I noted in my post earlier this week, The British Are Coming, that in spite of a stubborn, wasteful sticking to its guns on nuclear power and CCS, the new coalition government headed by the Conservatives has got an awful lot to recommend it – certainly on paper. Well, David Cameron has lived up to […]
I mentioned my visit to the local British Consulate-General yesterday and some discussions there. I also mentioned the enviable climate and energy politics across the pond in “Oh, to be in England” a while back. The three major parties in the UK have had their differences, but as can be evidenced by the new coalition’s […]
With apologies to Longfellow, not to mention Paul Revere, I want to recount my recent, close encounters with the British here in New York. As I mentioned in passing here, I was invited to a discussion at the Consulate-General to talk about my thoughts regarding the state of play on climate change; what you, gentle […]
Further to my last post below on the Alberta tar sands, here is a hopeful bit of news from Stacy Feldman at the excellent SolveClimate on a hard-hitting letter from Congress to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 50 members of the House, no doubt all with very high LCV ratings, warned the Secretary of the […]
I have never been one to diminish the chutzpah of folks trying to protect their special interests by embellishing the truth. I’m actually reading a particularly compelling – often horrifying – book right now called Merchants of Doubt. There are all sorts of obfuscation, misinformation, disinformation, lies, and other forms of wrong dealing documented in […]
This is just too good – and painful – to pass up: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c An Energy-Independent Future www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party
I had an interesting visit the other day, along with some other local climate change folks, at the British Consulate-General in New York. Over lunch, members of the Climate & Energy team talked with us about developments in the UK, some of the politics here in the US, and clean tech initiatives. I want to […]
David Leonhardt, an economics columnist and blogger for the “NY Times,” has just taken a good swing at the compelling arguments for a cap-and-trade bill. See Saving Energy, and Its Cost. (For a recent post from me on this and an exchange with an opponent, see The Facts of Cap and Trade.) Leonhardt has about […]
We are six months out from Copenhagen and further talks in Bonn, where the UNFCCC is headquartered, have just concluded. The release from the UNFCCC says the recent talks made “progress on fleshing out specifics” for a global climate change regime. There were 5,500 participants, including government delegates from over 180 countries, and reps from […]
When Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski proposed a change in how the Clean Air Act is administered, I was shocked but not surprised. See The Reaction from January. Thankfully, her resolution was defeated in the US Senate yesterday. This was an attempt at a radical reconfiguring of how environmental law has been practiced in this country […]
One of the recurring leitmotifs in this past winter’s hyper-inflated media coverage of the “debate” about climate science was that the public doesn’t care about the issue anymore anyway, and that the snow in Virginia and the stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit had soured people on the science, even though it has been […]
The indispensable (to me anyway) “NY Review of Books” has an insightful look at Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth. The reviewer is no less a personage than Nicholas Stern. In generally praising “McKibben’s engaging and persuasive book,” Lord Stern gives a particularly succinct summary of the history of the science and present state of the […]
The Danes have a lot to teach us. Samsø is a lab for the rest of the world on how to achieve carbon neutrality. Betsy Kolbert wrote a wonderful piece a couple of years ago: The Island in the Wind. And I’ve written here a few times about “convergence” and how we can have health […]
Now might be a good time to talk again about the promise of the electric or fuel-cell vehicle. Given the Gulf of Mexico disaster, one would hope that it must start to penetrate, sooner rather than later, that it is past time to leave the internal combustion engine behind. The naysayers talk about the “romance” […]
This is a characteristically compelling cover from “The New Yorker.” I do continue to be astonished that, after all these years and all the blood and treasure we’ve squandered for this fool’s gold, we’re still destroying ourselves and the earth we call home by relentlessly extracting, transporting and burning oil.