Climate Politics
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Renewable energy is more exciting than cap-and-trade!
I’ve long thought that the message framing around renewable energy is much more appealing (Let’s make clean energy cheaper! Build the industries of the future! Cool technology and jobs for everyone! It’ll be like the dotcom boom all over again! But without the dumb names!) than that of carbon cap-and-trade (Let’s put a price on […]
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John McCain (R-Ariz.)
John McCain Sen. John McCain was, of course, one of the earliest congressional supporters of cap-and-trade, cosponsoring the first two pieces of climate legislation to come to the floor of the Senate in 2003 and 2005. During his campaign for president last year, he regularly touted his support for climate action. But McCain did not […]
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Reps take expensive trip to learn about climate, but still block action
What’s missing from this Wall Street Journal article about expensive taxpayer-funded congressional travel to exotic locations? The fact that seven of the 10 representatives who spent about half a million bucks to go see climate-change-addled penguins actually voted against the House bill that seeks address the concern. Despite jetting to New Zealand and the South […]
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Obama, Calderon, and Harper talk up vision for ‘low-carbon North America’
At a North American summit Monday in Guadalajara, Mexico, U.S. President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper released a statement on climate change: North American Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change and Clean Energy We, the leaders of North America, reaffirm the urgency and necessity of taking aggressive action on […]
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Tally of interests on climate bill tops a thousand
This post was originally published on the website of the Center for Public Integrity and is reposted on Grist with CPI’s kind permission. More than 460 new businesses and interest groups jumped into lobbying Congress on global warming in the weeks before the House neared its historic vote on climate change legislation, a Center for […]
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The Clean Air Act story: back to the beginning
In David Roberts’ story about Henry Waxman’s long struggle to strengthen the Clean Air Act (part one, two), some important lessons were unavoidably overlooked, because Waxman inherited, struggled with, and never did manage to remedy a serious architectural flaw embedded in the original 1970 version of the law. When I first lobbied on clean air […]
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Obama needs to take a stand on trade
When President Obama attends the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) meeting (or the more innocuous sounding, North American Leaders Summit) in Guadalajara he has the opportunity to keep some campaign promises. The SPP has been referred to as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on steroids. For good reason. As a candidate Obama was […]
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Sanders & Merkley introduce bill to fund waste heat capture [with video of cats flushing toilets!]
Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (Vt.) have introduced a fantastic bill that deserves to be part of the climate/energy package the Senate votes on later this year. The Thermal Energy Efficiency Act (S.1621) “would dedicate 2% of revenues from climate change legislation to fund combined heat and power, waste energy recovery, and district […]
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Energy interests to fund ‘astroturfing’ efforts during congressional break
Courtesy Daquella manera via FlickrAstroturfing – the corporate practice of funding initiatives that mimic “grassroots” support for an issue – has been getting a lot of attention these days, after it came to light that a pro-coal group was ultimately behind forged letters to Congress on the climate bill. But the practice is neither new […]
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Glaciers, cheetahs, and nukes, oh my!
Financial Times South Asia Bureau Chief James Lamont has written a flood of environment-as-political-dialogue stories this week! (Well, only two, but that constitutes a deluge in the world of environmental peacebuilding.) On Monday he wrote about India and China’s agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from […]
