pBy Joseph Romm/ppAn AP a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/01/ap-toyota-secretly-develo_n_154654.html"report/a is generating headlines around the world:/p blockquote Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered strongsolely /strongby solar energy ...br br According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop stronga model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle/strong, the newspaper said without citing sources./blockquote pGetting some electricity from rooftop PV panels isn't news, though it is a good idea, if only a "a href="http://jalopnik.com/397945/new-toyota-prius-to-get-solar-panels-as-symbolic-gesture"symbolic gesture/a" until panel costs drop sharply. (See also Treehugger's "a href="http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/08/solar-powered_t.php"Solar-Powered Toyota Prius Project/a.")/p pBut there isn't enough rooftop area to run a car solely on rooftop solar cells. I don't see how it would work even for an ultra-lightweight short-range city car with a really big roof area -- an ungainly, unaerodynamic design. And don't forget, cars are often parked inside./p blockquote Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy in an strongeffort to turn around its struggling business /strongwith a futuristic ecological car, a top business daily reported Thursday./blockquote pToyota struggling? It a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20081223/BUSINESS01/312230001/1002"had a loss this year/a, true -- the "strongfirst since the Japanese automaker began reporting results in 1941/strong"! Meanwhile, its biggest competitor is on the verge of bankruptcy./p pYeah, I'd like to struggle that much. In any case, long before any solar car could be ready to market, Toyota will be the biggest and most profitable car company in the world./p pemThe Truth About Cars/em says there is no truth to this story, that it was just lost in translation -- see a href="http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/toyota-allegedly-developing-solar-car-a-case-of-too-much-sake/"Toyota Allegedly Developing Solar Car: A Case Of Too Much Sake/a./p pStill, I ran a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/17/112338/33"Chrysler to electrify entire product line/a, which some commenters thought should have been filed under humor. Let's file this under Don't hold your breath 'media' -- since they probably got the story wrong./p pemThis post was created for a href="http://climateprogress.org/"ClimateProgress.org/a, a project of the a href="http://www.americanprogressaction.org/"Center for American Progress Action Fund/a./em/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=aae731efd67089a83e037488c31e841dp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=aae731efd67089a83e037488c31e841dp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=aae731efd67089a83e037488c31e841d" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=SwHeAP.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=SwHeAP.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=Varn0J.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=Varn0J.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=T2aRh6.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=T2aRh6.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=kLDjYs.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=kLDjYs.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503866920" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Joseph Romm/ppOn the very first day of 2009, the emL. A. Times/em a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-co2-1-2009jan01,0,823260.story"ran a story/a that already seems a lock to win the year's dumbest headline award. And dumbest subhead: "Recent moves by lame-duck officials, though frustrating to environmentalists, offer the president-elect time and political cover to deliberately craft rules on emissions, strongenergy lobbyists/strong say."/p pYes, the emLAT/em thinks that accelerating new coal plant construction, greenhouse-gas emissions, and the wanton destruction of the planet's livability will give Obama "breathing room to fight global warming."/p pYou might just as well argue that strongwaterboarding gives its victims "breathing room"/strong -- after all, right after you have been waterboarded, you breathe like you have never breathed before, desperately gasping for air./ppAnd that's what a href="http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/23/climate-progress-persons-of-the-year/"eight years of Bush/a have left us. We are, as the Hadley Center explained last month, desperately fighting to save the planet from a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/22/1111/3775""catastrophic" 5-7 degree C warming by 2100/a, but now with much less time, much higher global emissions, and a lost decade of inefficient, polluting infrastructure built at a cost of many trillions of dollars -- and now on top of that we have a bunch of a last-minute destructive regulations:/p blockquote[The Bush administration] barred the Environmental Protection Agency from considering the effects of global warming on protected species. And, more broadly, it excluded carbon dioxide from a list of pollutants that the EPA regulates under the Clean Air Act ...br br EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson issued a memo in late December -- as part of a review for a proposed coal-fired power plant expansion in Utah -- that excludes carbon dioxide from the list of pollutants the government must regulate under the Clean Air Act when approving construction projects./blockquote pWhat a gift that all was to the planet and to the incoming Obama administration./p pI'm sure we can all be thankful to the Bush administration for this breathing room. Cough, cough, gasp, gasp./p pemThis post was created for a href="http://climateprogress.org/"ClimateProgress.org/a, a project of the a href="http://www.americanprogressaction.org/"Center for American Progress Action Fund/a./em/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1d0d5f41145cd48db1d6e50f0388e9ebp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1d0d5f41145cd48db1d6e50f0388e9ebp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1d0d5f41145cd48db1d6e50f0388e9eb" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=dv04hX.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=dv04hX.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=oR8QGu.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=oR8QGu.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=bbHxjj.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=bbHxjj.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=e3Dsfn.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=e3Dsfn.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503866921" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Gar Lipow/ppCommenter Pangolin made a point about the cost of a href="http://www.igshpa.okstate.edu/geothermal/geothermal.htm"ground source heat pumps/a, an a href="http://www.igshpa.okstate.edu/geothermal/faq.htm"energy-saving technology/a, in his a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/1/23367/28094#comment15"comment/a about Hansen's open letter: "If I cluster installation of my geo-exchange systems (4 homes) I can realize significant savings in the greatest cost of the system, the drilling for the ground loop. If I bundle systems into neighborhood or block thermal-service units unit costs go down again." /p pJust so. To take an extreme example, a neighbor of mine had a ground source heat pump installed for $15,000 in a single-family residence (her home was ideal for the technology in a number of ways). Normally such systems run $20,000-$40,000. However, that cost can drastically be altered when shared. In 1992, a HUD Oklahoma apartment complex, a href="http://www.geoexchange.org/geothermal/publications/doc_download/59-oklahoma-tulsa-hud-park-chase-apartments.html"Park Chase Apartments/a [PDF], installed heat pumps for 348 units for a cost of around $6,800 per unit -- about $10,000 per unit in 2009 dollars./p pEven on the four-unit basis Pangolin mentions, the price could be lowered not only by a shared ground loop, but by shared pumps, and by timing installation to coincide with road repair, and placing the loop under the street. I suspect that done on the block level or even along a single street the length of a block, this could lower costs to $15,000 per unit. /p pThis is not a technological change in the usual sense. But it makes use of smart cooperation to use technology more effectively. And this is only one of many cases where we can use cooperation to drastically lower the cost of the investments we need to make to replace fossil fuels. You can look at it as a form of technology if you want to. Certainly it is innovation -- an innovation in social relations rather than machines./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=03693fc56c760b9aacf82c64f7731374p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=03693fc56c760b9aacf82c64f7731374p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=03693fc56c760b9aacf82c64f7731374" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=bK9HXc.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=bK9HXc.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=dpOeEd.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=dpOeEd.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=N7TxHP.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=N7TxHP.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=1JHysS.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=1JHysS.