Carl Pope: Taking the Initiative

All

• Which Kind of Courage Are We Thankful For?

  San Francisco -- One of my great blessings this Thanksgiving has been reconnecting with a family from West Helena, Arkansas, whose father's Methodist Church I attended faithfully during the summer of 1965, when I was a voter-registration field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After church I would go [...]

  Posted: November 21, 2007, 6:14am EST by Carl Pope

• What a Difference a Pombo Makes

  Tracy, CA -- It's just a little over a year since the former Congressman from this town -- Richard Pombo -- was turned out by the voters and slunk, defeated, out of the Waterloo Cafe here without even thanking his followers. When Tracy elected Jerry McNerney as its Representative, it [...]

  Posted: November 20, 2007, 3:28am EST by Carl Pope

• OK, What Do We Do Now?

  New York -- The final report of the UN's IPCC sums it all up. Global warming is going to be a more serious problem sooner than most scientists believed, in part because our emissions of carbon dioxide are growing faster than economists predicted. We have only a very few [...]

  Posted: November 19, 2007, 9:44am EST by Carl Pope

• King Coal's Mountain Redoubt

  Las Vegas, NV -- At first blush, Nevada appears an unlikely choice for the coal industry to make its last stand in the mountain West. Coal is one of the few minerals the Silver State doesn't produce. Nevada enjoys America's biggest geothermal resource, ranks in the top five for solar, [...]

  Posted: November 15, 2007, 7:34am EST by Carl Pope

• Oil on Water

  San Francisco -- In theory San Francisco Bay, as one of our nation's most heavily regulated waterways, should be prepared to handle an oil spill. We've had them before, so there's plenty of experience. We don't have the ferocious storms that make dealing with spills on the open seas so [...]

  Posted: November 14, 2007, 1:02am EST by Carl Pope

• Emerald, Emerald Tuesday

  Arlington, VA - If next year's election follows the pattern set in this year’s mid-terms, we should be very happy indeed. The Sierra Club made major commitments up and down the ticket, across the country, and there are four major victories that I’d like to highlight and share with you. [...]

  Posted: November 08, 2007, 9:55am EST by Carl Pope

• Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?

  Washington, DC -- With those immortal words, Joseph Welch, the Chief Counsel for the US Army, shone a spotlight on Senator Joe McCarthy's bullying tactics before a national television audience in 1954, and began the end of McCarthy's reign of terror. Listening to my parents talking about that moment is [...]

  Posted: November 06, 2007, 5:55am EST by Carl Pope

• A Nation Called Tomorrow

  San Francisco -- Senator Hillary Clinton this morning staked her place out in the debate over a new energy policy and global warming, and did so definitively, referring to "the climate crisis," and offering a policy package that is at least as strong as that of any candidate in [...]

  Posted: November 05, 2007, 6:57am EST by Carl Pope

• Raising the Bar

  Seattle -- When public expectations are soaring, and the old "can't do" attitudes are breaking down, a challenge for all kinds of leaders is figuring out just how great a leap forward is doable and when getting there a step at a time becomes wimpiness. Here in Seattle, a division [...]

  Posted: October 30, 2007, 6:05am EDT by Carl Pope

• Won't Be Water but Fire Next Time, Lord

  Santa Barbara, CA - The smoke from the fires to the south made it hazy here, and folks with asthma were having a hard time breathing. But by this morning the weather had cooled, the Santa Anna winds were petering out, and mail service had been resumed in San Diego.
  [...]

  Posted: October 26, 2007, 8:12am EDT by Carl Pope

• Setting the Record Straight... Again

  San Francisco -- It's like clockwork: Every time there's a big wildfire like the ones we're seeing in California, our opponents use the tragedy to attack environmentalists. And each time there's a fire, we're forced to point out, again, that we have long supported the kind of fuel reduction around [...]

  Posted: October 24, 2007, 9:44am EDT by Carl Pope

• By the Numbers

  San Francisco -- Occasionally, it helps when trying to figure out what is really going on to look at the numbers. So this post is just a sampling of four of the more revealing statistics that have crossed my desk in the past month. These facts and statistics, I think, [...]

  Posted: October 22, 2007, 8:29am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Bigger They Are ...

  Topeka, KS - ... the harder they fall, and the Sunflower coal-fired power plant fell with a mighty thud today. With the support of a majority of Kansans, state regulators denied Sunflower its air permit, only weeks after Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius came out against it on moral grounds, [...]

  Posted: October 19, 2007, 7:43am EDT by Carl Pope

• Water, Water, Everywhere

  Washington, DC -- "Nor any drop to drink" was how Samuel Taylor Coleridge phrased it in his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
  
  Avoiding that risk was why Congress, 35 years ago, passed the Clean Water Act and then overrode President Nixon's veto. For a long time the Act was [...]

  Posted: October 18, 2007, 7:39am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Greening of an Ivory Tower

  Guest Author: Marilyn Berlin Snell
  
  What stood out at Stanford University last week was how green this ivory tower has become. From panels on innovations in sustainable fish farming to climate change, the campus was promoted as the vanguard of the green tech revolution. Sure, there was football talk. [...]

