especially when it comes to trampling on the rights of workers. But it has a unique power to show every corner of America that clean energy and energy efficient technologies make good business sense.
Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but are old people killing the planet? Follow me as I meander on a barely-substantiated round of wild speculation.
After an encounter on the Jackson River in western Virginia where he's fished his whole life, Marc Smith is ready to revolt:A couple of years ago I went back down to this area while fishing for browns on a section of the Jackson River (just below the dam at Lake Moomaw) with my buddy Dan Wrinn. We did okay – couple nice 10 inch browns. But what really caught our attention was us literally wading up to a sign posted on an oak tree on the bank that puzzled us. It read: “Kings Grant Land. No fishing. No Trespassing.”"This isn't merry ol England where the peasants and commoners have no say or right to hunt or fish on the Kings Land. This is America – and 2012 America," Marc concludes. "No, we have waters and wildlife held in trust for all to enjoy." Learn more from the Virginia Rivers Defense Fund.
Huh? is right. After all my years spending time in this area, and on the Jackson, I have never seen this sign. After some digging, now I know. This land along the Jackson was granted by King George III of England way back in the day. I am talking 17th century before there was even a thought of Virginia, much less the United States. Guess this even trumps state law. [...]
The Virginia Supreme Court have upheld this and many other Kings Grant claims in Virginia and in other eastern states. Crazy I know. Read the latest on a lawsuit involving Kings Grant land & anglers. This is huge. All anglers are watching this. This could set tremendous precedent.
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If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.Read it online or if you want to support strong progressive journalism, go buy it at the newsstand.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice.
Can a Congressman who's been unable to break open a big Obama administration scandal turn his luck around by investigating Cape Wind? Fortunately for people who enjoy things like breathing clean air and going to work building wind turbines, it doesn't look good for Rep. Darrell Issa.Several have ties to billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, who have made much of their fortune in oil and chemical businesses and have established a reputation as staunch small-government conservatives. Their influence through campaign contributions, lobbying and nonprofit groups--such as Americans for Prosperity, an activist organization with connections to the Tea Party movement--has become more pronounced since the shift in power in the House last November.Rep. Issa has long been a champion of polluting interests. Issa has taken more than $376,000 from electric utilities and the oil & gas industry.
Cape Wind has now been going through the federal regulatory review process for an astonishing 11 years. With multiple points for public input along the way, it's been vetted by, among others:
In the past, the climate strategy of Congressional Republicans has been to crow about "sound science" and bitch & moan when hearings don't include spokesmen for polluter front groups. But now they've got a new scheme: Refuse to talk about climate science at all. 
I've covered how global warming will be bad for lobsters from Massachusetts to Virginia, stressing them out with higher temperatures. But further north, warmer water has been great news for Maine lobsters, who've been booming in population. You'd think that would be good news for lobstermen, but instead the global warming-fueled Maine lobster glut has sent prices tumbling:
Harbors up and down the coast of Maine are filled with idle fishing boats, as lobster haulers decide that pulling in their lobster pots has become a fruitless pursuit.What about consumers, aren't they enjoying lower prices? Not unless you live in Maine:
Prices at the dock have fallen to as low as $1.25 a pound in some areas—roughly 70% below normal and a nearly 30-year-low for this time of year, according to fishermen, researchers and officials. The reason: an unseasonably warm winter created a supply glut throughout the Atlantic lobster fishery.
Retail lobster prices in Maine have started to fall along with the glut, and Mr. Bayer said that some fishermen have begun selling lobsters out of their trucks for as low as $4 a pound. But consumers elsewhere in the U.S. aren't likely to see bargains. The Maine lobsters that currently are in season can't be shipped long distances due to their soft shells, and retailers have other fixed costs that limit big price drops.While warmer ocean temperatures are clearly tied to man-made global warming and June was the 4th-hottest on record globally, the article in the Wall Street Journal (motto: "Fox, Print Edition") doesn't even mention climate change.
It's not true that if you slowly turn up the heat, a frog won't notice that his surroundings are getting hotter - the frog will jump out of the pot if he can. That's an allegory - but whether humans will recognize & respond to their warming climate is a very real & open question.
by Jared Diamond. Past dominant societies have proved quite capable of blissfully ignoring all evidence of impending doom. So far, America's media is proving no different. Will 2012's record temperatures and extreme weather change that? Or be just another milepost on the road to disaster?
