Red, Green, and Blue

In a special announcement, former President George W. Bush will be honoured as the 2009 recipient of the Goldman Prize for Excellence in Protecting the Environment. Bush was nominated for his 2006 decision to declare a remote chain of islands in Hawaii as a national monument. In making his announcement, Bush said “It’s larger than 46 of our 50 states, and more than seven times larger than all our national marine sanctuaries combined. This is a big deal”.

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Van Jones founder of Green for All and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, has been awarded the Individual Thought Leadership Award by the Aspen Institute at the conclusion of this week’s Environment Forum: Powering the Planet: Energy for the Long Run.

Jones was recently tapped to serve in the Obama administration to serve as Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation.

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When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele guest-hosted William Bennett’s nationally syndicated conservative talk radio show a few weeks back—in part, to diffuse the mounting tension between the Republican Party chief Steele and the de facto Republican Party chief, Rush Limbaugh—he gave a skewed interpretation of natural history and aligned himself with Limbaugh’s position on global warming in one fell swoop:

“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.”

But Steele didn’t stop there. He exhorted listeners to take sides in a debate that is “leading to the ultimate political Armageddon between conservatism and liberalism.” Telling one caller: Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Department of Energy is doing something it has been talking about for four years: loaning money.

A loan guarantee of $535 million will go to Solyndra Inc., which will expand its production of photovoltaic systems in Fremont, Calif. The money will cover 75 percent of the project costs but will yield up to 15 gigawatts of electricity and save some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Oh, it will also produce thousands of new construction, manufacturing and installation jobs. That’s thousands of green jobs, y’all. Read the rest of this entry »

While solar energy is often touted as a way to avoid fossil fuels, California Senator Dianne Feinstein believes some public lands solar projects in the Mojave Desert need to be reexamined for their potential environmental impact.

Feinstein wrote to the Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar to request that 12 proposed solar plans for the desert lands be scrapped, citing potential habitat destruction. The complaint applies to a small fraction of the 165 pending wind and solar energy leases on 600,000 acres of former railroad land.

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Turns out that natural-gas pipeline that Palin boasted about a number of times in her brief stint as VP candidate does not exist.

And the mere fact that she is even considering running in 2012 makes me ill…

…but maybe it’s just gas.

When we last checked in our heroes from the Trust Us League were creating electricity from self-generated methane to power the red-states.

Well, these ‘green machines’ are at it again. This time doing what they can to help Mother Nature fight climate change…

MJG #52: Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, and Beck: Environmental Superheroes

A week ago, Rep. John B. Larson introduced the America’s Energy Security Trust Fund Act of 2009 in the US Congress. The bill which has evolved from its previous version has advocated a nationwide carbon tax in addition to an ‘equivalent’ tax on the imported carbon intensive goods. The bill also proposes to neutralize the impact on the working class by giving out carbon tax rebate.

Calls for a carbon tax have been increasing ever since President Obama took office. In order to achieve energy independence and reducing carbon emissions due to the country’s ‘historical responsivbility’, President Obama proposed the implementation of cap and trade scheme. The administration feels that such a scheme would not only check the nation’s carbon emissions but would also generate much needed income.

The European Union also proposed that the Clean Developments Mechanism be replaced by a global carbon tax. Citing the drawbacks of CDM, like lack of transparency and beaurcratic delays, the EU proposed that a carbon tax seems to be the simplest and most effective method to meet emission targets and help getting developing countries access to the clean technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

For all President Obama’s rhetoric of science being back in the White House spotlight, it sounds like much of America hasn’t quite gotten that message.  A new poll from Gallup suggests that 41% of Americans think that the threat of Global Warming is exaggerated, the highest such number in a decade.  Well, at least people now mostly accept that it’s happening, even if it’s not a big deal…

Take that, Science!

Not surprisingly, the numbers on urgency seem to be based on political party: 66% of Republicans now think the Global Warming concerns are overblown, whereas people who identify as Democrats are holding at around 20%.  The political party that supports old energy doesn’t believe we need new energy… hmmmm…

It’s very easy for me, and for everyone else who clearly sees the logic behind the climate change science, to be frustrated by the war being waged on these facts by a coordinated series of commercial campaigns, and by the political factions who are allied with oil and coal interests.  But my background is coming from the news, so it’s not surprising that it’s the mainstream media that makes this poll really stick in my craw.

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