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503866922" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Kate Sheppard/p p Obama is poised to nominate a href="http://www.panettainstitute.org/institute/leon_panetta.htm"Leon Panetta/a to head the CIA, according to news reports today. Panetta is a long-time advocate for ocean protection, though he's not likely to get much sway in this area as CIA chief. /p pPanetta has been the chair and commissioner of the a href="http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_detail.aspx?id=130"Pew Oceans Commission/a since 2003. In 2005, Pew joined with the a href="http://www.oceancommission.gov/"U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy/a to create the a href="http://www.jointoceancommission.org/"Joint Ocean Commission Initiative/a, which Panetta now co-chairs. He is also the former director of the a href="http://www.mbayaq.org/"Monterey Bay Aquarium/a. While in Congress, Panetta was active on efforts to protect the California coast, and sponsored legislation to create the a href="http://montereybay.noaa.gov/"Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary/a. He continues to be active with the a href="http://nmsfocean.org/about-us/person/hon-leon-e-panetta"National Marine Sanctuary Foundation/a./p pPanetta represented California's 16th district in the House from 1977 to 1993, and was Bill Clinton's chief of staff from 1994 to 1997. Since then, he and his wife have founded the Leon amp; Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University at Monterey Bay. He is also the Distinguished Scholar to the Chancellor of the California State University system, and teaches political science at Santa Clara University./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b601a3217b105210799ee41e61fe45d1p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b601a3217b105210799ee41e61fe45d1p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b601a3217b105210799ee41e61fe45d1" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=RZvFIW.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=RZvFIW.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=HxT72D.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=HxT72D.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=cYOgem.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=cYOgem.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=DSuS5u.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=DSuS5u.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503866923" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Andrew Dessler/ppA friend of mine from college emailed me the other day and expressed some skepticism about the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. It occurred to me that it would make a good topic for my next post./pp So here is the reasoning that has led me to conclude that business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions will lead to temperature increases over the next century of around 3 degrees C./p p First, it has been known for over 150 years that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the planet. In fact, the very small number of credible skeptics out there, such as Dick Lindzen and Pat Michaels, are on record agreeing that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will warm the planet. What they argue is that the warming will be very small. More on that later./pp The conclusion that emitting greenhouse gases will result in warming does not rest on the output of climate models, but is a simple physical argument that predates the invention of the computer. And if you don't believe in physics, take a look at Venus. That planet features a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and consequently a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead./p pSo we know that adding carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. This leads us to the real question: How much warming are we going to get? /ppCarbon dioxide by itself will only provide somewhere around 1 degree C warming over the next century. In order to get really large warnings over the 21st century, there needs to be strong positive feedbacks to amplify the initial warming from carbon dioxide./p pThe strongest positive feedback is due to water vapor. The so-called water-vapor feedback refers to the process whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused for example by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, causes an increase in the specific humidity of the atmosphere. Because water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, the increase in specific humidity causes additional warming. /p pThe water vapor feedback has long been expected to exert a powerful warming effect because of the belief that the atmosphere's relative humidity would remain roughly constant -- meaning that specific humidity would increase rapidly with surface temperature. Models reproduce this, and the water vapor feedback is the most important reason for the models' large predicted warming for increases in greenhouse gases over the 21st century. /p pIf you read the blogs, you'll often see the argument made that no data exist to support the models' strong positive feedback and that they are simply "computer-generated." This is incorrect. I recently published a a href="http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2008b.pdf"paper/a [PDF] estimating the magnitude of the water-vapor feedback exclusively from data. No climate model involved. /p pWhat we found was evidence that the water vapor feedback is indeed strong and positive. And there are several other observation-based analyses that agree with this conclusion (see the references in my paper). /p pOverall, the water vapor feedback about doubles the Earth's response to carbon dioxide alone. If you throw in the other feedbacks (albedo, lapse rate, etc.), you'll get about a 3 degrees C warming for doubled carbon dioxide (compared to 1 degree C for carbon dioxide alone). /p pWhile there is significant uncertainty in this number, it's hard to believe that it will be fall outside a factor of 2 of this number. /p pThe credible skeptics agree that the Earth will warm over the 21st century, but that the warming will be very small (less than 1 degree C). Could they be right? Possibly. The one way that climate change may not be large is if there exists, somewhere in the climate system, a large negative feedback that compensates for the positive feedback provided by water vapor. If such a negative feedback exists, it seems highly likely that it would somehow revolve around clouds. /p pTo their credit, the few credible climate skeptics out there (Lindzen, Spencer) are indeed searching for negative feedbacks. So far, though, their arguments have been pretty weak and not convinced anyone in the scientific community./p pOne interpretation of the IPCC's statement that humans are "very likely" responsible for most of the observed recent warming is that there is about a 10 percent chance that a significant negative feedback (or something equivalent) does exist in the climate system and will preclude significant warming over the century. /p pMy personal opinion is that this is conservative, and that the actual chance we will discover a big negative feedback is actually far smaller. There is simply too much evidence in the paleoclimate record showing large swings of the climate, which tends to preclude the existence of stabilizing negative feedbacks./p pThis is how I reach the conclusion that warming of a few degrees Celsius is very likely unless we do something about greenhouse-gas emissions. Note that this conclusion is not derived from climate models. Rather, it is derived from fundamental physics combined with observations./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=5a10a61944febd7aa5ca9a2a3bf00cecp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=5a10a61944febd7aa5ca9a2a3bf00cecp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=5a10a61944febd7aa5ca9a2a3bf00cec" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=pk76Dl.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=pk76Dl.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=ot4hKh.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=ot4hKh.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=eVVAu0.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=eVVAu0.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=xElujz.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=xElujz.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503752224" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Kate Sheppard/p pAttention in Washington is focused on an economic stimulus plan, which will be the first major agenda item for the new Congress that convenes tomorrow, and for the new president when he's sworn in on Jan. 20. But how green will the stimulus package be?/p pIn his a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/4/02531/30455"radio/YouTube address/a on Saturday, Obama said his proposal -- dubbed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" -- would create 3 million new jobs, 80 percent of them in the private sector, including jobs in the renewable-energy and efficiency industries. "To put people back to work today and reduce our dependence on foreign oil tomorrow, we will double renewable-energy production and renovate public buildings to make them more energy efficient," he said./p pWhile Obama mentioned that a portion of the stimulus funding would go to repairing roads and bridges, he did not mention funding for public transportation, which many environmental groups and transit advocates are hoping will receive a substantial investment./p pOn Sunday, Obama's advisers said his plan will include a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/politics/05spend.html"$300 billion in tax cuts/a for workers and businesses, a move to appease conservatives who are concerned about government spending. The tax cuts would account for approximately 40 percent of the total package, which is likely to total between $675 billion and $775 billion over two years./p pOn Monday, President-elect Barack Obama met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other leaders from both parties on the Hill about his plan. "The reason we are here today is because the people can't wait. We have an extraordinary economic challenge ahead of us," he said./p pPelosi pledged that Congress will move rapidly on a stimulus plan. "As the President-elect indicated, the construction is underway right now. At [the time of inauguration], we hope to have signed into law legislation that will improve the lives of the American people."/p pWhile Pelosi sounded optimistic about getting a bill through in the next couple of weeks, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/congress-pushing-ahead-on-economic-stimulushfo/?hp"said on Sunday/a that it's more realistic to aim for getting a plan passed and signed by Presidents' Day in mid-February./p pSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on emMeet the Press/em on Sunday that Democrats will work with Republicans to craft a passable plan. "Whatever we do must be done on a bipartisan basis," he said. