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Congress, Get With the Program, Enact a Carbon Tax

Congress- listen up; forty companies with annual revenues of $611 billion want you to take action on climate change- including GM, the world's largest auto manufacturer. What are you waiting for? This past month, GM joined a stellar group, including Starbucks, Adidas, L’Oréal & IKEA. These companies are urging federal lawmakers to go bold on climate while proclaiming this challenge “one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century.” At the Ceres Conference, Gene...

Obama All-of-the-Above Energy Policy Lacks Moral Urgency

A lot of my friends are still on a high about Obama's recent discovery of the words climate change. He broke his climate silence after Hurricane Sandy. And climate change took prominent place in his inaugural address. In Tuesday’s the State of the Union, he brought it up again. "But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last...

How the GOP can answer Obama’s climate challenge

By Mark Reynolds If you’ve been waiting with great frustration for our government to address climate change, President Obama’s second inaugural speech last week was both stunning and exhilarating. In his most forceful language to date, the President made it clear he intends to devote much of his energy in his second term to “reduce the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” If legislative action is not forthcoming, it ...

As Obama Embarks on Second Term, He Heralds Citizens’ Obligations

Judging from the chatter on Facebook and twitter, Obama's inaugural rhetoric was a success. He used the words climate change. (We've really set the bar low in our expectations there.) "We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. (Applause.) Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of scien...

The Dirty Weather Report: Reality

24 Hours of  Climate Reality- The Dirty Weather Report is being livestreamed at The Climate Reality Project. The below musical montage of the project, called The Symphony of Science, was designed by John D Boswell. A very cool interactive new tool from the Climate Reality Project is Reality Drop. Created to combat climate denial, disinformation, myths and lies, Reality Drop uses game dynamics to counter the confusion and spread scientific truth. The site aggregates climate-related content fro...

Munich Re on Climate Change in North America: NOT IF, BUT HOW

"Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America. The study shows a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades, compared with an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America. Anthropogenic climate change is believed to contribute to this trend, though it influences various perils in different ways. Climate change particularly affects formation of heat...

Leaders, Climate Change and Energy Policy are Linked

I was horrified last night to watch President Obama and Mitt Romney try to out-dinosaur each other at the town hall debate. That brawl has no winner. It is a downward death spiral. Chris Hayes at MSNBC said after, "Discussing energy without talking about climate change is like talking about tobacco without talking about cancer." Yes, but even more; it can be viewed as a selfish Machiavellian play to hand the ball off to future generations. A form of intergenerational tyranny that one day will...

Norway to Double Carbon Tax on Oil to Fund Climate Initiatives in Developing World

This week, Norway announced plans to double a carbon tax on its North Sea oil industry and set up a £1 billion fund to aid the developing world in mitigating the impacts of climate change. In addition, monies fund renewable energy, food security, and the conversion to low carbon sources of energy.  The fund includes pledges of about £44 million to preserve tropical forests that are crucial in storing carbon. Norway previously financed forestry initiatives in Brazil, Ethiopia, and Indonesi...

James Hansen: The Runaway Greenhouse Effect

According to a Washington Post poll published in July, only 18% of Americans view climate change as their top environmental concern.  Compare this to 33% who said so in 2007, (amidst a highly publicized IPCC report and Al Gore's Academy Award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth). The survey findings and follow-up interviews with respondents show that Washington's inaction on climate policy may have caused the issue to recede. Even though many people link extreme weather events to global w...

Mitt Romney’s Inconclusive Declarations on Climate Change

Mitt Romney got a good laugh out of the climate deniers in his audience at the GOP Convention in Tampa, a city already planning for sea level rise, as he mocked President Obama's promise to address climate change. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans…(pause to allow for laughter) and to heal the planet.  My promise … is to help you and your family.” It could be that Republicans have a secret plan to transport American families to another planet, something they ar...