After a record-melting day, we've had a night of extreme storms that have killed several people and left millions of people without power across the Mid-Atlantic region.
The temperature at National Airport hit 104 this afternoon according to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. 
Rex Tillerson made $35 million last year selling you oil. Now he's urging you to invest not in clean energy but in helping poor people buy more of Exxon Mobil's oil.
Not only is Sen. Jim Inhofe's bill to block new Environmental Protection Agency mercury standards horrible public policy that would kill a lot of people, a new United Technologies/National Journal poll finds it's wildly unpopular with voters:A new United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll finds that 57 percent of the public supports a recently-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule controlling mercury and other toxic air pollution from coal-fired power plants as long as companies are given more time to comply.Again, I'd ask Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb: This is a hard call? Really? Which part is a tough call, the part where it lets corporate polluters profit by treating America's air and water like an open sewer? The part where people with asthma die? Or the part where it's incredibly bad politics?
The poll found that a similar majority—55 percent—thinks EPA should be able to control greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists agree cause climate change. Just slightly more than one-third of the public—36 percent—said Congress should stop EPA from such regulation. A federal court is expected to rule soon on whether the agency is within its right to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.
The poll’s findings put a majority of Americans out of step with Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., who is sponsoring a measure coming up for a vote on Wednesday that would nullify EPA’s mercury rule entirely. Just under 20 percent of survey respondents said the Senate should vote to uphold the rule as it stands now, while only 14 percent said the Senate should vote to get rid of it.
Today, the Senate is expected to vote on a bill by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) to block the Environmental Protection Agency from setting science-based standards for mercury and other toxic pollutants. That Sen. Mark Warner & Sen. Jim Webb are considered "swing votes" by the coal mining industry is a sad statement about how the Democratic Party of Virginia remains pathetically in the back pocket of the coal industry.Kim Meltzer, a Charlottesville mother who has rushed her two-year-old son to the ER because of asthma attacks, hopes politicians will do the right thing for those who don't have a voice in Washington. "I'd like the environment to be one in which my children and all people can live in and not worry about breathing toxic fumes."What's most pathetic about Sen. Inhofe's effort is that coal's enemy isn't clean air regulations - it's the rising cost of digging the last bits of coal out of the ground compared to natural gas that's cheap now and renewables that are falling in price every day. "Even without the EPA rules, coal is not really competitive," says one energy industry analyst.
The EPA has estimated that as many as 15,000 construction jobs lasting several years will result.And what about coal? Virginia just invested billions in a new coal-fired power plant in Wise County ... which a Virginia State Corporation Commission analyst has testified (PDF) that, because the higher rates needed to pay for it, will actually result in a net loss to Virginia of 1,474 jobs.
[NRDC Clean Air Director John] Walke says this is a win-win for the American economy and the health of the American people. "It's finally time to clean up these dirty power plants, they are being given plenty of time to clean up, and it's a tremendous health gain for Americans that we finally clean up these dirty plants."
When an opponent of renewable energy claims North Dakota is the Saudi Arabia of oil shale, or Canada is the Saudi Arabia of tar sands, it's a dead giveaway they don't know what they're talking about.
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Teams receive no federal funding. I understand they need to raise money and can't be too choosy about the sources.
America is forecast to get less than 40% of its electricity from coal this year, mostly replaced by cheaper, less polluting natural gas and to a lesser extent by emerging renewables like solar & wind. That would be coal's lowest level in more than 60 years:
Just five years ago, coal was flourishing in the U.S. With electricity demand and the price of natural gas both rising, coal was viewed as essential to keeping power costs under control. Utilities drew up plans to build dozens of coal-fired plants.For coal apologists, here's the real kick in the pants: "Even without the EPA rules, coal is not really competitive," says Jone-Lin Wang, head of Global Power for the energy research firm IHS CERA. So much for coal executives' fever dreams of a "war on coal."
But around the same time, a revolution was under way in the natural gas industry. Drillers figured how to tap enormous deposits of previously inaccessible reserves. As supplies grew and the price of natural gas plummeted, the ground shifted under the electric-power industry. [...]
Power plants that burn coal produce more than 90 times as much sulfur dioxide, five times as much nitrogen oxide and twice as much carbon dioxide as those that run on natural gas, according to the Government Accountability Office, the regulatory arm of Congress. Sulfur dioxide causes acid rain; nitrogen oxides cause smog; and carbon dioxide is a so-called greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