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has suggested that the federal government should give money to states in the form of loans rather than grants. /p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=40fa15c3bda3abb7891a2f6c08468e65p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=40fa15c3bda3abb7891a2f6c08468e65p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=40fa15c3bda3abb7891a2f6c08468e65" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=feMeB6.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=feMeB6.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=KqnO0I.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=KqnO0I.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=ic5Ik4.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=ic5Ik4.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=AvXsLG.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=AvXsLG.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503752225" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Tom Philpott/ppThere's an idea out there that reforming U.S. food policy simply can emnot/em be a priority for the Obama administration. We're enmeshed in two wars (three, if you count what our dear Israeli friends are up to in the Gaza Strip), the economy is crumbling, and climate change is accelerating. /ppUnder these conditions, how can Obama possibly busy himself with something as trivial as food? The president-elect himself seems to buy into this line of reasoning. By nominating a a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/16/2326/6775"corn-belt pol with a history of playing footsie with agribiz/a as his USDA chief, Obama signaled that status quo, not reform, will mark his food agenda, at least early in his presidency. /p pI think the food-reform-can-wait logic is wrong on several counts. As I'll argue later this week in Victual Reality, investing in a new food system could make for an excellent piece of a stimulus package. And on practical grounds, food-system reform is urgent. Anyone who doubts that should read the powerful, concise a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05berry.html?ref=opinion"op-ed/a in today's emNew York Times /emby Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. /ppThe sustainable food movement's most revered elders make the case with characteristic bluntness: /pblockquoteAgriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice./blockquotepemCivilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland./em Anyone who doubts this should take a dip into the pages of Jared Diamond's a href="http://astore.amazon.com/gristmagazine/detail/0143036556/102-1183543-3665742"emCollapse/em/a, or David Montgomery's a href="http://astore.amazon.com/gristmagazine/detail/0520248708/102-1183543-3665742"emDirt: The Erosion of Civilizations/em/a./ppBerry and Jackson make a key point about a society that has become almost completely alienated from the land that feeds it:/p blockquotestrongFor 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. /strongThat is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. strongThe government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations./strong/blockquote pIn other words, given enough taxpayer cash, you can theoretically bail out Wall Street, even when it's twisted itself into knots; but you can't bail out ruined soil. /ppBerry and Jackson call for a rejection of policies that prop up the industrial-food system. In their place, they want to see investments in "the perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers." /ppThey're making an important argument here, but perhaps too concisely. For thousands of years, humanity has relied on annual crops -- farmers plant, say, wheat, harvest the seed heads, and then plow in the dead wheat stalks to prepare the field for next year's planting. /ppThe process requires tremendous amounts of energy -- whether human, animal, or petroleum -- and disturbs soil structure, leading to soil erosion and the emission of carbon dioxide. /ppJackson and his colleagues at the a href="http://www.landinstitute.org/"Land Institute/a have been having success breeding perennial versions of staple crops like wheat. In a perennialized system, wheat plants would stay in the field for decades, every year yielding a harvest of wheat berries. And each year, their roots would reach deeper into the dirt, sequestering carbon and holding soil in place -- and negating the need for tillage. /ppBut the particular solution that Berry and Jackson offer is beside the point. They conjure a stark image: modern society is consuming soil, literally destroying its ability to feed people. /p pI can only imagine two responses. One is to dismiss Berry and Jackson as doddering old Luddites. Let techno-corporate science, though patent-protected biotechnology, fix our soil troubles. This view is analogous to the Wall Street fantasy of the late 1990s: Tech stocks can rise indefinitely, because we've created a "new economy"! /ppThe other response is to take Berry and Jackson seriously. If they're correct that we're at once consuming our best soil and poisoning it, we've got an urgent problem on our hands. We delay addressing it at our peril. /p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=888b8badd629f2175ba1a9455f6cfeccp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=888b8badd629f2175ba1a9455f6cfeccp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=888b8badd629f2175ba1a9455f6cfecc" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=mjoAiK.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=mjoAiK.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=34TIzt.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=34TIzt.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=19pEe2.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=19pEe2.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=dWyQuQ.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=dWyQuQ.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503752226" height="1" width="1"/

pBy David Roberts/ppIn last weekend's emNew York Times/em, conservatives a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28inglis.html?_r=1" Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) and Arthur Laffer had an op-ed/a claiming that a revenue-neutral "tax shift" would make conservatives "the new administration's best allies on climate change." /p pColor me skeptical. Laffer, of course, is a conservative legend, an economist whose a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve" curve/a has given a great many mendacious right-wing legislators intellectual cover in the war on taxes. Inglis is best known for a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070amp;sid=aU_vOirVlXhYamp;refer=home"telling Mitt Romney that Mormons aren't Christians/a. /p pIt's notable when prominent conservatives don't try to deny or downplay climate change. But that's a mighty low bar to clear these days. /p p There is a crucial bit of weasel wording here: "If the bill's authors had instead proposed a simple carbon tax coupled with an equal, strongoffsetting reduction in income taxes or payroll taxes/strong, a dynamic new energy security policy could have taken root."/p pIt matters a great deal whether a carbon tax reduces "income taxes or payroll taxes." Energy taxes are generally regressive unless offset. Reducing payroll taxes would provide some progressivity; reducing income taxes would provide additional regressivity. (Many workers pay no income tax at all.) You can bet conservatives would love that. "The good news is that both Democrats and Republicans could support a carbon tax offset by a payroll or income tax cut," they say. Everything's in that "or."/p pAs with many carbon tax fans these days, Inglis wildly overstates the effects of a modest price on carbon:/pblockquote Nuclear power plants would then compete with coal-fired plants. Wind and solar power would have a shot against natural gas. Trains would compete with trucks. We would clean the air, create wealth and jobs through a new technology boom and drastically improve our national security.br br The market-driven innovation that brought us the internet and the personal computer could quickly bring us new, cleaner fuels. A carbon tax that was fully offset (with payroll or income taxes cut by a dollar amount equal to the revenues generated by the new tax) would be as bold as the threat that we face. /blockquote p"As bold as the threat that we face"? No. It might be bold in today's political climate, but it is nowhere emclose/em to addressing the threat we face. A carbon-negative U.S. by mid-century is as bold as the threat we face. A modest ($15-25) carbon tax is a tiny, tiny step in that direction. /p pFirst, we have to remember all the places the price signal created by an upstream tax can be diluted or stymied on the way to consumers -- i.e., those who can change their behavior in response to prices. Not every industry or business will pass an increase in operating costs directly on to the next link in the chain. Information failures and split incentives abound. Price signals that begin strong, catholic, and clear become fragmented and faint downstream. For all the hype, an upstream carbon price will deliver fairly little incentive to where the carbon is used -- and where opportunities to switch to low-carbon alternatives are most plentiful./p pAt least, not until you crank the tax up fairly high. How high do you think you could get it before your "best allies" Inglis and Laffer jump ship? High enough?/p pSecond, trains wouldn't "compete with trucks" unless emsomebody laid rail/em. Many if not most carbon-reduction strategies are hostage to infrastructure. You can't take trains without rail networks; you can't double renewables without improving the grid./p pThis is to say -- yet again! -- that private sector price signals are only one part -- perhaps a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/31/22430/356"not the biggest part/a -- of a serious climate/energy strategy. You also need massive public investment and performance regulations. /p pWill Inglis and Laffer (and their conservative brethren) be the administration's "best allies" in its efforts to pursue investment and regulation? Will they defy decades of conservative "free market" orthodoxy and deep-rooted ties to industry? Again, color me skeptical. /p pI've changed my mind a number of times over the years about what it's going to take to get serious action. Currently I'm of the opinion that it will take a propitious confluence of a terrified public and a governing coalition of liberals and moderates. Conservatives are going to be bystanders at best, impediments at worst. I'd say history will judge them harshly for it, but there are always people like them doing things like they do, so history's judgment must not be much of a deterrent./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=78ccf9ac9d6105c3336e9ccf6daa1fc6p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=78ccf9ac9d6105c3336e9ccf6daa1fc6p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=78ccf9ac9d6105c3336e9ccf6daa1fc6" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=E90oow.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=E90oow.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=uRB9n0.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=uRB9n0.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=mwUHAT.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=mwUHAT.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=CKNgIl.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=CKNgIl.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503752227" height="1" width="1"/

