Carl Pope

Imagine you could buy an electric car for the same price as an equivalent internal combustion model. Along with the car came a six-year recharging package, which for $150/month guaranteed you unlimited charging privileges and driving. (If you drive an average 15,000 miles each year, and get 25 true MPG...

This year's most pitch-perfect political speech may have just been given, not by President Obama, or Mitt Romney, but by John Dingell, the dean of the House of Representatives, but razor sharp at 85. Speaking to the Blue-Green Alliance's Detroit "Good Jobs-Green Jobs" Conference, Dingell sounded a simple theme. Americans...

Ohio (along with my own California) has one of the nation's biggest tax give-aways to the fossil fuel industry. It's severance tax on natural gas is essentially zero -- only 0.42 percent. Texas levies 7.5 percent, Oklahoma 7.1 percent, and neighboring West Virginia and Pennsylvania 5.79 percent.

So...

That question has been nagging me since I did, when I looked at the following visual at last week's CERES 2012 Conference, "Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability."

This is an image, derived from a pair of NASA satellites named "Grace", that...

OK, we now know that Walmart's meteoric rise to Mexico's biggest retailer and employer appears to have been fueled by a massive bribery scheme. We know that millions of dollars were apparently paid to "gestores," fixers whose job was to ensure that local zoning and environmental laws didn't...

Unfortunately wasn't at the Goldman Environmental Prize Ceremony in San Francisco. But I can't think of a better place for the new Bank President, Dr. Jim Yong Kim to have spent his first night. This year's Goldman Prize winner's place in luminous perspective one of the core...

Washington is in a tizzy about "who killed coal?" in the wake of EPA's new air pollution standard for carbon pollution. That standard, which requires that new power plants be at least as clean as a new natural gas plant, has blocked a miniscule number of coal plants...

So what has changed for the world since first Earth Summit in Rio twenty years ago -- and what new challenges and opportunities will be on the table at the end of June when the UN again convenes its members?

Well, some things are pretty clear. Climate disruption is happening...

The Republicans should be careful. Their current naïve faith -- that high gasoline prices on a Democratic president's watch gives them a political edge -- overlooks their own profound vulnerability, and seems to be based primarily on the (not entirely unwarranted) assumption that the president will parry, rather than thrusting...

Dealing with climate change is, at its heart, 50% about rebuilding America - replacing the factories, highways, power plants, apartment buildings, cars, trucks, private homes, sewer lines, shopping center, schools, hospitals - the build environment left us by 200 years of American enterprise - and waste.

Inadequate investment in infrastructure,...

One of the iconic markers you are in a desperately poor third-world country is driving past the garbage dump and watching rag-pickers sort through open garbage dumps, often with their homes on top of the refuse pile from which they scavenge a living.

These communities, however, are the functional...

Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Republican Congressional leaders like John Boehner have decided that high gas prices are the key to their defense against President Obama and the Democrats -- and they have decided that building the Keystone XL Pipeline is the symbol of their commitment to bringing...

"The ARPA-E story is the American story," comments Undersecretary of Energy Arun Majumdar. We are only hundreds of yard outside the Beltway -- I can see it from the hotel window. But this conference clearly prides itself on a very different conversation than the one which dominates the "national capital...

Calgary, Alberta -- This is the heart of Canada's tar-sands boom, whose promoters, including the current governments both here and in Ottawa, Canada's capital, claim is Canada's economic future. Whether it is TransCanada's pipeline company's Alex Pourbaix saying in a debate with me at the Commonwealth Club, "The oil sands really...

The week made it official: the 2012 election will be the first in American history to be driven by the nexus between innovation, clean energy, manufacturing and the role of the federal government in shaping the economy. The president followed up his  State of the Union message with...

New Delhi, India -- India's in the midst of a rolling series of state elections, and one striking reality is that the voters Thomas Frank wishes Kansas possessed -- keenly focused on how those who govern them impact their own lives -- are found here by the scores. (Tens of millions.)...

Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India -- If, as I pointed out in my first posting on this subject, stories about the prices of coal for electricity get buried in the press in both India and the U.S., stories about gasoline or diesel prices get top billing. It's quite simple -- voters buy...

Mumbai, India -- The story is buried in the business section of the Times of India. India's largely government-owned monopoly, Coal India, is changing its pricing system -- and the result will be a staggering 25 percent projected increase in the price of electricity generated with domestic coal. Since...

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates -- That question just shouts itself from the stage of the World Future Energy Summit here. The opening plenary features UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon, and Abu Dhabi's Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, but also Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Korean President Kim Hwang-sik. The U.S. is...

New York -- Perhaps it's not surprising that the audience of investors at this year's CERES Climate Risk Summit would give the day's only standing ovation when AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pledged organized labor "to work together with others to shape a process for how we are going to...