Barack Obama
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Obama administration announces massive coal mining expansion
The future’s looking sooty.Photo: Tami Heilemann, DOIInterior Secretary Ken Salazar announced yesterday an enormous expansion in coal mining that threatens to increase U.S. climate pollution by an amount equivalent to more than half of what the United States currently emits in a year. A statement from Wild Earth Guardians, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife […]
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Bingaman tries to make policy out of Obama’s hopey-changey Clean Energy Standard
Is Obama wasting Sen. Bingaman’s time?Photo: The White HouseIn his State of the Union speech, Obama introduced an ambitious plan to encourage clean energy in the U.S. At least I think it was ambitious. Kinda hard to tell — it was vague. Thinking about it since, I’ve come to see the Clean Energy Standard (CES) […]
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President Obama's Trip through Latin America: Opportunity to Advance Action on Global Warming
President Obama will be travelling through Latin America March 19-23, 2011 with stops in Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador. This is a region that has countries that are: major emitters, key players in global warming negotiations, taking action and ripe for further action, and on the front lines of the impacts of global warming. As […]
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Still giving lessons in how not to communicate
The White House is just lousy at messaging across the board, as I and others have noted many times. Obama also seems to have bad luck. He endorsed offshore drilling shortly before the biggest offshore oil disaster in history. He embraced new nuclear power plants in a speech last February, and now we are seeing […]
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If President Obama calls it safe, watch out
Pondering whether “safe” means what he thought it meant.Photo: The White HousePresident Barack Obama is a good fellow at work in a difficult era, to say the least. So this post is not intended to be a slam on the president. Still, it is a good idea for Obama to be much more cautious when […]
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More drilling won’t help
We have a problem we can’t drill our way out of.Photo: arbyreedCross-posted from the Center for American Progress. Unrest in Libya and Egypt is driving up oil prices, stirring concerns that gasoline could hit $5 a gallon by summer. Like a smoker’s persistent cough, it’s another warning to change our ways. America sends nearly $1 billion […]
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Could US-Mexico agreement lead to cleaner and more efficient vehicles in Mexico?
This post was written by Rich Kassel. According to Forbes and other reports, U.S. President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderón have reached an agreement on resolving the two nations’ long-standing dispute over cross-border trucking. The two presidents met in Washington today, and supposedly agreed to a phased-in plan that would authorize both Mexican […]
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For once, developments in Washington could make things better on the farm
The outlook for small farms could be getting a bit sunnier.Photo: andyrobeI write on Grist about my small farm, but my day job is different. I’m an organizer for the Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs (CFRA). One of the things we do at CFRA is try to tweak federal farm policies in ways that help […]
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The Recovery Act: the most important energy bill in American history
If the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) had been an energy bill, it would arguably have been the single-most important piece of clean energy legislation in our nation’s history. It drove unprecedented new investments — both public and private — into modernizing America’s clean energy infrastructure. And its clean energy provisions alone have already […]