pBy David Roberts/ppThis is a href="http://www.virginianaturalgas.com/Universal/PressRoom/2008/20082312.aspx"cool news/a:/p blockquoteDecember 23, 2008 -- The Virginia State Corporation Commission (VSCC) today approved the Virginia Natural Gas (VNG) proposed conservation and ratemaking efficiency plan.brbr The plan calls for new energy conservation programs, coupled with a revenue adjustment mechanism, designed to assist customers in managing their energy costs.brbr As part of the plan, VNG will provide $6.6 million over three years in new conservation initiatives. VNG projects that customers who participate in these new programs, set to begin rolling out in early 2009, can significantly reduce their monthly natural gas usage./blockquote pThis is a href="http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bcolander/decoupling_and_energy_efficien.html"via NRDC/a, who shares this very cool map of decoupling programs across the nation:/ppa href="http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bcolander/decoupling_and_energy_efficien.html"/a/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=e77a06ec8054d23dea13afcd6378d65bp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=e77a06ec8054d23dea13afcd6378d65bp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=e77a06ec8054d23dea13afcd6378d65b" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=saJEwy.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=saJEwy.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=yTXSPC.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=yTXSPC.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=uKZc82.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=uKZc82.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=ReO1Ti.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=ReO1Ti.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503752228" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Ken Johnson/ppFollowing are two questions for James Hansen and Grist readers, relating to Hansen's tax-and-dividend proposal in his recent a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/1/23367/28094"policy recommendations to Obama/a:/p pstrong1. Would it not be advantageous to use dividends to give consumers an equity stake and interest in decarbonization?/strong/pp This could be achieved by investing carbon tax revenue in renewable energy and clean technologies in exchange for equity, and distributing equity shares to the public on an equitable per-capita basis. The shares would yield dividends that increase -- not decrease -- as carbon is phased out./p pstrong2. Is tax-and-dividend fundamentally incompatible with cap-and-trade?/strong/p p Many of the ills of cap-and-trade ("special interests, lobbyists, ...") are associated with free allocation, but allowance auctioning (Obama favors) would be similar to a tax in terms of revenue generation and potential for consumer dividends. Moreover, an auction with a price floor would be equivalent to a carbon tax as long as there are sufficiently many allowances to satisfy market demand at the price threshold. (The price would only increase if the tax incentive is insufficient to achieve the cap.) A recognition of the commonality between carbon taxes and cap-and-trade could help overcome political barriers to action on climate change./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=f9cf038f7e0d64a14cebd71816add148p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=f9cf038f7e0d64a14cebd71816add148p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=f9cf038f7e0d64a14cebd71816add148" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=qtm2OV.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=qtm2OV.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=GWkvdp.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=GWkvdp.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=Cwne79.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=Cwne79.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=MLvcXi.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=MLvcXi.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622489" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Adam Stein/ppAmerican lithium-ion battery makers, including giants like 3M, are banding together to try to extract a few billion dollars from Congress so they can build a shiny battery manufacturing plant that, for whatever reason, they aren't willing to spend their own money on. This latest handout request is a fairly dubious idea that is nevertheless likely to appeal to a lot of people on grounds of both economic nationalism and a vague aura of environmental goodness./p p Whatever you think of the request, though, let's at least all agree not to put up with a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/green-battery-start-up-begins-with-drills/#more-2091 "this/a:/p blockquote "We don't want to go from being dependent on Middle East oil to Asian batteries." br / br / - Jeff Depew, chief executive of Imara, a start-up that makes lithium-ion batteries/blockquote p Oil is a viscous substance, finite in quantity, concentrated in hard-to-reach pockets in certain corners of the globe. These properties allow a relatively small handful of countries to exert some imperfect control over its supply. Batteries differ from oil in just about every important way.*/p p Depew has an obvious interest in promoting American battery manufacturers. But surely savvy outsiders understand that a competitive, low-cost industry, whether centered in Asia or anywhere else, is good for everyone a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122957206516817419.html"who needs batteries/a?/p blockquote Recently, Andrew Grove, former chairman of Intel Corp., began urging the chip maker to explore whether it could play a role in battery manufacturing. Mr. Grove and others say U.S. companies must step up efforts to produce advanced batteries for the country's car industry or America will end up trading its dependence on foreign petroleum for dependence on foreign-made batteries./blockquote p Oh, well. The industry consortium is organized by Jim Greenberger, a lawyer specializing in clean tech. In case you're not scared enough yet of the Asian battery menace, Greenberger a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/electric-car-battery-makers-seek-federal-funds/ "spells it out/a:/p blockquote Yet car manufacturing will eventually move where the batteries are made, he said. "If we're dependent on Asia, transportation and even defense will gravitate there."/blockquote p Roger that. Clearly the one thing our globalized economy has taught us is that all industry eventually clusters around the battery plant./p p The government almost certainly can play a productive role in moving the battery industry forward, primarily by funding the sort of basic research that is fueling the explosion in domestic battery start-ups, from Imara to A123. The former is trying to commercialize technology a href="http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/green-battery-startup-starts-small/"developed at Stanford/a and funded by the Clinton administration. The latter is based on technology a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22186/"developed at MIT/a./p p And who knows? Maybe America's research advantage in will translate into manufacturing supremacy as well. But let's not cloud the issue with scare talk about new forms of "dependency." I for one welcome our new lithium overlords./p p * This is someone's cue to chime in about South American lithium mines. Fair enough, but that issue still has nothing to do with where batteries are manufactured./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=7603c736d955f8ec7fe77f5a5a4152ebp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=7603c736d955f8ec7fe77f5a5a4152ebp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=7603c736d955f8ec7fe77f5a5a4152eb" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=7nRAf9.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=7nRAf9.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=Utflgg.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=Utflgg.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=5qbFoe.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=5qbFoe.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=JjJwNo.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=JjJwNo.