"Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency."

April 28, 2013 - Renewable Energy Wins in North Carolina Thanks to Key Republicans.  They resisted a barrage of lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. Right wing Americans for Prosperity's response -  Right wing Americans for Prosperity's response -  “This was a horrible vote by Republicans, and they need to be held accountable,”

April 23, 2013  Solar Energy: This Is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like - about how solar is gaining

April 12, 2013 The Mounting Economic Toll of Erratic Weather - from Kiplinger Magazine

April 11, 2013 Bill McKibben writes in Rolling Stone about the powerful climate movement growing around the world.

 Mar 31, 2013   Exxon pipeline breaks spilling 84,000 gallons of Canadian crude oil near Arkansas lake   

Mar 21. 2013    Adding Fuel to the Fire: The Climate Consequences of Arctic Ocean Drilling  

Mar 19, 2013    Baltimore City Council Passes Fracking Wastewater Bill

 March 18, 2013   Storm Surge Risk Amplified By Climate Change, Study Finds - article from Huffington Post; also coverage here, from ThinkProgress.org.

March 15, 2013   China's announcement of a carbon tax heralds need for worldwide conversation on pricing carbon  www.brookings.edu/research/topics/carbon-tax

March 13, 2013  What’s the best way to design a carbon tax? Lawmakers ask for suggestions - from Washington Post - great start to important dialog.  See also Waxman, Whitehouse, Blumenauer, and Schatz Release Carbon Price Discussion Draft

March 11, 2013 - Jeremy Grantham,  large scale investor,  opposes tar sands development on Charlie Rose.  www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12812

March 8, 2013  More evidence of spike in global temps  - Global temperatures are higher than they've been in 4,000 years, according to research  published in the journal Science. The NYT has a report here. Read ClimateProgress report here.   

Feb 28, 2013 The Climate Reality Project launched "Reality Drop" to spread truth and counter climate change denial.  Posting online to refute deniers explained here   - and see the site - https://realitydrop.org/ 

Report on Amplifying Public Opinion: The Policy Impact of the U.S. Environmental Movement  - 

Not new but timely because of Forward on Climate vision of  the start of a real "movement".  Summary. Full Report.  Audio interview on study. 

Feb 22, 2013 - Md., D.C. utilities pay paper mills burning ‘black liquor’ for alternative fuel credits  - Not a good thing. Mike 

Tidwell of CCAN comments

Feb 22, 2013   

Fracking in Md.: Let’s look before we leap  -   www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fracking-in-md-lets-look-before-we-leap/2013/02/22/dd080b68-7c78-11e2-a044-676856536b40_story.html

Feb 21, 2013  Keystone Pipeline: Bad for Business and the Economy, Business Leaders Say  and here.http://asbcouncil.org/press-release/keystone-xl-pipeline-bad-business-and-economy-business-leaders-say

Feb 17, 2013 ForwardOnClimate.org estimates nearly 50,000 attended  the largest climate rally ever!  See:

• The Story of #ForwardOnClimate (350.org blog)
• Media Round on Foward on Climate (FOR)
• 350.org pics,  Sierra Club pics,  some CCIHC pics
•  350.org Forward on Climate Wrap up Video, Entire rally as webcast , Democracy Now Video 

Feb 17, 2013 Let Maryland set the pace in wind power -  letter published in the Washington Post by Dereck Davis (D-Prince George’s) ,chairman of the Maryland House Economic Matters Committee.  and Mac Middleton (D-Charles) is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. 

Feb. 15, 2013  "Sanders and Boxer introduce ‘fee and dividend’ climate bill; greens tickled pink" - article in Grist.org on The Climate Protection Act of 2013

Feb. 8, 2012  Big Oil’s Banner Year: Higher Prices, Record Profits, Less Oil   

Gas prices were up in 2012 while Big Oil made billions in profits. Industry spend those billions lobbying to preserve tax breaks and repurchasing stock for shareholders instead of investing in technology or alternative enegy;

Farmland conversion for biofuels leads to deforestation

Here's an unintended consequences of the push for biofuels in the United States: Farmers are converting the United States’ prairie lands to farms at rates comparable with deforestation levels in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia – rates not seen here since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. This contributes to climate change because grassland holds carbon in the soil better than cropland.Tall grasses are also the breeding grounds for ducks and other birds. Read articles here and here

Feb 21, 2013  Keystone Pipeline: Bad for Business and the Economy, Business Leaders Say   www.reuters.com/  & http://asbcouncil.org

Feb 17, 2013     Let Maryland set the pace in wind power   -  www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/let-maryland-set-the-pace-in-wind-power/2013/02/17/d2b3c64c-76fc-11e2-b102-948929030e64_story.html

July 19, 2012

Bill McKibben does the math

Bill McKibben wrote an article in Rolling Stone that lays out our predicament. He discusses three numbers, their implications for our planet and civilization as we know it -- and the enemy we have to confront. For example: "The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams. Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue."

