Politics

Reassuringly Stupid

The House GOP’ is trying to stop the Pentagon from thinking about climate change. Here’s why it won’t work.

The military considers climate change to be a threat to national security.  Naturally, that’s news that the House Republicans would like to suppress.  Last week, they tried to do something about it with an appropriations rider. Luckily, the amendment is so poorly drafted that it would accomplish almost nothing. Here’s the language of the amendment: None …

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What Will India’s New Regime Do About Climate?

Modi Will Make Solar-Powered Trains Run On Time

When the world’s largest democracy goes through a political earthquake, people around the world notice, even in the United States. So the victory of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and its authoritarian leader Narendra Modi, has the pundits scurrying to explain what it all means. Much of the early analysis is pessimistic, …

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Thom Tillis, the GOP Establishment, and the Environment

Tillis is not a Tea Party extremist on regulatory issues, but he’s also been no friend of environmental protection .

Thom Tillis’s victory in the North Carolina primary for U.S. Senate was widely seen as a victory for the Republican Establishment over the Tea Party.  What does this mean on environmental issues? In other word, where do “Establishment Republicans” stand on the environment? In Tillis’s case, lowering regulatory costs seems to be the highest priority. …

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An Opening for Climate Adaptation?

Marco Rubio seems willing to admit that climate change exists and is causing real problems. That’s a start.

During an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Kent, Marco Rubio made a very interesting statement about climate change.  He took the standard anti-science position about the causes of climate change.   “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he said.  He went on …

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Ending Corporate Welfare for Oil

“There Will Be Blood” was the title of 2007 movie about an old-time oilman. If you were doing a similar movie about the situation today, you might call it, “There Will Be Tax Write-Offs.” The taxpayers have been generous to the industry. Oil companies get about $5 billion per year in favored tax treatment.  Mostly, …

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Renewable Energy and Political Geography

The Washington Post had a story over the weekend about the concerted campaign by the fossil fuel industry to rollback state laws favoring renewable energy.  This effort was also the subject of an editorial in the Sunday Times. So far, this effort hasn’t gained real legislative traction.  The story attributes this failure to the growth …

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The Missing of Summer Lawns*

It’s Time to End the Wasteful Practice of Irrigating California’s Residential Landscaping With Fresh Water

What a difference a drought makes. Once upon a time, a fundamental attribute of home ownership in California and the American West was an expansive, verdant lawn surrounding private homes, townhouses and apartment complexes. Indeed, some communities have historically imposed permit conditions or adopted local ordinances mandating the inclusion and maintenance of lush, healthy lawns …

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A New Low for Fictional News Network

Guess which cable news network misleads on climate?

Well, what a shock: To gauge how accurately [cable news] networks inform their audiences about climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists analyzed the networks’ climate science coverage in 2013 and found that each network treated climate science very differently. Fox News was the least accurate; 72 percent of its 2013 climate science-related segments contained …

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Sea Level Rises, Premiums Not So Much

Congress apparently just couldn’t resist restoring subsidies for coastal homeowners.

The President has now signed an important modification of the flood insurance program.  The changes are hard to understand, in part because the bill changed an earlier 2013 law that itself amended the basic statute.  So you have to work through the whole sequence to see what is going on. Before I go into more …

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The Perils of Rail Transit and Democracy

How Decentralized Decision-Making Can Screw Up Rail Planning and Implementation

Americans seem to love democracy but hate many of the results. We want governmental power to be decentralized, whether it’s across three federal branches or with local control over sometimes regionally oriented land use decisions. But when the inevitable compromise that is required to get majority approval means a less-than-perfect result, from Obamacare to budget …

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