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622490" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Kate Sheppard/pdiv class="float-right" style="width: 200px;" div class="photo-caption" style="padding-left: 5px;"Lisa Jackson./div div class="photo-credit" style="padding-left: 5px;"/div /div pDepending on who you ask, Lisa Jackson is either the best or worst thing that ever happened to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which she led from February 2006 to November 2008./p pFor the most part, New Jersey's biggest environmental groups praise her work on climate change and celebrate her nomination to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But she also has a passionate and vocal group of detractors, mainly people who have worked on toxics in the state, both within the DEP and outside it. Her critics say she's a political player who has undermined science within the department. The deep divide between greens in the state has lead to some a href="http://blog.nj.com/njv_bill_wolfe/2008/12/credibility_is_a_scarce_resour.html"nasty finger-pointing/a on both sides./p p"When she became commissioner we had high expectations, and we thought she was going to come in and move the DEP away from being a failure and actually moving it to an organization that would be strong on the environment, strong on enforcement, exemplify leadership," said Robert Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association, a nonprofit based in central New Jersey. "I was sadly disappointed, as were many folks in the environmental community in New Jersey, by her performance as commissioner of the DEP."/p pNew Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel defended Jackson, even though she didn't agree with enviros all the time. "I think she's a decent person who has some strong environmental principles," he said./p pAmy Goldsmith, director of the New Jersey Environmental Federation, praised Jackson's work on water protections and the state's climate plan. "She's clearly more of an environmentalist than we've had in previous commissioners," she said. "I would say probably on average 70 percent of the time or more we agree with her. It isn't that she gives us 100 percent of what we want. She has priorities that she has to make, and she has constraints from up above in the governor's office."/p pThe split seems to be between those who work on energy and climate policy in the state's capital and those who work on toxic cleanups at the local level./p p"A lot of these people who are saying these negative things don't even work in Trenton and they don't even work on these issues," said Tittel. "That's what I find ... very aggravating."/p pSpiegel, meanwhile, says his experience with Jackson on local issues has demonstrated that she's not capable of reforming the federal EPA. "So many environmental groups in New Jersey have said that [her nomination] is a good thing for the EPA, but those groups don't work in the trenches," he said. "We do. We have about 70 sites we work on directly and advocate for directly, and we see first hand what's happened."/p pstrongA toxic legacy/strong/p pNew Jersey, a hub for the chemical manufacturing industry, is one of the most polluted states in the nation, with some 16,000 contaminated sites, including 115 Superfund sites. Early in her tenure, Jackson promised to reform the department's $60 million toxic-site cleanup program./p p"I firmly believe that additional changes in how the DEP manages and cleans up contaminated sites are definitely needed," Jackson said in a hearing before the state Senate Environment Committee in October 2006, nine months after she took the helm at the agency. She said then that one of her key objectives would be prioritizing the sites in order to get the most dangerous cleaned up first. But critics lambaste her for never getting around to completing that ranking./p pA a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/images/user/6337/20080602_08_P_0169.pdf"June 2008 report/a [PDF] from the U.S. EPA Office of Inspector General slammed the state for delays and mismanagement of seven state-supervised Superfund cleanups, going so far as to recommend that the federal EPA assume responsibility for the cleanups. The report notes that the problems predated Jackson, but also continued through her time as commissioner./p pSpiegel of the Edison Wetlands Association says the state has failed not only to act on a number of sites already known to be contaminated, but on listing new sites as well. Recently his organization has been calling on the DEP to investigate the Akzo Nobel chemical plant, which it says is leaking benzene and other chemicals into the Raritan River, but its repeated requests have been ignored. "We were left having to a href="http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-njdce/case_no-2:2008cv00419/case_id-210491/"file a federal lawsuit/a in order to get a site cleaned up that normally DEP in the past would have taken immediate action on," said Spiegel. "For us that really directly spoke to leadership and [Jackson's] ability to protect human health and the environment. She failed on every test in that aspect."/p pCritics say Jackson has also a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/15/102510/81"failed to adequately protect the public from chromium pollution/a. The previous DEP commissioner, Brad Campbell, had placed a moratorium on development of sites found to contain the carcinogenic substance until new standards could be put in place. When new standards for cleanup were finalized, Jackson lifted the moratorium. But some in the state in the state, including a former DEP scientist who resigned over the issue, believe that the standards are far too lax, putting public health at risk. /p p"I thought technically [Jackson] would appreciate the complexity of [the chromium] issue. I knew her background with federal laws and I looked forward to it," said Zoe Kelman, an environmental engineer who had been with the DEP for nearly 20 years. But she says Jackson ignored new data on the health effects of chromium as well as warnings from herself and others that standards needed to be stricter./p pKelman resigned in August 2008, saying that Jackson prioritized the interests of developers and industry over environmental health. "I just can't function in that environment anymore," she told Grist. "It just went against everything of who I am as a professional."/p pJoe Morris, director of the environmental cleanup project at the Interfaith Community Organization, a small group that has worked on environmental-justice and remediation efforts, voiced similar complaints about Jackson, calling her "really irresponsible." Morris's group in 2003 a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504EEDA143EF934A25756C0A9659C8B63"successfully sued Honeywell International/a to force it to clean up a 34-acre chromium-contaminated site along Jersey City's waterfront. When his group has come to Jackson with concerns about other sites, it's been largely ignored, he said./p p"We've had relationships with commissioners with whom we've disagreed very strenuously, but they were still willing to meet," said Morris. Jackson "operates in a bubble," he said, and has not been responsive to requests to investigate sites and force cleanups. "The only way to get a cleanup was for private citizens to go to court," said Morris./p pThe toxics issue that grabbed the most attention during Jackson's time at the DEP was her handling of a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/nyregion/19mercury.html"mercury poisoning at the Kiddie Kollege day-care center/a in Franklin Township, N.J., an incident that arose early in her tenure. At least a third of the 60 children at the day care were found to have abnormally high levels of mercury in their bodies. The fact that a day-care center was operating out of a building that had previously housed a thermometer manufacturer -- and had mercury vapor levels at least 27 times the regulatory limit -- apparently went unnoticed by DEP officials for years. The permitting and oversight problem started before Jackson was commissioner, but critics point out that there was a a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/nyregion/01mercury.html?_r=1"three-month lag/a between discovery of the problem in April 2006 and a href="http://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases06/pr20060803b.html"shutdown of the facility/a in July of that year./p pPublic Employees for Environmental Responsibility cites toxic-cleanup failures as just one of a href="http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1136"many reasons why Jackson is unfit to lead the EPA/a. The group has been particularly critical of a Permit Efficiency Review Task Force that Jackson appointed last year, arguing that it was a href="http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1022""industry-dominated"/a and not sufficiently transparent in its dealings (though it did ultimately a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/images/user/6337/final_report_8_7_08.pdf"make its findings public/a). /p pstrongBudget woes/strong/p pThe state's bigger green groups say that Jackson was constrained both by the state's budget and by Gov. Jon Corzine (D), who has been inclined to protect the state's industrial base from new environmental regulations./p p"There are many other accomplishments that Lisa Jackson would have had if it wasn't for Corzine's policies and his refusal to sign off on certain things," said Sierra Club's Tittel. "Jon Corzine is the one setting policy as governor. Lisa Jackson is carrying it out. She's done some good things, there's some things that she's done that I don't agree with, but most of the things I don't agree with came from the governor."p pOverall, the DEP has 3,200 employees, a thousand fewer than it did at its peak two decades ago. The agency handles about 26,000 permit requests each year. The Permit Efficiency Review Task Force set up by Jackson a href="http://www.northjersey.com/environment/environmentnews/28645224.html"concluded/a that severe understaffing and a lack of technological infrastructure were causing big delays. /p pStaff shortages date back to the 1990s, when then-Gov. a href="http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/12/05/index.html"Christine Todd Whitman/a (R) cut the DEP's staff by 20 percent and reduced the remaining staff to 35 hours a week. The office in charge of hazardous waste used to have 270 people, but is now down to 150, according to Tittel./p pBudget cuts have continued under Corzine, and he has put a hiring freeze in place in the state. Last year, the DEP lost another 119 staffers through an early-retirement program the state was pushing to help cut the budget./p p"She was already operating under pretty adverse conditions, and then the budget crisis in the state got worse," said Goldsmith of the New Jersey Environmental Federation./p pstrongAn outsource of contention/strong/p pJackson has said that budget constraints prompted her department to advocate for a href="http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2008/2008-04-15-094.asp"privatizing site remediation/a work in the state. A plan to outsource toxic-site cleanups to private consultants will go before the legislature early this year./p p"Sometimes I feel our department is so overworked that we are not getting results, we're just pushing paper," Jackson said last April. "Therefore, I feel outsourcing the consultant program to the private sector will ease the workload and lower the wait time for all those involved in site remediation."