7/6/12

Mike Tidwell says extreme fossil fuel extraction means more extreme weather

Mike Tidwell of Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) writes in an essay in the Baltimore Sun about climate extremes and the folly of using extreme techniques such as fracking to extract yet more fossil fuels. Check out the CCIHC blog as well. 

5/10/2012

Activists urge end to subsidies for fossil fuels industries

Common Dreams reports that 350.org, Friends of the Earth and Taxpayers for Common Sense held a rally in DC to announce legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) that would eliminate tax subsidies for fossil fuels industries. Several CCIHC members attended.

5/10/2012

James Hansen reasserts that extracting tar sands oil means "game over for the climate"

In an op-ed in the New York Times, NASA scientist James Hansen encouraged President Obama to deny Canada access to transport its tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries. He said it's also imperative that Obama offer incentives to keep fossil fuels in the ground. He said: "If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control."

4/26/2012

W.Post editorial urges Obama to get "serious about climate change"
The editorial comments on an interview in Rolling Stone in which the president said he thinks climate change will be a big issue in the campaign. The editorial concludes: Climate change is one of the great challenges of this century, and the country needs a big, realistic debate about policy to address the threat. We encourage Mr. Obama to follow through on his words, giving the issue — and truly serious ways to deal with it — the prominence they deserve in this year’s election.

4/16/2012
Poll shows Americans link weather extremes to climate change
The NYT reports that a new poll shows 69 percent of respondents agree that climate change is affecting recent weather. Researchers at Yale and George Mason commissioned the poll. “Most people in the country are looking at everything that’s happened; it just seems to be one disaster after another after another,” said Anthony A. Leiserowitz ofYale University, one of the researchers who commissioned the new poll. “People are starting to connect the dots.”

 The end of the article includes a plug for 350.org's 5/5 event:

 A group called 350.org is planning a worldwide series of rallies on May 5, under the slogan “Connect the Dots,” to draw attention to the links between climate change and extreme weather. (The group’s name is a reference to an ideal concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.)  “My sense from around the country and the world is that people definitely understand that things are getting freaky,” said William E. McKibben, the founder of 350.org. “During that crazy heat wave in March, everyone in Chicago was out enjoying the weather, but in the back of their mind they were thinking, this is not right.”

blog/ 3/28/2012

Republican Meteorologist sends message to his party

Check out a blog by meterologist Paul Douglas, who says that acknowledging climate science "doesn't make you a liberal." (Not that there's anything wrong with that....) Here's one quote: "I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable," and  "This is not about 'insuring more fat government research grants.' I have yet to find a climate scientist in the '1 Percent', driving a midlife-crisis-red Ferrari into the lab." ....

Editorial in the w. post 3/24/12
Rising concern on climate change
The W. Post, in an editorial 3/24/12, says: "Rising sea levels threaten to inundate low-lying roads in Louisiana, costing billions in port activity, The Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports. Northrop Grumman sees potential damage to billions in shoreline defense infrastructure, such as the imperiled drydock in Hampton Roads built to construct the next generation of aircraft carriers. Other factors are also at work in these examples of rapid coastline loss. But Louisiana and Virginia offer a picture of how further sea-level rise and higher storm surges — just one set of climate-related risks — could seriously disrupt human activity.
America, meanwhile, is fixated on . . . paying an extra buck per gallon at the gas pump.
A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) underscores how myopic the country’s energy debate is — and, consequently, how delinquent the United States has been in leading the world.  The organization calculated that the world is on course to increase its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050. ......"

Tom Toles from the W. Post 3/16/12

3/3/2012

Study says cleaner energy (natural gas) won't lower global temperature enough to avert disastrous climate change

Nathan Myhrvold, previously a proponent of geoengineering to solve the climate crisis, has published a paper with climate scientist Ken Caldeira saying that switching to natural gas won't reduce carbon enough to avoid severe warming by the end of the century. Grist.org reports on his paper.  
“There is no quick fix to global warming,” Caldeira said. “Shifting from one energy system to another is hard work and a slow process. Plus, it takes several decades for the climate system to fully respond to reductions in emissions. If we expect to see substantial benefits in the second half of this century, we had better get started now.” Cladeira and Myhrvold say that rapid transition to clean energy will be needed, and low-carbon sources won't be enough to make a change:  “If countries were to start right away and build really fast, so that they installed a trillion watts of gas-fired electricity generation steadily over the next 40 years,” Myhrvold said, “that would still add about half a degree Fahrenheit to the average surface temperature of the Earth in 2112—that’s within a tenth of a degree of the warming that coal-fired plants would produce by that year.”  They say a "substantial benefit" to global temperatures will come only from conservation, solar, wind and  nuclear energy. (although he doesn't look at other issues -- such as huge expense, radioactive waste -- involved with nuclear energy).