If you've been wondering whatever happened to Cap & Trade in California, it's not your fault. The topic has bounced around several state agencies, and it was tied up in the courts for awhile. But now is a good time to tune back in, because they're talking about how to...

The world needs every brilliant mind available to help us understand what is happening to humanity and the planet and to show us how to solve the climate crisis. In 2011, we lost two of the best: Jonathan Rowe and Richard Douthwaite.

These two...

Americans are still mourning the recent passing of technology icon Steve Jobs, spurring a broad consideration of innovation and entrepreneurship in this country. To many people, he personified an improved technological future, touching and sometimes transforming far-flung industries with his creative thinking. Although Silicon Valley is awash in clean tech...

Two well-known quotes from Dick Cheney are apropos to the current crisis in Congress over the debt ceiling: "Deficits don't matter" and "Go F- yourself."

1) "Deficits don't matter"

Cheney's quote about deficits is still true. The federal government can continue to run deficits as long as...

As recently as May 2009, cap and trade was the preferred policy solution for the Kyoto Protocol, federal legislation in Congress, regions, and states. But in mid-2011, the market-based policy doesn't seem to have many friends anymore.

Internationally, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (whose major outcome was the first cap...

In Congress, the polluting industry's lobbyists are taking aim at federal climate regulations. In California, climate regs are facing a court challenge from a different source.

On January 24, 2011, a San Francisco Superior Court judge issued a tentative ruling that could block the implementation of the AB32 Scoping Plan,...

Raise your glass if you are cynical about the UN's international climate negotiations. The talks starting on Nov 30 in Cancun, Mexico are the 16th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN climate framework signed back in 1992. Expectations are low for COP-16, which may go down in history alongside...

The midterm elections have sent a new class of climate deniers to Congress, making it unlikely that Congress will take up climate legislation for the foreseeable future. This leaves national climate leadership where it has been for almost 10 years now: Sacramento.

California's election results were mostly hopeful for...

You may have heard of the Dirty Energy Proposition, Prop 23 on California's November ballot. Funded primarily by two Texas oil companies, Tesoro and Valero, Proposition 23 would suspend California's global warming law -- known as AB32 -- until the state achieves four consecutive quarters of unemployment below...

This is the story of the death of a bill that was meant to address the greatest moral issue of our time: climate change. Compromised and unrecognizable at its time of death, the bill was a hideous deformation of its former self. When the bill died, a moment of possibility...

Public outrage at the tragedy in the Gulf may finally break the fossil fuel industry's special interest stranglehold on Washington. The most far reaching punishment to BP and the other culprits would be an economy-wide shift to clean energy that prevents polluters like BP from profiting from the new price...

The Kerry-Lieberman climate bill (KL) was finally introduced last week as the "American Power Act." For the previous 10 months, it was the unicorn of climate bills. When speaking to climate deniers, Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham claimed it wasn't a climate bill, it...

Humans have put too many heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, and now the Earth is running a fever. But there's also an increasingly toxic atmosphere in the blogosphere, where climate deniers strategically confuse the issue, delay meaningful government action, and harass scientists and authors.

For decades, the media presented...

"I want my, I want my, I want my permits free..." -Utility lobbyist at a recent California Air Resources Board hearing on carbon market design (paraphrased)

There's no free lunch. But greedy utilities and offsets providers have been trying to get one by lobbying for a carbon pricing system that...

It's obvious, right? Monopoly utilities and oil refineries that want to keep peddling their wares finance ballot measures to mislead voters into postponing the inevitable move away from fossil fuels. Nothing new here, but California voters get ready for the next round this election season.

First, PG&E is backing an...

Looking for a job? I know one that just opened up. It's stressful but rewarding - you get to actually save the world. The UN's top climate diplomat Yvo De Boer resigned from one of the toughest jobs in the world last week. De Boer's job was to...

Visions of Obama arriving triumphant in Copenhagen with a climate bill in hand focused the otherwise fractious environmental community in 2009. But the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House is stalled in the Senate, and environmentalists must now rethink their strategies for 2010.

The old strategy seems to have run...

I enjoyed Arianna's funny Things to Forget from 2009 . But for people like me, who are really focused on (obsessed with?) climate change, we're so desperate for some positive news. Every day we've been watching the science of climate change get bleaker. Years pass and New Orleans...

On Friday, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) released the Carbon Limits and Energy for American Renewal (CLEAR) Act that auctions permits to fuel producers and returns 75% of the resulting revenue in checks to every American. With its "cap and dividend" approach, this bill would...

Roland Emmerich is on to something. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and if we don't do something BIG to really start reducing greenhouse gas emissions after that, we are screwed in a big, Emmerich-movie-like way. The UN climate conference in Copenhagen starts on December 7th. The so-called "leaders" of...