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As an environment writer, I’m constantly sent pitches highlighting companies that are going green, getting more efficient, shrinking their carbon footprint—and few industries talk a bigger game than the airlines. Companies like American Airlines hype their new, more fuel-efficient fleets, while other corporations like to talk about their work with experimental biofuels. Just a couple [...]
Chances are you’ve heard about—if not read—Al Gore’s 7,000-word essay in Rolling Stone on America’s ongoing failure to act on the climate crisis. (If the whole piece is a bit too much for your Wednesday lunch hour, Mother Jones has a nice summary.) The media, unsurprisingly, has focused Gore’s criticism of President Obama’s inaction on [...]
I was fortunate enough to have the chance to lead a symposium on the future of climate policy back in April for the progressive periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The transcript has just been published. I had great panelists: Joe Aldy, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former White House adviser [...]
As we survey the results of last night’s Canadian federal election, I’ll spare you the jokes about how completely boring Canada is. It’s actually a fascinating, vast nation that I lived in for a year (Scarborough!), one with a mix of cultures and language, a welcoming attitude towards immigrants, a sober banking sector, a fully [...]
My weekly Going Green column is up on the Time.com mainpage. It’s an interview with Jim Rogers, the CEO of Charlotte-based Duke Energy, soon to be the most powerful utility chief in the U.S. Rogers formed key corporate support for cap-and-trade, but with the political chances of that looking slim, he’s favoring an R&D, innovation-focused [...]
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson finally got to use her parking space on Capitol Hill this morning. Jackson was the star witness at the newly Republican-run House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearings on the proposed “Energy Tax Prevention Act.” What’s that? You weren’t aware that there was an [...]
The first generation of any innovation—be it a new mobile phone or computer system—always comes with glitches and flaws. But still it’s tough not to feel frustrated this week by news that Europe’s carbon trading market–the first of its kind, and designed as a model for cap-and-trade schemes around the world–has been closed following a [...]
As Politico first reported last night, Carol Browner will be stepping down from her post as White House climate and energy czar. Browner, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator in the Clinton Administration, was a key member of the “Green Dream Team” of cabinet appointees and White House aides who accompanied President Obama into office [...]
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 [...]
OK, so a national carbon cap-and-trade program is, as we’ve said many times before, extremely dead. And at this point, no one has any idea what form energy and climate legislation might take over the next couple of years, or whether anything’s really possible. Climate change hasn’t gone away, even if many people are pretending [...]
