Other than maybe Jason in Friday the 13th, nothing has supposedly died and come back to life more often than climate legislation and carbon cap-and-trade. A year ago, thanks in part to fierce opposition from business interests led by the Chamber of Commerce, the cap-and-trade bill cosponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey just barely …
Politics
White House Space Policy: Good News For Greens
NASA junkies continue to howl at the Obama administration’s plans for human space exploration, and with good reason: there’s just no there there. Space partisans won’t be any happier with a 14-pg. policy statement released by the White House yesterday. (You can read a summery here at whitehouse.gov and download a PDF of the report.) But …
Death (of an Agreement) on the Nile
Nine countries that border the Nile failed to reach agreement on Sunday on a deal to share the river for irrigation and hydro power projects—a troubling indication that water rights will become increasingly difficult to manage in the face of climate change.
In May, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya signed a new agreement …
Storm Seems Likely to Miss Spill—But Politics Won’t Stop Onshore
Bad news good news. The bad news is that the tropical depression that had been forming in the Caribbean has now officially become a tropical storm—named Alex—the first of what’s likely to be many in a rough season. The storm may even strengthen to become a minimal hurricane by the time it makes landfall. The good news is that it’s …
Still Failing to Size the Spill: BP Mendacity Watch #2
Remember the line Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman? “Every word she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” I’m beginning to think those words may apply to BP as well. I’ve written before about the company’s habit of not just downplaying the extent of the oil gushing from its blown well in the Gulf, but repeatedly telling …
Asian Carp All Up in the Great Lakes
Fishermen in Lake Clumet, Illinois—just six miles downstream from Lake Michigan—netted a fish on Tuesday. That generally being what fishermen do, the news wouldn’t have caused much of a stir, but this was no ordinary fish. They caught a 20 lb. bighead carp, one of a number of Asian carp species that were imported into the U.S. in …
The Gore Files
The National Enquirer—the once-scorned supermarket tabloid that scooped the mainstream press on John Edwards’ extramarital affair—broke a story yesterday about a masseuse in Portland Oregon, who claimed that Al Gore tried to force her to have sex with him and subjected her to “unwanted sexual touching.” Detectives at the time passed …
Washington Slows Down Sand Berms in Louisiana
Billy Nungesser is mad. This by itself is not unusual—as the president of Plaquemines parish in southeastern Louisiana, Nungesser has been dealing with the oil spill since day one, and since maybe day two he’s been angry with BP and the federal government’s sluggish response to the catastrophe. Nungesser—a constant presence by …
Is a Carbon Tax Actually Good for the Economy?
Over at the Curious Capitalist blog–which I admit has both a better name and logo than Ecocentric—my TIME colleague Stephen Gandel looks at the common assumption that carbon pricing is bad for the economy. We hear rhetoric about carbon pricing being a “job-killing national energy tax” (thanks, House Republican leader John Boehner), …
Obama’s Drilling Moratorium Is Moratoriumed
Almost exactly a week ago, executives from the major international oil companies stood before Congress for questioning. They defended the oil industry’s record on offshore drilling and distanced themselves from BP and its mistakes. But on one area they had to admit defeat. After Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts showed copies …