Archive of News Items

Fantastic news! This morning President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, capping a seven-year uprising against the project, which would have carried 800,000 barrels of extreme oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast every day. All of us concerned with climate have reason to celebrate. This victory was hard fought, and it shows the growing power ...

“Arguably negligible.” That’s the Congressional Research Service’s bleak assessment of the direct impact on emissions of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), six years on. RGGI, launched in January 2009 by nine northeastern states, is the first greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system in the U.S. It covers CO2 emissions from the 168 electric power plants 25 ...

“It is just the right moment to introduce carbon taxes,” declared IMF director Christine Lagarde yesterday at the joint annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Lima, Peru. In a panel discussion that included World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and the celebrated climate economist Nicholas Stern, Lagarde urged governments to ...

“e’re seeing once-in-a-thousand year flooding along the South Carolina coastline as a consequence of the extreme supply of moisture streaming in from Hurricane Joaquin,” climate scientist Michael Mann told the Washington Post. “There is an exponential relationship between sea surface temperature and the amount of moisture in the atmosphere above it. So record warm temperatures means record ...

China’s announcement last month that it will begin implementing a national cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 is welcome news. Not only because it signals (again) that the world’s largest emitter may be starting to tackle global warming (and conventional air pollution), but because it tosses another shovelful of dirt on a longtime ...

Lawsuit Filed in Northeast Carbon Trading Scheme (NYT, Green Inc.)

In Obama’s Team, 2 Camps on Climate (New York Times)

Markey to Replace Boucher as Chair of Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee? Let’s Hope so! (Climate Progress)