/p pThis plan has drawn harsh criticism from environmentalists. "We don't think that consultants should be the ones to verify whether a site has been cleaned up," said Goldsmith. Enviros also argue that the plan could create conflicts of interest, potentially allowing polluting companies to get contracts to clean up the messes they made. /p pTittel too opposes the privatization plan, but blames Corzine rather than Jackson. "I think the whole issue over privatizing part of the site-remediation programs is because Corzine has tied her hands with the budget, not having more staff to oversee the cleanup of contaminated sites," he said./p pstrongSuccesses/strong/p pJackson has earned much praise, however, for her work on the state's climate change and energy plans, and on clean-water protections. During her tenure, more than 900 miles of state waterways were given the highest level of protection under the Clean Water Act, limiting development and requiring buffer zones./p p"She did some good work on clean water and land use, which was difficult to be successful on, because Gov. Corzine was not supportive of a lot of the land-use protections that we were seeking and that she wanted to adopt," said Dena Mottola Jaborska, executive director of Environment New Jersey. "It's not perfect. Lisa wasn't able to see all the protection through that we wanted, but she was more successful than any of the other heads of the DEP that I've worked with."/p pGreen groups say Jackson also pushed Corzine toward tougher measures on climate and energy. The Global Warming Response Act, which the governor signed into law in July 2007, aims to reduce the state's greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to 80 percent below 2006 levels by mid-century. /p pThe state missed a June 2008 deadline by which it was supposed to identify measures needed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but again Tittel says that's mostly Corzine's fault because the governor "micromanages and won't let anything go out until he signs off." /p pThe plan was a href="http://www.northjersey.com/environment/States_global_warming_emissions_plan_unveiled.html"released in mid-December/a, and enviros say it's strong. It calls for 90 percent of new development to be in areas already served by public infrastructure, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, increased public transit, and a requirement that all buildings constructed after 2030 to have net-zero energy consumption. (The trick will be getting the legislature to sign off.)/p pTittel also credits Jackson with shaping the state's 15-year energy master plan. A 2006 law set a goal of drawing 20 percent of the state's electricity from renewables by 2020, but now the Corzine administration is aiming for 30 percent. In October, a href="http://www.grist.org/news/2008/10/07/njwind/index.html"Corzine announced/a a plan to triple the amount of wind power in the state by 2020, to 3,000 megawatts -- about 13 percent of the state's total electricity -- to help meet that goal. Tittel says Jackson played a key role in reforming the plan to promote offshore wind, renewable energy, and energy efficiency; in its first incarnation, it was heavy on nuclear and fossil fuels./p pJackson is currently vice president of the executive board of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the cap-and-trade program created by northeastern states to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that a href="http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/09/24/rggi/index.html"kicked off/a in September./p pStill, critics like Bill Wolfe, the former director of the state PEER group and a columnist for the Newark emStar-Ledger/em, say Jackson has not done enough to regulate greenhouse gases in the state. Wolfe argues that the DEP had the power to curb emissions even before passage of the Global Warming Response Act in 2007. "Although Jackson is touted as a leader on global warming, few realize that she has done nothing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as NJ DEP Commissioner, despite having existing regulatory authority to do so," wrote Wolfe in a a href="http://blog.nj.com/njv_bill_wolfe/2008/12/worst_midnight_ruling_by_far.html"recent column/a. "The Jackson record amounts to the same as the Bush policy -- no regulation, no action, no reductions."/p pstrongIs she ready for the big leagues?/strong/p pJackson's critics in the state say her record there does not portend great things at the federal level. "I shudder at the thought of her being put in charge of an agency that's supposed to be protecting the environment and human health of the whole United States when she couldn't even do it for New Jersey," said Spiegel./p p"In my opinion, Lisa Jackson has ably used [New Jersey] and the DEP as a stepping stone to a federal position, leaving behind no legacy of environmental resource protection but only an outstanding record of self-preservation and self-publicity," a href="http://blog.nj.com/njv_johnbury/2008/11/more_dirt_on_dep_part_2.html"wrote columnist John Bury/a./p pYet her supporters think she'll be able to accomplish a lot under Obama, who has set forth an ambitious environmental agenda. /p p"We're looking forward to her having the opportunity to actually do some of the things she's wanted to do here in New Jersey, but because of resources and lack of leadership at the top, she hasn't been able to those things," said Goldsmith./p p"I think she, under some very tough circumstances here, has done some very good things, and has gotten some good programs fixed," said Tittel. "I think at the national level the difference is that Barack Obama is not Jon Corzine, and I think she can get a lot more done."/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=539d8284acfc6f121edb8fb07b8395edp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=539d8284acfc6f121edb8fb07b8395edp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=539d8284acfc6f121edb8fb07b8395ed" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=24WPsw.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=24WPsw.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=iozylj.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=iozylj.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=ENsQOk.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=ENsQOk.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=t3iSjt.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=t3iSjt.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622491" height="1" width="1"/

pBy David Roberts/ppFor several years Michigan has been pursuing a dual-track energy strategy: more coal plants and more clean energy. But as forecasts show demand slacking, energy imports draining the budget, and power plant costs rising, the calculus may be shifting./p pa href="http://mlui.org/landwater/fullarticle.asp?fileid=17282"Keith Schneider reports/a that Gov. Jennifer Granholm is on the verge of a big announcement:/p blockquoteSenior Granholm administration officials declined to be specific about what they said would be a "major statement," but indicated the governor might support a moratorium on approving new coal plants while the state formulates CO2 regulations--something coal opponents around the state have pushed for with lawsuits, petitions to the governor, and a steady barrage of press and grassroots events for more than a year. Or, some officials said, the governor might announce an outright ban on new coal plants./blockquote pPutting Rust Belt states in the vanguard of the clean energy shift is a powerful thing, symbolically, politically, and economically. Let's hope Granholm goes big./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=27e4e3fb8f727b36a58f3a78a6efec5ep=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=27e4e3fb8f727b36a58f3a78a6efec5ep=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=27e4e3fb8f727b36a58f3a78a6efec5e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=LnDXVF.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=LnDXVF.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=cEZQaI.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=cEZQaI.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=mfsbSh.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=mfsbSh.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=dr5woO.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=dr5woO.