10 June 2013 (Deutsche Welle) – The International Energy Agency (IEA) says the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel usage have risen to a record level. It warns that despite increased renewables usage climate change will “not go away.” Global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record in 2012, standing at 31.6 billion tons, […]
By CLIVE HAMILTON26 May 2013 CANBERRA, Australia (The New York Times) – The concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere recently surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in three million years. If you are not frightened by this fact, then you are ignoring or denying science. Relentlessly rising greenhouse-gas emissions, and […]
By Roberta Kwok8 May 2013 (The Guardian) – In the 1970s, a population of Arctic foxes on an island in the Bering Sea began to mysteriously decline. The animals were thin and mangy, and nearly all the cubs died. Today, only about 100 foxes remain. The animals were not felled by an infectious disease, a […]
27 March 2013 (IMF) – Global pre-tax energy subsidies are significant. The subsidy estimates capture both those that are explicitly recorded in the budget and those that are implicit and off-budget. The evolution of energy subsidies closely mimics that of international energy prices (Figure 2). Although subsidies declined with the collapse of international energy prices, […]
[cf. Cities and tribes in Washington State: No coal port, no coal trains here] By Kim Murphy26 April 2013 COLSTRIP, Montana (Los Angeles Times) – Out in these windy stretches of cottonwood and prairie grass, not far from where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer ran into problems at Little Bighorn, a new battle is unfolding […]
By MARTIN FACKLER24 April 2013 YAKUSHIMA, Japan (The New York Times) – A mysterious pestilence has befallen this island’s primeval forests, leaving behind the bleached, skeletal remains of dead trees that now dot the dark green mountainsides. Osamu Nagafuchi, an environmental engineer with a passion for the island and its rugged terrain, believes he […]
By Harold Meyerson23 April 2013 (Washington Post) – On May 21, Los Angeles voters will go to the polls to select a new mayor. Who will govern Los Angeles, however, is only the second-most important local question in the city today. The most important, by far, is who will buy the Los Angeles Times. The […]
By Neela Banerjee23 April 2013 WASHINGTON (Los Angeles Times) – A federal appeals court unanimously backed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate a controversial form of coal mining called mountaintop removal, overturning a lower court decision that barred the agency from stopping a large coal mine in West Virginia. The ruling by the D.C. […]
By Joel Connelly22 April 2013 (Seattle PI) – Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, oft-faulted for a go-it-alone governing style, became a coalition builder Monday, joining with other city officials and Indian tribes in a new organization designed to build opposition to location of big coal export terminals in Northwest waters. In an interview, McGinn suggested that […]
By Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Pennsylvania State University[Text excerpted from chapter 2 of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, by Michael E. Mann, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, 395pp] (wunderground.com) – By the mid-1990s, it was possible to investigate the causal mechanisms behind changes in Earth’s climate using relatively sophisticated mathematical […]
