Congress
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Pushing for local food in the farm bill: An interview with Chellie Pingree
Rep. Chellie Pingree introduced the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act to make sure small-scale agriculture doesn't get left out of this year's farm bill.
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Wind works — time to pass the Production Tax Credit
The wind industry supports more than 75,000 American-made jobs around the country, and is helping to lead the way toward America’s clean energy future. But right now Congress is holding the fate of thousands of those jobs in its hands. The Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal policy that helps level the playing field and […]
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Celebrity chefs and food movement leaders tell Congress: ‘This farm bill stinks’
With the bill on the Senate floor, Mario Batali, Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and nearly 70 other food luminaries have signed a historic letter to Congress.
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Bathtub photo lands coal activist in child-porn hot water
West Virginia coal activist Maria Gunnoe testified before a congressional committee about her community's ruined water supplies. Instead of action, her evidence triggered a conversation with the Capitol Police.
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Critical List: Massive tariffs for Chinese solar panels; Bike to Work Day
The Commerce Department announced that the U.S. could put tariffs of up to 250 percent on Chinese solar panels imported into the country. It’s Bike to Work Day! First the Arizona Congress wanted crazy legislation to ban all government work on sustainability, now it’s the New Hampshire Congress. So trendy!
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Cleantech spending drops 75 percent in five years
A new paper from Brookings, the World Resources Institute, and the Breakthrough Institute shows exactly how much trouble cleantech is in: Depressing, no? Some of that rapid decline comes from the end of stimulus spending. But the researchers found that even discounting those funds, federal support for cleantech dropped 47 percent between 2011 and 2012.
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Critical List: Americans link climate change to hot weather; yet another Keystone XL bill
The majority of Americans are convinced that climate change had something to do with the warm winter and last year’s super hot summer. Good news: They believe climate change has consequences. Bad news: When it gets cold, they’ll be convinced we fixed it. House Republicans are going to vote today on yet another bill that […]
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Critical List: Lucy Lawless occupies oil ship; Maine fisherman catches child-sized lobster
Lucy Lawless, best known for her role as Xena, Warrior Princess, teamed up with Greenpeace to occupy an oil drilling ship. The panel on Morning Joe posited that environmentalists think the alternative to fossil fuel is granola. (In case this wasn’t clear already, everyone on Morning Joe is a jerk.) A Pew Research Center poll […]
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‘Gasland’ director arrested for filming in Congress
This is probably not the way for the U.S. to regain our recent huge losses on the Press Freedom Index. Josh Fox, director of the Oscar-nominated (and Emmy-winning) documentary Gasland, was arrested this morning for trying to film a committee meeting about fracking.