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622492" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Adam Stein/ppNew Year's resolutions, as we all know, are almost entirely pointless -- made in one breath, forgotten in the next. So in that spirit of general futility, I offer a few ideas for green resolutions that, either through novelty or just ease of use, may inspire more than a passing commitment. Please leave your own ideas below./p p strongIdea #1: help make quot;livable streetsquot; a reality in your community/strong/p p All politics is local, said Tip O'Neill, but most of us still don't pay much attention to local politics. Issues at a community level are often driven by the triumvirate of homeowners, business owners and car owners -- good people, no doubt, but narrow in their interests./p p This won't change if you don't help make it change. Happily, a thriving network of community organizers is doing great work to promote a people- and environment-centered development agenda, ranging from this a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/11/11/rave-review-for-clevelands-brt-debut/"new bus system/a in Cleveland to this a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/07/10/big-companies-bringing-bike-share-to-small-cities/"bike-sharing program/a in Tulsa to this a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/08/12/eyes-on-the-street-summer-streets-gallery-2/ "massive street festival/a in New York./p p Support their good work! A few ideas for getting involved:/p ol li Get smarter about development issues by spending some time with the great resources at the a href="http://www.livablestreets.com/"Livable Streets Network/a. Subscribe to their a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/"blog/a, subscribe to an a href="http://www.livablestreets.com/blognetwork"affiliated blog/a focused on your community, watch their a href="http://www.streetfilms.org/"films/a, or read and contribute to their a href="http://streetswiki.org/"wiki/a./li li Find or start a local group using the Livable Street Network's a href="http://www.livablestreets.com/projects"online tools/a./li li Get involved with a local organization like a href="http://www.transalt.org"Transportation Alternatives/a (based in New York). Or support them financially by attending some of their fun events./li /ol pstrongIdea #2: eat more plants/strong/p p I'll take it as given that no one is going to adopt vegetarianism as a result of this blog post. But, speaking as one omnivore to another, perhaps I can convince you that reducing the environmental impact of your diet is both easy and enjoyable. The carbon footprint of food is an insanely complicated topic, so I'm going to organize these food-related resolutions around a radically simple proposition: eat less beef. Some possible resolutions:/p ol li During your weekly shopping, substitute chicken, pork, or fish for beef. Better yet: beans, pasta, or veg./li li Spend the few minutes necessary to figure out the provenance of your non-beef meat, and find a convenient source of stuff that isn't evil./li li Read anything by a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8amp;keywords=Michael Pollanamp;tag=gristmagazineamp;index=booksamp;linkCode=ur2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=9325"Michael Pollan/a. If your Pollan library is full stocked, start working your way through a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8amp;keywords=taras%20grescoeamp;tag=gristmagazineamp;index=booksamp;linkCode=ur2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=9325"Taras Grescoe/a./li li If you cook, learn one new a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764524836?ie=UTF8amp;tag=gristmagazineamp;linkCode=as2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=9325amp;creativeASIN=0764524836"vegetarian entree/a per month./li li If you don't cook, start. Make one dinner per week from scratch. No burgers./li li Pick one day a week to go fully veggie./li li Or go completely meatless for all your lunches./li li Etc./li /ol pstrongIdea #3: downgrade your gadgets/strong/p p I hesitate to post this, because, well, it smacks of treacly feel-goodism. But anyway: I recently lost my spiffy web-enabled cell phone. I replaced it with a comically out-of-date, refurbished flip phone, with the intention of riding out the last few months of my service contract and then getting a shiny, shiny iPhone./p p Here's the heartwarming bit. Since switching to the junky, used phone, my quality of life has gone up appreciably. Turns out that when you're stripped of mobile email and web, your heart rate decreases, you have more serendipitous encounters with puppies and wonder-filled children, and your bursitis goes away. I miss the mapping functionality of my web phone, but I find the survival skills I honed during my pre-mobile-internet years slowly returning. /p p So no iPhone for me. The key to this act of voluntary simplicity was making it involuntary. Resolving to spend less time stating at little screens never would have worked. /p p Do you have a love-hate relationship with any electronic encumbrances? Now is as good a time as any to cast them off (read: recycle them). The environment may or may not benefit, but your pocketbook probably will, and your sanity almost certainly will./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=cc78f695548f99c9e113188e7da7dc0fp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=cc78f695548f99c9e113188e7da7dc0fp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=cc78f695548f99c9e113188e7da7dc0f" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=5TUCyU.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=5TUCyU.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=9bAdYc.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=9bAdYc.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=ZGicCC.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=ZGicCC.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=rMKBFh.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=rMKBFh.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622494" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Maywa Montenegro/ppWhat do Weather Channel seductress a href="http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/09/15/little/index.html"Heidi Cullen/a, Steven quot;a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/31/181924/330"wedge/aquot; Pacala, former TIME writer Michael Lemonick, soon-to-be NOAA head a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/18/135259/96"Jane Lubchenco/a, and Grist founding board member Ben Strauss have in common?/p pThey're all part of an new project called a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/about.html"Climate Central/a. It was mentioned briefly in this a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/19/105810/54"recent post/a about Lubchenco, but it's so interesting and innovative that it merits further digital ink -- which I was going to provide myself, but Curtis Brainard of the emColumbia Journalism Review/em a href="http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/climate_central.php?page=1"beat me to it/a./pblockquoteClimate Central is a hybrid team of nearly two dozen journalists and scientists -- spread between a main office in Princeton, New Jersey and a smaller one in Palo Alto, California -- who work side by side on stories for television, print, and the Web. Relying upon a non-profit business model that is similar to a href="http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org/"The Center for Investigative Reporting/a, a href="http://www.propublica.org/"ProPublica/a, and others, Climate Central pitches its work to local and national news outlets, looking for collaborative editorial partnerships. It also makes its various experts, many of who are still affiliated with major research institutions, available as primary sources. The goal is to "localize" the story around regions, states, or even cities, in order to highlight the various and particular ways that changes in climate are affecting people's daily lives. /blockquotepAs Brainard points out, this new effort comes at a time when traditional news outlets are struggling to produce original environment-related content (many, like a href="http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/cnn_cuts_entire_science_tech_t.php"CNN/a, have axed their science and environment teams). /ppWhether Climate Central will be, as communications scholar Matthew Nisbet puts it, quot;the future of science journalism -- non-profit partnerships providing independent and syndicated science coverage," or whether it will falter under conflicts of interest (real or perceived), remains to be seen./ppBut it's great to see scientists stepping up to the plate -- or if you'll indulge a double-edged pun -- to the green screen./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=9d0f96d10082b3c10c8f4a25fb9e694bp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=9d0f96d10082b3c10c8f4a25fb9e694bp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=9d0f96d10082b3c10c8f4a25fb9e694b" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=IaA4q4.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=IaA4q4.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=DLkBOJ.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=DLkBOJ.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=ZG6yR3.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=ZG6yR3.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=9KI9Lf.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=9KI9Lf.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622495" height="1" width="1"/

pBy David Roberts/ppObama's radio address, on the "a href="http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/american_recovery_and_reinvestment/"American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan/a," mentions doubling renewable energy and energy efficiency renovations; it does not mention public transit. Lots of bipartisan talk, in the runup to the great kickoff of Jan. 20./p p/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1477f95a9bb5d4880593aa32224a06f8p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1477f95a9bb5d4880593aa32224a06f8p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1477f95a9bb5d4880593aa32224a06f8" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=7rsPqz.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=7rsPqz.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=EaWoMj.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=EaWoMj.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=JynCde.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=JynCde.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=KiOdhE.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=KiOdhE.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622497" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Erik Hoffner/ppThe final environmental impact statement on Cape Wind was supposed to hit the press in December, but it's been a href="http://www.nantucketindependent.com/news/2008/1224/other_news/009.html"put back another month/a thanks to the delay tactics of the 'antis' in Congress, this time notably Rep Jim Oberstar (D-Minn) who was recently singled out a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/4/02954/3919"in Grist/a as an outstanding advocate for progressive stances on energy and transit, but only in Minnesota, I guess. emThe Providence Journal/em takes him and those he probably acted on behalf of to task a href="http://capewindbook.