\nsigned health care reform into law this week, exposing a rarely
\nacknowledged political pre-existing condition among the pundit class: despite the conventional wisdom, no matter how many years experience a
\ngiven observer has had in Washington, whatever political party you
\nfavor—nobody ever really has any idea what’s about to happen. As Sen.
\nLisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said<\/a> the other day about the current mood in Congress, “It was bad last
\nweek. It’s going to be bad this week. Who knows what it’s going to be
\nlike next week?”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Passage of a bill widely declared dead shores up the president’s and <\/p>\n People at Work:<\/strong> Top White House advisers <\/p>\n All eyes turned to Graham after health care passed. Reports <\/p>\n Many Democrats are eager to move on energy and climate legislation <\/p>\n Whatever Happened to…: <\/strong>For what it’s worth, <\/p>\n When two presidential candidates promised measures to address climate <\/p>\n Civil (Legal) War?:<\/strong> Newsweek profiles EPA administrator Lisa Jackson as a way to narrate<\/a> for its general <\/p>\n States too continue to hop on board the EPA litigation train. The <\/p>\n Carbon–It’s What’s for Dinner:<\/strong> Monday<\/a> was World Water Day. National <\/p>\n About 1,800 gallons of water go into the production of one pound of <\/p>\n Sea Is for Climate:<\/strong> Widescale production of <\/p>\n India and Bangladesh settled a longstanding dispute over a tiny <\/p>\n Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute <\/a>and author of The Carbon Age<\/a>: How Life’s Core Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n The EPA weighs the hidden costs of carbon<\/a><\/p>\n Let’s call setting a price on carbon “puppies”<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhis party’s political capital and has prompted an uptick in violent,
\nintimidating rhetoric<\/a> among the Democrats’ political opponents in and out of the
\nblogosphere. Supporters of the various climate mitigation approaches may
\n feel emboldened<\/a>,
\n as if the conventional wisdom shouldn’t count them out either.<\/p>\n
\nmet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Wednesday to chart
\nout a strategy<\/a> to move climate legislation through the Senate. Sens. John Kerry
\n(D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are
\nexpected to release a draft of their bill in April, after the two-week
\nspring recess that starts tomorrow. The troika has been shopping<\/a> an eight-page proposal around influential lobbyists, such as the U.S.
\nChamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, according to Politico.
\n The effort by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman has been the most visible
\neffort by senators to address climate change, but other approaches will
\nnot be discounted. More specifically, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and
\n Susan Collins (R-Maine) will not be discounted. The pair has already
\nwritten a bill, introduced last November, that would compel<\/a> heavy industry—predominantly sellers of fossil fuels—to buy carbon
\nemission permits, and trade them in a market. Auction receipts would be
\nmostly re-distributed back to consumers. [Click here<\/a> to download the Nicholas Institute’s recent modeling study of Cantwell
\nand Collins’ CLEAR Act.]<\/p>\n
\ncirculated last week that he could walk<\/a> out of climate-bill negotiations if Democrats passed healthcare reform
\nthrough a procedural sidestep called the “reconciliation” process, which
\n they did. With that bill now law, Graham vows to continue his work with
\n Kerry and Lieberman (I-Conn.). Passing another major bill right after
\nhealthcare will take much more than Graham’s presence as a negotiator in
\n a political environment that—however it strains the imagination—keeps
\nfinding ways to become more and more poisonous.<\/p>\n
\ndespite the political obstacles. Twenty-two Democratic senators,
\nincluding Sens. Cantwell and Sherrod Brown of Ohio,
\nwrote a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid supportive<\/a> of a jobs and energy security bill. Ten senators from coastal states
\nwrote a letter to Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman threatening to pull their
\n support for the as-yet-unseen bill if it contains provisions for
\noffshore oil drilling. NPR asks the question, whatever happened to
\nbroader GOP support<\/a> for climate policy?<\/p>\n
\n the president’s party continues to find encouragement for its climate
\npolicy from abroad. The U.S. and international climate conversations
\nmerged in Washington this week when Connie Hedegaard, the Danish
\nminister of climate and energy, visited<\/a>, meeting
