California Unveils Draft Cap and Trade Rules

Reuters, November 25, 2009
California released on Tuesday draft rules for its landmark greenhouse gas cap and trade plan that will be the most ambitious United States effort to use the market to address global warming.
State law requires California to cut its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Measures will [...]

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Climate Change ‘More Alarming Than Ever’ Claim UK Groups

BBC News, November 24, 2009
Three UK groups studying climate change have issued a strong statement about the dangers of failing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases across the world.
The Royal Society, Met Office, and Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) say the science of climate change is more alarming than ever.
They say the 2007 UK floods, [...]

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Stop Killing the World’s Oceans

SAM WATERSON, Special to CNN, November 2, 2009
CNN Editor’s Note: Sam Waterston is an award-winning stage, film and television actor who is best known for his long-running role as prosecutor Jack McCoy on “Law & Order.” He is a member of the board of directors of Oceana, a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect the [...]

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Whale Songs Drowned Out by Human Noise Pollution

Endangered species’ communication critical to survival
ARIEL DAVID, Seattle Post Intelligence, December 8, 2008

The songs that whales and dolphins use to communicate, orient themselves and find mates are being drowned out by human-made noises in the world’s oceans, U.N. officials and environmental groups said Wednesday.
That sound pollution — everything from increasing commercial shipping and seismic surveys [...]

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Obama’s Controversial Pick for Secretary of the Interior

JOHN M. BRODER, The New York Times, December 18, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Interior Department, Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, will inherit an agency demoralized by years of scandal, political interference and mismanagement.
He must deal with the sharp tension between those who seek to exploit public lands for energy, minerals and recreation and those [...]

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Competition to Climate Proof California Bay Area

JOHN KING, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2008
The impacts of climate change are a hot topic among scientists and environmental activists.  Now the Bay Conservation and Development Commission wants to hear from another perspective: the design community.
The state agency is preparing to launch a $125,000 competition that will invite architects, planners and engineers to bring innovative proposals [...]

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California Adopts Vast Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan

MARGOT ROOSEVELT, The Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2008
California regulators adopted the nation’s first comprehensive plan to slash greenhouse gases on December 11th and characterized it as a model for President-elect Barack Obama, who has pledged an aggressive national and international effort to combat global warming.
The ambitious blueprint by the world’s eighth-largest economy would cut [...]

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U.S. Presence at UN Climate Conference Raises Hopes

ELIZABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, December 11, 2008
Poznan, Polan — Senator John Kerry arrived at the United Nations climate conference here on Thursday and immediately reassured delegates that the United States would take strong measures to combat climate change.
“President Obama will be like night and day compared to President Bush,” Mr. Kerry, Democrat of [...]

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Obama Picks Leaders of Energy Team

DEBORAH CHARLES, Reuters, December 10, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama’s team to address climate change emerged on Wednesday as Democratic officials said he had chosen a Nobel laureate for U.S. energy secretary and was likely to pick an environmental veteran to serve as coordinator of climate policies.
Announcements to come in the days ahead include several key environment-related [...]

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The 10 Big Energy Myths

CHRIS GOODALL, Guardian/U.K, November 27, 2008
Myth 1: Solar energy is too expensive to be of much use
In reality, today’s bulky and expensive solar panels capture only 10% or so of the sun’s energy, but rapid innovation in the US means that the next generation of panels will be much thinner, capture far more of the [...]

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Congress Urged to Spur Green Economy

GLOBE-Net, November 28, 2008
Five leading U.S. corporations – Nike, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Sun Microsystems, and Timberland – have teamed up with the Ceres investor coalition to lobby the U.S. Congress for stronger climate and energy legislation.
These founding members of Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy, BICEP, are urging for government action to ensure future [...]

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Gore: Climate Change Deserves Attention Economic Bailout is Getting

MATT NAUMAN, San Jose Mercury News, September 27, 2008
Al Gore said in San Jose on Saturday that the climate crisis deserves the same type of attention and money from Washington that the financial meltdown is getting.
“Instead of a focus only on a bailout, we need to bail in renewable energy,” Gore said during a 50-minute [...]

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Fareed Zakaria Interviews Thomas Friedman

MendoCoastCurrent, September 2008
Fareed Zakaria: Your new book (Hot, Flat and Crowded) is about two things, the climate crisis and also about an American crisis. Why do you link the two?
Thomas Friedman: You’re absolutely right–it is about two things. The book says, America has a problem and the world has a problem. The world’s problem is [...]

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Beyond Carbon: Scientists Worry About Nitrogen’s Effects

RICHARD MORGAN, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
TOOLIK FIELD STATION, Alaska — As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”
Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is [...]

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Coal-fired Energy Company to Disclose Global Warming Risks

NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, The New York Times, August 28, 2008
One of the country’s largest builders of coal-fired power plants will give investors detailed warnings about the risks that global warming poses to its business under a deal with New York’s attorney general.
The agreement Wednesday between the attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, and the company, Xcel Energy [...]

