Some Big Successes As U.S. Election Casts Long Shadow On Climate

Tuesday’s election wasn’t a complete rejection of climate action and the promise of the low-carbon economy. But there is no mistaking that the results made the ground game to cool the planet much harder. In the decisive defeat of California’s Proposition 23 and the re-election of Senator Barbara Boxer, voters showed that climate action and [...]

Rockefeller Delay Measure Would Give Air Polluters A Free Pass

By Keith Schneider U.S. Climate Action Network More than 1 billion tons of coal are mined and burned in the United States each year, almost all of it to generate electricity in the nation’s more than 600 coal-fired utilities. Those utilities pour 2.67 billion tons of climate changing carbon emissions into the atmosphere every year, [...]

Narrow Energy Bills Introduced in House and Senate

Goals: Make Deep Ocean Drilling Safer; Improve Energy Efficiency House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday introduced separate energy proposals that are principally concerned with limiting the hazards of deep ocean energy exploration and production, and also contain modest additional measures to strengthen energy efficiency programs and expand the use of natural gas as a fuel [...]

Climate Dropped From Energy Bill

WASHINGTON, JULY 22 – Though he vowed last week to introduce a comprehensive climate and energy bill before the end of the month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged this afternoon from a meeting with Democratic colleagues and announced that the new bill would not include specific measures to limit emissions that are warming the [...]

Dirty Air Act Vote Tests Senate’s Direction on Climate, Clean Energy

On June 10, the Senate votes on a “resolution of disapproval” to limit federal action on climate change by blocking the EPA’s ability under the Clean Air Act to limit emissions from big polluters. The resolution, which has 41 co-sponsors, was introduced in January by Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the largest Congressional [...]

Gulf Oil Disaster Prompts Calls For Comprehensive Solution: President Obama and advocates press for new national climate and energy bill

By Keith Schneider US Climate Action Network On June 2, a day before BP announced it had sheared through a leaking pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the very few steps forward in the company’s 44-day campaign to staunch the worst oil disaster in American history, President Barack Obama pressed [...]

All Eyes To The Future: American Power Act’s Imperiled Pragmatism

By Keith Schneider US Climate Action Network Over 70 years ago, in the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an estimated 10 percent of all Americans were transported across a landscape of innovation and optimism that became the economic and cultural foundation of the great American century. The Futurama exhibit [...]

The Hour of Choosing Arrives: American Power Act Introduced in Senate

By Keith Schneider US Climate Action Network In a long-awaited proposal designed to secure existing domestic energy sources and develop new ones that begin to reverse the damaging effects of global climate change, New England Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman today introduced comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. The co-authors of the bill, one [...]

Bubbling and Crude: Gulf coast spill reflects devotion to wealth, power, and oil

By Keith Schneider US Climate Action Network On March 17, two weeks to the day before President Barack Obama laid out a new plan to expand offshore oil exploration in the United States, a government auction of federally controlled oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico was held at the New Orleans Superdome.  [...]

Clean Action Commitments: World Waits on U.S.

White House, Congress Appear to be Stepping Toward Commitments By Keith Schneider U.S. Climate Action Network Delegates from the United States and 191 other nations gather in Copenhagen next month to draw up a comprehensive, ambitious, and fair international agreement to solve climate change. Hundreds of public interest organizations and tens of thousands of citizens [...]

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