\n with U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern and chatting up the international
\nimportance of U.S. legislation.<\/p>\n
\n change, in the summer of 2008, confidence in America’s first-ever
\ncarbon market shot up to seven dollars a ton. But with international and
\n domestic negotiations uncertain, prices for a ton of carbon on the
\nChicago Climate Exchange have dropped<\/a> to ten cents. Among those hit hardest by the collapse in prices are
\nfarmers who earned carbon credits through “no-till farming.” When
\nfarmers deploy this practice, CO2 remains trapped underground if farmers
\n refrain from turning it over. Good practices—and what constitutes “good
\n practices” can be disputed—aren’t catching up with emissions trends. A
\n report in Nature this week documents a global rise<\/a> in emissions from soil.<\/p>\n
\naudience the inside-the-beltway machinations occurring in her agency and
\n on the Hill. Legislators prefer (perhaps by definition) that such major
\n changes in pollution laws go through Capitol Hill. “Jackson knew that
\nthreatening to act by executive fiat wouldn’t be popular. But she also
\nknew it would get people’s attention, and maybe prod Congress to act,”
\nwrites Daniel Stone. Murkowski has led opposition to the EPA’s move in
\nthe Senate.<\/p>\n
\nfederal appeals court in Washington wrapped together the petitions
\nseeking to beat back the EPA’s endangerment finding. Sixteen states have
\n joined the battle<\/a>.
\n Pennsylvania and Minnesota support the EPA’s finding, and 14 others
\noppose it: Alaska, Michigan filed separately, while Nebraska, Florida,
\nHawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota,
\nOklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah acted together.<\/p>\n
\n Geographic marks the event with a comprehensive cover package<\/a> about this most
\npersonal of all environmental issues (You are mostly water). In the
\nmagazine’s leader, writer Barbara Kingsolver offers a lyrical<\/a> perspective on our many worlds of water. Water is the ultimate commons.
\n Earth has a finite amount of it, but an expanding global civilization.
\nThe essay glides toward mention of that seminal work, Garret Hardin’s
\n“The Tragedy of the Commons.” Kingsolver writes: “Agreeing to
\nself-imposed limits instead, unthinkable at first, will become the right
\n thing to do. While our laws imply that morality is fixed, Hardin made
\nthe point that ‘the morality of an act is a function of the state of the
\n system at the time it is performed.’ Surely it was no sin, once upon a
\ntime, to shoot and make pies of passenger pigeons.” Other articles—and
\nphotos, natch—look at desalination<\/a>,
\n California’s<\/a> water, and the U.K. group WaterAid’s work<\/a> in southwestern Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
\nbeef. The magazine has a nice online interactive graphic<\/a> showing the “embedded water” in various products. Likewise, how much
\nCO2 meat production represents came under scrutiny this week. A
\nUniversity of California, Davis, professor challenged a four-year-old
\nreport that found emissions from meat production represents<\/a> 18 percent of the global emissions of heat-trapping gases. Frank
\nMitloehner told an academic conference that the report, called Livestock’s
\n Long Shadow, included more variables in its calculation of meat’s
\ncarbon emissions than in the transportation sector emissions calculated
\nby the IPCC. The apples-to-oranges comparison skews the result, making
\nit look like meat production pollutes more. In the U.S., transportation
\ncontributes about a quarter of emissions, but pork and beef production
\nadd just three percent of the national total. An author of the report
\nsays of Mitloehner’s study, “I must say honestly that he has a point.”<\/p>\n
\n batteries would focus attention on parts of the world not considered
\nmajor players in the global energy economy. But a proliferation of
\nbatteries for transportation and stationary use might make Bolivia or
\nneighboring Chile into the Saudia Arabia of lithium<\/a>,
\n a key ingredient batteries. The nearly 4,000-square mile salt flats,
\nremains of an ancient sea, contain the world’s largest lithium deposits,
\n waiting to power your electric car.<\/p>\n
\nisland with two names by letting the rising Bay of Bengal swallow it
\nwhole. New Moore island (India) or South Talpatti (Bangladesh) stood
\njust six feet above sea level. The waters have risen in temperature and
\nheight in recent years. The island, which was uninhabited, will continue
\n to be uninhabited.<\/p>\n
\n Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue
\navailable at Grist<\/a>.
\n Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation<\/a>.<\/p>\n