At the UN climate conference in Paris, Obama spoke forcefully about the need to make the accords legally binding, to hold countries accountable. This is new and exciting, and has energized the negotiations there. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress scheduled votes on Tuesday to strike down rules that reduce carbon emissions. Once again, they are […]
© Matt Davies Volkswagen, the largest manufacturer of cars in the world, has admitted to cheating on emissions tests. How bad is this? Eleven million cars were deliberately given sophisticated software that detected when the car was being given an emissions test (detecting that the steering wheel was not being turned even though the accelerator […]
Ten years ago, Dubya signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included massive giveaways to the oil, gas, and nuclear industries. But the most infamous part of the law became commonly known as the “Halliburton Loophole” (named after the corporation led by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president). Indeed, the law was championed by […]
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released a working paper that attempts to quantify the total cost of subsidies we pay for fossil fuels. This includes not just direct payments and tax breaks for energy companies, but also the cost of “externalities” like cleaning up after oil spills and health costs directly attributable to the […]
© Jen Sorensen Even animals know better than to crap up their homes! But what do I know, I’m not a scientist.
The climate for fighting climate change just got noticeably more cordial. Historically, the two biggest stumbling blocks to reducing carbon emissions have been China, which is the world’s largest source (accounting for 29% of the global total annually), and the US (at 15%). Even though China is the largest source of carbon today, that statistic […]
Above all else, I believe in pragmatism. Laws and policies should be evaluated not by ideology, but by whether (or not) they work. As such, it has been very interesting to see results from things like marijuana legalization in (first) Colorado and now Washington state, or the availability of free or low-cost contraception on teen […]
The prevailing discourse about energy is particularly interesting to me as an example of the politics of scarcity. The conventional wisdom (based on rampant misinformation) is that we are running out of energy, which is why we need to fight expensive and terrible wars for oil, pollute our air and water, build costly pipelines to […]
© Tom Tomorrow I think Osama bin Laden made a (literally) fatal mistake. I mean, he was rich. He should have bought up a bunch of American corporations (including of course some media companies). After all, look at what big corporations have done to our country (and we are only looking at recent events): yes, […]
Scotts Miracle-Gro is making headlines because they publicly donated $200,000 to Romney’s SuperPAC “Restore Our Future”. Yes, that is the same Scotts Miracle-Gro that pleaded guilty to selling birdseed that was coated with a pesticide toxic to birds, even after their own scientists warned them of the problem. And in a separate case, falsified documents […]
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