President Obama's veto this week of a Republican bill passed -- precisely so that he would veto it -- mandating the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline does, indeed, as former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out, serve as "a perfect symbol of Washington's dysfunction." Obama made...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed India's "megawatts to gigawatts" challenge at the Renewable Energy Investment Summit (RE-Invest) here this week, building on his existing commitment to 160 gigawatts of solar and wind by 2022. Energy Minister Piyush Goyal doubled down, saying that he expected that the already ambitious...

The U.S. electricity sector will be unrecognizable in 20 years. How-- and how-- fast it changes will be a big factor in how large a price the world pay for having disrupted climate equilibrium - but it is not the climate threat that will drive the changes. Electricity is a...

The vicious coal industry/right-wing attack on President Obama's proposed Clean Power Rule is not fundamentally about the rule itself. Substantively, the proposal is simply the fulfillment of one of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign promises -- to clean up carbon pollution from power plants.

Amidst groans and outcries of Presidential...

San Juan, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico

Why not a Commonwealth of Texas? That thought occurred to me reading about political stalemate in Washington while celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Sierra Club's vibrant chapter here.

A modern Whiskey Rebellion afflicts America. Calling itself "The Tea Party" these rebels have...

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the...

On August 1, 2011, a feral heat wave grasped Texas by its drought-parched throat. Temperatures remained over 100 degrees for 40 days -- dozens of people died. Air conditioners all over the state struggled valiantly to cool buildings -- much of their effort leaked out into...

COP20, the United Nations climate conference held here in Lima, Peru, was dramatically unlike its predecessors. It opened amid confidence that progress toward a major new agreement in Paris next year would continue -- and closed with a weak but formally adequate agreement that keeps the process rolling....

As the world gathers in Lima to discuss next year's climate deadline, a lot of focus is on the US-China climate agreement. While alone that deal has not paved a pathway for a meaningful global agreement all the way to Paris, if you detour through New Delhi something intriguing and...

This may be the shortest blog I've ever written. On Election Day, voters in a number of cities and counties voted on whether to severely restrict or ban oil and gas development -- the oil industry poured millions of dollars in an effort to avoid these restrictions. In...

When the Western Energy Alliance in June invited K-Street mugger Richard Berman to advise them on how to deal with public opposition to oil and gas extraction, Berman's back-alley style can hardly have surprised those who invited him. His tactics and viciousness have been broadly reported...

When you last filled up your gas tank, you may have thought about where the oil came from. Today let's think about where the money you paid went. Some of it, indeed, went to the salary of the trucker who delivered the gasoline, the woman behind the cash register, or...

Panicking finance ministers. Squabbling OPEC. Slumping stock markets. Cancelled oil projects. Speculators rushing out of energy investments.

Here we sit, inundated with gloomy but indecipherable news on the economy and energy. Perched on the cliff of a slumping global economy, the price of oil slipping down from obscene...

A Discourse of Character Not Consequence

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's rock-star love-fest with the American Indian diaspora at Madison Square Garden last week was hardly a policy address -- Modi's theme was India's potential greatness and his vision of how to enable it, not a 10-part to-do list...

The slogan of the 300,000+ People's March for Climate Justice that rolled over Manhattan like a tsunami yesterday -- "to change everything we need everyone" -- was embodied not only in the raw numbers -- larger than the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice led by Martin Luther...

It's about time that someone pricked the fraudulent "Saudi America" narrative that the oil industry and its allies have been peddling successfully to the media for the past several years -- and a new movie Pump the Movie does exactly that. According to the current petro-fantasy, a domestically...

According to the media, the 2016 presidential campaign began here last Thursday with the 7th Clean Energy Summit, an energy gab-fast honchoed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Center for American Progress and the University of Nevada.

The opening gambit was Hillary Clinton's speech ...

When the ice breaks up in a northern river and unleashes the spring melt, it's not just an ice cube in a glass warming from 31-34 degrees -- instead, what was a stable, frozen system, becomes a wild, chaotic flood.

The turbulent economics of low carbon energy are similarly poised...

"With or without legislation, we're going to move forward to protect the waters of North Carolina from coal ash." -- Governor McCrory, August 2

Any informed observer of North Carolina politics is shaking their head at my headline -- while Pat McCrory is not, himself, a Tea Party...

Thursday and Friday EPA will hold in this city the final in its series of hearings on its proposed rule to clean up carbon pollution from coal fired power plants. There will be a lot of theater, and a lot of opposition as well as support. Some of...