Climate Politics
All Stories
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Climate disobedience: Is a new “Seattle” in the making?
This guest essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. Research assistance was provided by Sean Nortz. Will climate disobedience heat up in the months before Copenhagen?In the early morning of October 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more […]
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Alaska legislature rebukes Palin, but Alaskans may still lose
The odd saga of stimulus money and the state of Alaska drew to a close yesterday, ending in what should have been a big win for efficiency, as the state legislature voted to override former-Governor Palin’s veto of efficiency money. Unfortunately, this may be a victory in name only, as the Department of Energy has […]
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A policy framework for investment in energy efficiency retrofits
This post is co-written by Benjamin Goldstein, Reid Detchon, and Kurt Shickman and reprinted with permission of the Center for American Progress. Investments in building efficiency retrofits can simultaneously address the challenges of economic recovery, energy insecurity, and global warming by laying the foundation for sustained economic growth, driving demand in the construction and manufacturing […]
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Key to climate bill, offsets have plenty of critics
America’s first major stab at tackling global climate change comes in the form of the American Clean Energy Security Act, a massive piece of legislation that would touch nearly every corner of the U.S. economy. The bill, often referred to as “Waxman-Markey” after its principal sponsors in the House of Representatives, contains provisions for clean […]
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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 […]
