Over on the mainpage, I have a piece pegged to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the U.S.—and how Washington and Beijing can find valuable common ground on energy and climate, assuming short-term politics don’t get in the way. Check it out here.
Politics
Can Climate and Energy Become the New Civil Rights Movement?
I’m in Abu Dhabi right now, attending the World Future Energy Summit and getting a chance to check out the first finished buildings in Masdar City. I’ll have more on the summit and the city tomorrow, but I wanted to focus on something else today. I often write on this blog about rapidly the planet has developed over the past few decades, …
Politics: Gabrielle Giffords Is a Green Patriot
A lot of attention has focused on how Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s support for health care reform might have helped made her a target. (On Monday Giffords was still in a medically induced coma after being shot in the head Saturday morning in Tucson.) Her office in Tucson was vandalized last March after she voted in …
Politics: What to Expect from the Republicans on Energy Policy
At noon today, Republican John Boehner will be sworn in as the 61st Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the GOP will take over partial control of the government. (Apparently the outgoing Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, actually hands over the gavel to the new leader, a ceremony that certainly has more gravitas than the Internet …
Energy: Will the Tax Bill Be Good for Renewable Energy?
Amid all the political agony over the tax compromise taking shape in Congress right now there are side measures that could be incredibly important for renewable energy in the U.S. The final bill is obviously still evolving, but the compromise agreed to by Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell contains a few provisions that will …
Politics: Will Bipartisanship Ever Be Possible on Climate and Energy?
I spent the first couple of days this week at the Governors Global Climate Summit at the University of California in Davis, where outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger presided over his third gathering of regional and local leaders interested in action on global warming. (Full disclosure: I moderated two panels at the summit.) I …
Fissile Material Smuggling and the Nuclear Renaissance
There was a very scary story out of Georgia today after two Armenian men pleaded guilty during a secret trial to smuggling highly enriched uranium into the former Soviet state and trying to sell it to an undercover agent posing as a representative of Islamic radicals.
Bloomberg on Climate Change: “Most People Unfortunately Don’t Care”
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was the belle of the ball this morning at a international climate change conference here in Hong Kong. He was here as the new chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a group of 40 cities worldwide committed to tackling climate change. (Here’s a map of participating cities.)
Bloomberg shared
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Politics: How Much Did Cap-and-Trade Hurt the Democrats? Not As Much As You Think
[Update 1:10 PM]: Ryan Cunningham of Glover Park Group wrote to me to note that by the numbers, Democrats who voted against cap-and-trade were three times more likely to lose then those who voted for it. That’s a striking number, though most of the anti-cap Democrats who lost were Blue Dogs representing generally conservative …
Politics: What’s at Stake for Environmentalists at the Midterm Elections
So there seems to be an election coming up tomorrow—or at least that’s what I can tell from all of the writers and editors scurrying around TIME HQ this morning, trying to make sure John Boehner’s deep orange tint doesn’t throw off the visual balance of the next issue. The sad truth for environmentalists—or “climate hawks,” or …