I've said it before and I'll say it again: when it comes to the global climate challenge, as goes China, so goes the world.

Driving that aphorism home, co2scorecard.org, a not-for-profit project that closely tracks global greenhouse gas emissions, now reports that China's CO2 emissions increased...

A slew of critical news articles about a clean energy stimulus program have suggested both that the program is a government boondoggle and that the Obama Administration has inflated the number of jobs supported by the program. Both contentions are misleading.

One article published by MSNBC, titled "Hot...

By Devon Swezey and Jesse Jenkins

It is fashionable these days to paint the government as a useless yet ravenous institution, the expansion of which will turn America into a third world country - or, worse yet, France.

Even the Economist, a respected, moderate publication, has recently taken to...

Originally published at the Breakthrough Institute

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has funded breakthrough innovation and new growth industries that are driving down the cost of clean energy and building the foundation for competitive 21st century U.S. industries, according to a new White House report released...

The failure of the U.S. Senate to pass clean energy and climate legislation has caused investment giant Deutsche Bank to take its clean energy dollars elsewhere, according to Kevin Parker, Global Head of Asset Management for the firm.

"They're asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at...

By Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey

Cap and trade is dead. Again. For real this time.

Reports put the time of death at 1 P.M. EST, July 22nd, 2010. That is when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged from a meeting of the Democratic Caucus without...

Over at NRDC, David Doniger writes a last-ditch defense of a diminished, utility-only cap and trade proposal while categorically rejecting any "energy-only" legislation -- e.g. legislation lacking a cap and trade component.

Unfortunately, Doniger, NRDC (and EDF) wind up clinging onto a "cap" on carbon

With the final seconds ticking down on the Congressional clock, President Obama and Senate Democrats emerged from a White House summit with Republican moderates Tuesday still lacking any plan to score a last minute win for clean energy.

Wasted opportunity

Establishing a price (any price) on carbon pollution through...

By Jesse Jenkins, Mark Muro, and Rob Atkinson, originally at the New Republic

Having passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 28th, the America COMPETES Act, America's flagship competitiveness legislation, will soon be debated in the U.S. Senate. The Act was originally passed in 2007 in response...

Politicians talking about clean energy jobs like to claim "they can't be shipped overseas." From President Obama's State of the Union to Rep. Ed Markey stumping for the climate bill he co-authored with Rep. Henry Waxman, the promise of new "green jobs that pay well and can't be...

By Jesse Jenkins and Yael Borofsky

With President Obama's announcement Wednesday that the Administration would support expanded offshore oil and gas extraction, it's now apparent that price pressures on oil make political pressures on politicians impossible to ignore and that some expansion of offshore drilling is...

South Africa's finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has an op-ed in the Washington Post that illustrates the multi-faceted challenges facing developing nations as they struggle to provide the affordable access to modern energy needed to pull citizens out of poverty. The piece highlights the current tension between such objectives...

With rising anxiety about mounting federal deficits, President Obama declared a freeze on all non-defense discretionary spending in his latest budget proposal. Heavy on symbolism and light on impact, the Administration's proposal attacks all of the areas of the government least responsible for the inexorable increase in...

Forget 80% by 2050 and 17% by 2020. Time to stop fixating on 450 ppm vs 350 ppm. As UN climate talks kick off today in Copenhagen, Denmark, if you want a number to focus the world's attention on, try this one: $10.5 trillion.

That's the scale of additional investment...

"Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate Clean Energy Race by Out-Investing the United States," a major new report released today by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, is the first to comprehensively benchmark the competitiveness positions of the United States...

This is a guest post by Yael Borofsky

The nation's leading research universities are calling on the Senate to ensure dramatically more funding for clean energy R&D in the Senate climate and energy bill, investments they described as necessary to achieve the bill's targeted deep cuts in emissions.

In...

The latest draft of the Kerry-Boxer "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" would invest less than $10 billion of the bill's nearly $80 billion in annual cap and trade allowance revenue in clean energy technology, assuming EPA-projected allowance prices (note: all figures in 2009 constant dollars).

Over...

Friday factoids time: The U.S. biomedical and pharmaceutical industry invests between 10-20 percent of revenues in R&D and new product development, spending $58.8 billion on R&D in 2007. The U.S. government adds...

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and leading DC-based think tank Third Way are the latest political figures to issue a call for significantly increased public investment in clean energy innovation. The Ohio...