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  • Why does Congress have Clean Air Act phobia?

    Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. It’s a sad state of affairs when members on both sides of the aisle in Congress seem to think it is a good idea to attack the Clean Air Act — the landmark law that Richard Nixon signed and George H. W. Bush strengthened. Yet the hits on […]

  • Japan’s wind farms save its ass while nuclear plants founder

    Wind turbine in Yokohama, JapanPhoto: shibuya246If Japan’s wind turbines were to get a new theme song, it would be Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries“, and it would ring out from the hills upon which they stand triumphantly, unscathed by the the country’s earthquake/tsunami double whammy, lifting their skinny, still-turning blades like antennas to heaven. While Japan’s […]

  • The Climate Post: The aftermath in Japan

    Japan’s been through a lot in just one week.Photo: Matthew BradleyLast Friday, Japan was rocked by a magnitude 9.0 quake — its most powerful earthquake on record, and the strongest anywhere in the world in the past 140 years — with its epicenter off the coast, creating a 30-foot-high tsunami that swallowed up whole towns and killed more than 5,000 people. […]

  • Majority of Americans still understand global warming, despite best efforts of Fox

    A new Gallup poll shows that 52 percent of Americans understand that global warming is due more to human activities than natural variation, and only 43 percent believe the opposite. That’s marginally better than last year — 50 to 46, barely holding on to a “believe in science” majority” — but way down from 2007, […]

  • Nervous China to break up with nuclear, run back to coal

    China is suspending its development of nuclear power plants amid rising public anxiety. As the country’s economy develops rapidly, nuclear power had been seen as key to answering the need for rapid growth in production of electricity. Some 28 reactors – or 40 per cent of the world’s total under construction – are being built […]

  • Sen. Jay Rockefeller: Climate science is ‘unequivocally true’

    Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. Opposing Republican efforts to forbid climate regulations, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Tuesday that the science of human-made climate change is “unequivocally true.” Rockefeller, a strong defender of his state’s coal industry, spoke out on the Senate floor against an amendment submitted to a small business bill by Senate Minority […]

  • A little background on the EPA’s new mercury and air toxics rule

    Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Today, the EPA announced the most important actions to clean up air pollution from dirty coal-burning power plants since the Clean Air Act was last updated in 1990. EPA’s proposed mercury and air toxics standards for power plants that burn coal and oil are projected to save as […]

  • If Senate Dems ‘compromise’ with Rockefeller bill, EPA rules are screwed

    Can Senate Democrats snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory? Yes, that was a rhetorical question. Politico has them bumbling around again, “scrambling” to react to an attack on EPA climate rules that has been telegraphed for months. I don’t know how much of this is genuine fecklessness and how much is Politico’s enduring […]

  • House committee votes to deny climate change

    Click for a larger version [PDF].Written with guest blogger Kristen Bartoloni, Researcher for Progress Central. Today, Republicans in the House energy committee voted not once, not twice, but three times [all PDFs], against amendments recognizing that climate change is real, despite the broad scientific consensus that “climate change is happening and human beings are a major reason for it.” They […]

  • Koch-funded group mounts cut-and-paste attack on regional climate initiatives

    Fresh off last year’s successful defeat of federal climate legislation in the U.S. Senate, the oil baron Koch brothers and their dirty-energy buddies are now bent on dismantling one of the nation’s last hopes for doing anything about climate change in the near term: regional climate accords. Today, a total of 32 states are active […]