Inching closer to Klamath dam removal
Today's San Francisco Chronicle has encouraging news for the Klamath River. In this front-page story, Peter Fimrite reports that a final agreement has been reached "among 28 parties, including American Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen and [PacifiCorp,] the hydroelectric company that operates the dams," subject to formal ratification by their various boards, commissions, and councils. A Department of Interior news release says that the agreement will be made available fo...
CONTINUE READINGBoxer-Kerry pre-draft released
UPDATE: The full bill as introduced is posted here on Senator Kerry's web site, and a 19-page section-by-section summary is here. (Hat tip: Ben Somberg, Center for Progressive Reform.) Senators Boxer and Kerry are expected to introduce their greenhouse gas regulation bill on Wednesday. The Washington Post has posted what it describes as a "close-to-final" version of the bill that clocks in at a cool 801 pages. Obviously there's a lot here. One positive addition comp...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change Lesson #4: Small Ordinary Things Add Up in a Big Way
This is the fourth in a series of short homilies about climate change. In terms of climate change, the contribution of any one automobile, light bulb, or felled tree is microscopic. Put enough of these together and you can change the temperature of the world for centuries to come. It's hard to believe - and that inability to understand the dramatic cumulative effect of micro-causes probably is one of the reason some people just can't absorb the idea of climate chang...
CONTINUE READINGIt’s the Enforcement, Stupid!
We rightly celebrate large legislative environmental victories like the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Europeans, too, are proud of accomplishments such as the establishment of the European Union Emission Trading System to address greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade and the passage of sweeping legislation, known as REACH, to regulate toxic chemicals. But two New York Times stories in th...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change Lesson #3: Everything is Connected to Everything Else
This is the third in a series of short homilies about the lessons of climate change. Barry Commoner called this the first law of ecology. Because "everything is connected to everything else," he said: the system is stabilized by its dynamic self- compensating properties; these same properties, if overstressed, can lead to a dramatic collapse; the complexity of the ecological network and its intrinsic rate of turnover determine how much it can be stressed, and for how ...
CONTINUE READINGSchwarzenegger’s REAL Test on Climate
Like any Hollywood actor, and like any politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk a good game. And on climate, he talks a lot. He loves to promote inconsequential gab-fests like the Governors Global Summit on Climate Change. But when the rubber hits the road, will he actually, you know, do anything about it? Whether a bill on his desk gets a signature will tell us whether he is real or all puffery. That bill is SB 406, by state Senator Mark Desaulnier. SB...
CONTINUE READINGDelivering on Reform?
It seems that TSCA reform is heating up for this and next year, but the form it will ultimately take is still quite hazy. Senator Lautenberg and Representatives Waxman and Solis introduced the Kid Safe Chemical Act (KSCA) twice before, and the Senator is about to take a third swing at it very soon. In its last iteration, the placed the onus for testing and demonstrating safety on industry, but still essentially retained a conventional risk management approach to chem...
CONTINUE READINGHey planet, we owe you one!
According to the Global Footprint Network, today is Earth Overshoot Day. We have already used up as many resources in 2009 as the planet can produce in a single year. The rest of the year represents deficit spending. “It’s a simple case of income versus expenditures,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. “For years, our demand on nature has exceeded, by an increasingly greater margin, the budget of what nature can produce. The urgent t...
CONTINUE READINGHow useful are “planetary boundaries”?
The latest edition of Nature has an interesting article and accompanying commentaries (freely available here; longer version of the principal article here) on the concept of boundaries, or limits, or thresholds if you prefer, for the planet. The principal article, which has 27 authors led by Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center, is called "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity." It purports to identify and quantify "planetary boundaries that must not be tra...
CONTINUE READINGThe Kennedy seat, resolved
Just closing the loop on this earlier post, which discussed the uncertainty over whether the late Sen. Kennedy's seat would be filled in time to get Dems back to 60 seats for the crucial fall legislative season. Today, MA Governor Deval Patrick appointed a longtime aide to Kennedy as his temporary replacement, pending a special election on January 19(NY Times story here). The fate of climate and energy legislation in the Senate this fall will certainly depend on ...
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