Politics
EPA’s crime on its 40th birthday? Having accomplished too much
EPA head Lisa Jackson waded into hostile territory yesterday with a Wall St Journal editorial defending the agency and its work. It’s EPA’s fortieth birthday, and she uses the occasion to acknowledge forthrightly that “[w]e reach this milestone exactly one month after the midterm elections strengthened the influence of groups and individuals who threaten to roll back …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat If They Gave a Climate Summit and Nobody Came?
Last year about this time, everyone was excited about Copenhagen. UCLA Law School even sent its own delegation. President Obama was going to come. It was the biggest thing in climate since Kyoto — maybe bigger, since now the US had an administration that believes in science. Now? Not so much. The coverage of Cancun …
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CONTINUE READINGBottles and cans, bisphenol-A, and chemical regulation
The online magazine Yale Environment 360 has published an informative and rather frightening interview with Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri’s Endocrine Disruptors Group, about bisphenol-A and what he sees as a completely broken regulatory system for managing hazards from chemicals. Elizabeth Kolbert, known recently for her stellar journalism in the New …
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CONTINUE READINGOur strawberries’ safety: will California approve methyl iodide this year?
As Margot Roosevelt reports in the Los Angeles Times, California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation has signaled that it will make a decision before Governor Schwarzenegger leaves office about whether to approve the use of methyl iodide as a strawberry fumigant. Farmworker advocacy groups and environmental advocates fear the pesticide will be approved, and are planning …
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CONTINUE READINGActual Conservative Climate Change Policy!
After all the talk over the last two weeks, here it is: Fresh off a big victory over the GOP establishment on earmarks, conservative GOP senators are opening up a new front in the battle on government spending that could be similar to the earmarks standoff: They are calling on Congress to let billions in …
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CONTINUE READINGDim Bulbs
It’s good to know that there’s still someone who isn’t afraid to stand up for the use of obsolete technologies and the right of every citizen to overpay for electricity.
CONTINUE READINGSo much for “consensus climate solutions”
Our friend Jon Adler has taken many of us and most progressives to task for not pursuing “consensus solutions” to climate change. What might these consensus climate solutions be? Well, Jon insists that it would look something like a revenue-neutral carbon tax (such as is proposed by the superb Carbon Tax Center) instead of a …
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CONTINUE READINGWhose Nature? God, the GOP, and Everyone Else
Some Americans say they don’t believe in climate change because they believe in God – or, more exactly, because of what they believe about God. A few weeks ago, the New York Times quoted some Indiana Tea Party activists who explained that, because the world was created for human use and benefit, using its mineral …
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CONTINUE READINGMore Thoughts About Conservative Climate Perspectives
Climate issues are essentially factual, not ideological. We naturally all come to those issues with our own perspectives. That’s fine, so long as our ideological lenses merely color the facts rather than blocking them from view entirely.
CONTINUE READINGThat Warm Fuzzy Cap-And-Trade Feeling
Cara asks if cap-and-trade skeptics like me still get excited at California’s Mini-Me version. The short answer (for me, at least) is yes. I’m all in favor of California rolling out its own version, and my hope has always been that the California Air Resources Board could develop a successful program that EPA could eventually …
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