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Book Spotlight: The Dominant Animal by Paul & Anne Ehrlich

MendoCoastCurrent, August 6, 2008
In humanity’s more than 100,000 year history, we have evolved from vulnerable creatures clawing sustenance from Earth to a sophisticated global society manipulating every inch of it. In short, we have become the dominant animal. Why, then, are we creating a world that threatens our own species? What can we do to [...]

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Put Oil Firm Chiefs on Trial, Says James Hansen

ED PILKINGTON, The Guardian, June 23, 2008
James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies [...]

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California Unveils Draft Carbon Cap and Trade Plan

LAURA MANDARO, MarketWatch, June 26, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO – California released a draft plan on Thursday to reduce the state’s projected greenhouse gas emissions by nearly one-third, in part by creating a cap and trade program that could serve as a blueprint for a national carbon emissions market.
The 77-page “climate change draft scoping plan” lays out [...]

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National Audubon Society’s Position on Wind Power

Summary:
Audubon strongly supports properly-sited wind power as a clean alternative energy source that reduces the threat of global warming. Wind power facilities should be planned, sited and operated to minimize negative impacts on bird and wildlife populations.
Rationale:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has clearly stated that the impacts of climate change are here now [...]

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U.S. Eyes Deal on Slashing Clean Tech Tariffs

LINDSAY BECK, Reuters, June 13, 2007
Beijing – The United States hopes the world’s major economies will agree to remove trade barriers on clean energy technologies when they meet alongside the Group of Eight rich nations next month, a senior official said on Friday.
James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the [...]

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B.C. Becoming a Leader in Global Warming

MATT HOME, The Vancouver Sun, June 3, 2008
Just as British Columbia passes the first carbon tax in Canada into law, a new poll by McAllister Opinion Research has revealed that more than 70% of Canadians support British Columbia’s carbon tax as a “positive step” towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A separate poll by Harris/Decima published in [...]

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World’s Biggest Solar Farm at Centre of Portugal’s Ambitious Energy Plan

JOHN VIDAL, The Guardian, June 6, 2008
From a distance the bizarre structures sprouting from the high Alentejo plain in eastern Portugal resemble a field of mechanical sunflowers. Each of the 2,520 giant solar panels is the size of a house and they are as technically sophisticated as a car. Their reflective heads tilt to the [...]

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Running in Circles Over Carbon

MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, June 8, 2008

Washington — Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is a fine idea, and a lot of companies would be proud to do it. But they would prefer to be second, if not third or fourth.

This is not a good way to get started in fighting global warming.

As efforts [...]

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The Coming Wave

The Economist, June 5, 2008
You only have to look at waves pounding a beach, inexorably wearing cliffs into rubble and pounding stones into sand, to appreciate the power of the ocean. As soaring oil prices and concern over climate change give added urgency to the search for new, renewable sources of energy, the sea is [...]

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Portugal Now a Player in Wind & Wave Energy

ANDREW LEONARD, How the World Works at Salon.com, June 6, 2008
Portugal lacks oil and gas resources, has no nuclear power expertise, but has abundant wind, wave and solar energy. Making a commitment to turn from expensive, polluting fossil fuel to abundant renewable power, Portugal’s leaders foresaw tightening energy markets and made huge investments to develop [...]

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PG&E Chief’s Green Crusade

From Green Wombat, May 1, 2008
“Years ago we came to the conclusion that global warming was a problem, it was an urgent problem and the need for action is now. The problem appears to be worse and more imminent today, and the need to take action sooner and take more significant action is greater than [...]

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Sea Changes: There’s Little Time Left to Save Coastal Regions

EDWARD J. DODSON, E/The Environmental Magazine, March/April 2008
The debate over whether our global climate system is experiencing changes at an accelerated rate seems to be over, even if the extent to which human activity is a primary cause remains in dispute. Climatologists are not yet able to model the full scope of changes we will [...]

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Climate Expert Says He Underestimated Threat

GERALD WYNN, Reuters UK, April 16, 2008
LONDON – Climate change expert Nicholas Stern says he under-estimated the threat from global warming in a major report 18 months ago when he compared the economic risk to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Latest climate science showed global emissions of planet-heating gases were rising faster and upsetting the [...]

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PG&E Receives Approval for 585.5 MW of Projects

San Francisco, California, RenewableEnergyAccess.com, December 28, 2007
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved its four new renewable energy power purchase agreements (PPA). The four projects — three utility-scale solar and one geothermal — will generate approximately 585 megawatts (MW) of electricity for PG&E’s customers in northern [...]

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EU Claims Within Reach of Kyoto Targets

Press Release from November 2007

The EU-15 can meet, and may even over-shoot, its 2012 Kyoto target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 8% below 1990 levels if Member States implement now all additional policies being planned, according to a new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA), released today in Copenhagen.

The report, Greenhouse gas emission [...]

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