San Francisco -- Just when we thought we were getting a fresh start with a new decade, some of the worst actors from the previous one popped back up to say, "You're not finished with us yet."

Richard Pombo, the unlamented former chair of the House Natural Resources Committee who tried...

The last year of the decade may best be remembered for one piece of particularly good news: carbon dioxide emissions from the United States have peaked, are coming down, and (if we keep working) will continue to decline. Although this was partly a consequence of the economic crisis (not a...

It's stunning how easily both members of Congress and the media -- and all of us -- have slipped into believing that the problem with the health-care debate is that America is deeply divided. When the bill passed the Senate, the New York Times editorialized: "Conventional wisdom...

Will Copenhagen's near collapse and half-hearted outcome help or hinder the effort to repair our climate? As a Danish prince once said, that is the question, but we won't know the answer for a while. Was the Copenhagen Accord strong enough to start a virtuous cycle of nations upping their...

Copenhagen -- It was a cold, gray, and dispiriting day here. From morning on, it became increasingly clear that while the major emitting nations (the U.S., China, Europe, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, India, Japan, and South Korea) share a common commitment to reducing their greenhouse pollution and to doing it...

I'm glad I used a roller-coaster metaphor when I first got to Copenhagen -- it's gotten wilder and wilder. Yesterday, after a gloomy morning, as I was leaving the Bella Center, the student sit-in had begun. A group of young people were reading aloud the names of people (more than...

In theory, Copenhagen's Bella Center should seem like the epicenter of history. In reality, it's more like being in a big room full of people playing the game of telephone by circulating bits of information, misinformation, and gossip. There were huge protests outside today, as a result of which access...

My equilibrium's shaky, and it's not from Denmark's most famous roller coaster. I go from cheerful-looking billboards at the airport (the best are Oceana's on ocean acidification; the least-plausible are Coca-Cola's "Hopenhagen" series) to the reality of a climate summit that's poorly framed, inadequately ambitious, and riven...

In a few hours I'll arrive at the UN Conference in Copenhagen -- surely the biggest environmental gathering I've ever attended and, arguably, the most consequential ever to meet. The sheer scale of the threats posed by climate disruption (and of the actions needed to protect us against it) does...

The White House, Washington, DC -- Even though our meeting with President Obama was off the record, I don't think the White House will mind my quoting from his parting message to us when he was asked "What should we tell the world when we get to Copenhagen?"

"The United States...

Last week I took a look at China's offer for Copenhagen, and a few days later India laid down its own proposal. How bold is the Manmohan Singh government being?

India's basic offer is to reduce the energy intensity of its economy by 20 to 25 percent by 2020. If...

For the last eight years, federal agencies charged with protecting our health were systematically discouraged or even prevented from doing their jobs. During that period, for example, the Sierra Club had to force federal agencies  to act to clean up the scandalously lethal "toxic trailers" used to house Katrina...

The Chinese government has laid down its initial marker for Copenhagen: China would commit to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy (tons of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic activity) 40 to 45 percent by 2020. That's progress at a rate of 4 percent a year, which...

What do we make of the prospects for global action on the climate crisis, given recent events both in the U.S. Congress and in the international conversations leading up to Copenhagen? Something very peculiar is going on. Most of the major players are moving in the right direction -- toward...

In one of the most intriguing court decisions in years, the federal district judge who has presided over most of the cases involving responsibility for the damages caused by Hurricane Katrina, Stanwood Duvall, ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers was grossly negligent in shoddy oversight of the Mississippi...

I was the second witness yesterday morning as the EPA opened its hearing process on Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse pollutants. The first was from the American Petroleum Institute (API). He made one point over and over: the EPA shouldn't use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon...

Veterans Day had always been a day-off from environmentalism for me, but this year Veterans week was different. The Sierra Club was really, for the first time, a full participant -- a story that has been building slowly

Several years ago, the Sierra Club published a book by Jonathan Trouern-Trend, an...

Media coverage of last week's off-year elections has focused on Republican victories in two gubernatorial races, an upstate New York Congressional special election, and Mayor Bloomberg's reelection in New York City. Those races had in common that they were big-money contests, had very low voter turnout, and were dominated by...

...and the forest is the Tongass, it's highly unlikely that anyone will hear it -- so remote, pristine, and primeval is this temperate-rainforest treasure. The Tongass still has 9.5 million acres of roadless areas -- in all of the National Forest System there are only some 60 million, so the...

A year ago the American people voted for change. Central to what persuaded them was then-candidate Barack Obama's promise of a new way of thinking about energy and the environment, a restored respect for scientific integrity, and the leveraging of clean energy to jump start the American economy, rebuild the...