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/more-action-from-osterville.html"here/a: blockquoteThis is another win for the Kennedys, who have summer houses on Nantucket Sound, and Bill Koch, a fossil-fuel billionaire and a hardball political player and paymaster, and the leader of the anti-wind-farm group the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound ... That the vast majority of Massachusetts residents support Cape Wind seems not to matter at all .../blockquote pThe FEIS is expected to be very positive on the proposal, opening the way to who knows what next hurdle the Alliance will erect, 7 years now after Cape Wind was first proposed./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=472c211325b04a3510556748184afec3p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=472c211325b04a3510556748184afec3p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=472c211325b04a3510556748184afec3" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=yqnMJh.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=yqnMJh.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=2VRxLv.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=2VRxLv.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=rO62ZS.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=rO62ZS.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=K6YX1O.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=K6YX1O.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622500" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Kate Sheppard/p pBill Richardson has a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28493919/"withdrawn his name/a from consideration for the post of commerce secretary. The New Mexico governor says he is concerned that a a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/politics/05richardson.html?hp"grand jury investigation/a into a company that has done business with his state might delay the confirmation process./p pObama a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/3/84942/6299"tapped Richardson/a to head the Commerce Department last month, to the a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/3/132917/349"delight of enviros/a who praised his strong record on climate and energy issues./p p"Let me say unequivocally that I and my Administration have acted properly in all matters and that this investigation will bear out that fact," he said in a statement. "But I have concluded that the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process."/p pObama said in a statement that he is accepting the decision "with deep regret." "Governor Richardson is an outstanding public servant and would have brought to the job of Commerce Secretary and our economic team great insights accumulated through an extraordinary career in federal and state office," said Obama./p p"It is a measure of his willingness to put the nation first that he has removed himself as a candidate for the Cabinet in order to avoid any delay in filling this important economic post at this critical time," Obama continued. "Although we must move quickly to fill the void left by Governor Richardson's decision, I look forward to his future service to our country and in my administration."/p pObama made no mention of possible new nominees for the post./p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b5529f6364a110fb8f2ce584cfef756ep=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b5529f6364a110fb8f2ce584cfef756ep=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b5529f6364a110fb8f2ce584cfef756e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=3MxGfb.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=3MxGfb.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=WvRlaJ.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=WvRlaJ.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=3OHsop.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=3OHsop.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=yMN6Mq.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=yMN6Mq.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622503" height="1" width="1"/

pBy Joseph Romm/ppemCongressional Quarterly/em emOnline /emreported last week:/p blockquoteThe two senior House Democrats with jurisdiction over energy and telecommunications policies could swap gavels in the 111th Congress, with potentially dramatic implications for the shape of climate change legislation expected next year.brbrSince 2007, Rick Boucher of Virginia, the Energy and Commerce Committee's fourth-ranking Democrat, has led the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, which has taken the lead role in crafting legislation to address global warming.brbrBut Boucher said in an interview Tuesday that he expects Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, No. 3 among committee Democrats in seniority, to bid for the subcommittee chairmanship. Boucher said he would "respect that decision" and stake his own claim for chairmanship of Markey's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.brbr"I'm awaiting his decision," Boucher said. Markey has not yet made up his mind, a spokesman said./blockquote pThis would be almost as big a deal as a href="http://climateprogress.org/2008/11/20/breaking-news-waxman-defeats-dingell/"Waxman defeating Dingell/a for committee chair. Just as Dingell-Boucher co-authored a House climate bill last session, one would expect that if this change occurs, Waxman and Markey would co-author a House Bill in this session. And it certainly wouldn't be as lame (see "a href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/17/05116/823"Q: Does Dingell-Boucher have meaningful auctioning of CO2 permits before 2026?/a")./p pThe story continues:/pblockquoteA move by Markey to leadership of the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee would represent a significant philosophical shift in the leadership of a panel charged with writing the climate legislation that House leaders and the Obama administration want to pass this year.brbrBoucher, who hails from a coal-rich corner of Virginia, worked with recently ousted Energy and Commerce Chairman John D. Dingell, D-Mich., a champion of his state's ailing auto industry, to produce a draft global warming bill that some environmentalists criticized as too soft on industry.brbrMarkey, however, is a leading liberal in his caucus and is closely aligned with environmentalists. He also is strongly allied with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who named him chairman of a Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the 110th Congress, and with the new Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif.brbrMarkey introduced his own climate bill (HR 6186) in June, which would cap greenhouse gas emissions at 85 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, a target far more aggressive than Boucher and Dingell proposed in their draft.brbrMarkey has long been the top Democrat on the telecommunications subcommittee and may have some reluctance about giving up that prominent post.brbrBut with President-elect Barack Obama signaling that a major global warming bill will be among his top priorities this year, Markey may find the prospect of taking a lead role in writing the legislation. His select committee has held dozens of hearings on a wide range of climate and energy issues, but lacks any legislative authority./blockquote pI can't see the point in keeping the Select committee if Markey switches positions. But in any case, the switch itself is what matters. It would be a good way to start the new year./p pemThis post was created for a href="http://climateprogress.org/"ClimateProgress.org/a, a project of the a href="http://www.americanprogressaction.org/"Center for American Progress Action Fund/a./em/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=d7860a84273c3a6ab3d11646d640164bp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=d7860a84273c3a6ab3d11646d640164bp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=d7860a84273c3a6ab3d11646d640164b" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=kUTzDb.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=kUTzDb.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=tWZpbG.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=tWZpbG.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=fSelE3.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=fSelE3.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=NA9oi3.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=NA9oi3.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622504" height="1" width="1"/

pBy David Roberts/ppFox News on the "green bible":/p pembed width="305" wmode="false" bgcolor="#000000" id="mediumFlashEmbedded" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://foxnews1.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/foxnews1-foxnews-pub01-live/current/videolandingpage/fncLargePlayer/client/embedded/embedded.swf" name="undefined" menu="false" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" play="false" height="275" allowfullscreen="true" scale="noscale" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="playerId=videolandingpageamp;playerTemplateId=fncLargePlayeramp;categoryTitle=amp;referralObject=3397345amp;referralPlaylistId=playlist"/pp(thanks LL!)/p br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=56ee6f0d71209e55390a415cbf958043p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=56ee6f0d71209e55390a415cbf958043p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=56ee6f0d71209e55390a415cbf958043" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=zuiXW0.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=zuiXW0.P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=xups05.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=xups05.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=bntwzi.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=bntwzi.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?a=QspC3f.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/grist/gristmill?i=QspC3f.p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/gristmill/~4/503622506" height="1" width="1"/