’t be there much longer if we continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at current rates. Have plans to check out the Lone Star State? Well, you might want to get there soon, as Texas can expect up to 100 days of temperatures […]
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Obama’s voice absent from release of big climate report
The podium awaits you, sir.Courtesy JoshBerglund19 via FlickrOn a day when the executive branch released a major report on the effects of climate change already underway in the United States, where was President Obama? Not at the official release of “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.” Two of his top science officials, John […]
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Congress is the problem
Felix Salmon blogs at Reuters about the seeming exhaustion of Obama’s political capital — on both climate change and financial regulations, he just can’t seem to get what he wants out of Congress. I think Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent both have the appropriate response: the problem here is not Obama, but Congress. Indeed, the […]
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The faint silver lining of the Waxman-Markey clean-energy-mandates cloud
The Waxman-Markey bill would require that 20% of the nation’s power supply come from clean energy (15%) and efficiency (5%) by 2020. But wouldn’t the U.S. have reached those mild targets without any government intervention, through natural market growth? Would the bill’s mandates have any effect at all? A spate of recent analyses have argued […]
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Do as Heartland says, not as it does
If you’re a green blogger who wants to cover a Heartland Institute event, you better pony up hundreds of dollars in entrance fees or you’re not allowed inside. But if you’re a Congressman holding a hearing on global warming and you don’t invite a spokesman from the Heartland Institute to testify, you’re a fascist who […]