  Posted: October 17, 2007, 7:23am EDT by Carl Pope

• What's Al Got To Do With It?

  What’s world peace got to do with global warming? As I wrote today in Salon, perhaps everything. Or it will if things don’t change fast-- if, in 10 or 20 or 40 years devastating floods and droughts displace millions of refugees and spur nations and tribes to desperate bloodletting–no [...]

  Posted: October 12, 2007, 7:00am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Billion-Dollar Industry Devoted to Stopping Progress

  Washington, DC -- This morning, the Justice Department announced that American Electric Power (AEP) -- one of the most recalcitrant operators of outmoded, dirty coal power plants in the country -- has agreed to spend $4.6 billion cleaning up its 46 dirty units in the Ohio Valley, including three of [...]

  Posted: October 10, 2007, 7:25am EDT by Carl Pope

• It Never Flooded Like This Before

  Muzaffarpur, India -- Forty years ago I spent two years in the Indian state of Bihar, as a Peace Corps volunteer. North Bihar, on the Gangetic Plain, suffered every year from flooding. The causes, although no one mentioned them, were centuries of poor environmental management and deforestation. Eight years ago, [...]

  Posted: October 08, 2007, 11:42am EDT by Carl Pope

• Brighter Skies in New Mexico

  Albuquerque, NM -- The New Mexico license plate features a bold, graphic sun, so it's ironic that the single biggest obstacle to getting more federal support for solar energy and other renewables has been New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici. A month ago, the Sierra Club, having decided to confront [...]

  Posted: October 04, 2007, 11:02am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Remodeler's Dilemma

  San Francisco, CA -- My roof deck needs replacing. The big redwood planks that the previous owner installed thirty years ago got really spongy last winter. I went to my local lumber yard in January to find appropriate replacement materials, put the job out to bid, pulled permits, and finally [...]

  Posted: October 03, 2007, 10:28am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Global Warming Week That Was

  New York, NY -- So what would a polar bear's take-away have been from the last week of global warming events -- is the ice-pack she depends on for a summer home more or less secure than it was a week ago?
  
  At week's end, how does ursus maritimus [...]

  Posted: October 01, 2007, 9:56am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Good Week for GM?

  Washington, DC -- It certainly looks like it. The settlement of the short-lived strike by the United Auto Workers is seen as having resolved the threat that retiree health care costs posted to General Motors' competitiveness, and the company's stock price soared on the news. Meanwhile, Congressman John Dingell, whose [...]

  Posted: September 27, 2007, 8:53am EDT by Carl Pope

• You Cannot Seize an Opportunity If You Don't Know About It

  New York, NY -- The Clinton Global Initiative
  
  That was the point former President Clinton made repeatedly today in his interactions with World Bank President Robert Zoellick. Clinton asked Zoellick what the Bank's role was in enabling poor countries to develop and expand access to electricity and energy [...]

  Posted: September 26, 2007, 11:47am EDT by Carl Pope

• Where the Goods Are Odd

  Juneau, AK -- Politics in this state is almost as out-of-kilter as the climate is. As the Arctic ice-cap shrinks, so does Alaska. Melting permafrost, bigger waves and a higher sea level are all eating away at the Arctic coastline, from Nome to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The village [...]

  Posted: September 24, 2007, 7:17am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Essence of Cynicism

  Jackson, WY -- It is disconcerting, upon my return from a melting Greenland, to be confronted by Bjorn Lomborg's latest toxic confection. Greenland, after all, is still governed by Denmark. And Lomborg is the Danish statistician who several years ago, in a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist, claimed that [...]

  Posted: September 20, 2007, 9:20am EDT by Carl Pope

• Progress on Global Warming?

  Columbus, OH -- Action in Congress on a new energy future and global warming is slowing again -- a sign that the influence of the carbon lobby in our capital is alive and well. But to be able to come to Ohio and sit down with both the Governor and [...]

  Posted: September 17, 2007, 11:07am EDT by Carl Pope

• God Grant Us the Wisdom to Act in Time

  Narsasuaq, Greenland -- The bright blue icebergs that dot Eric's Fjord don't calve from a local glacier. They have been carried by ocean currents from the East Coast of Greenland all the way to this southwestern inlet where Norse settlement of Greenland began. Leif Erickson was seeking this harbor when [...]

  Posted: September 13, 2007, 9:14am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Beginning of Life – and the End of Civilization?

  Isua, Greenland -- Here, on a rocky outcrop perched 2,000 feet above Davis Strait and 1,000 feet below the cap of the Greenland ice sheet, a shale face about the size of a plasma tv screen contains the world's oldest known surface rocks -- 3.8 billion years old. The shale [...]

  Posted: September 11, 2007, 11:29am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Tale of Three Arctics

  Down the Greenland Coast
  
  Ice Fjord, Greenland, September 8 -- The silent prayer group that assembled on deck today may have been the most diverse gathering ever seen in Greenland. Led by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Istanbul, the group includes a Sunni Muslim imam from Nottingham, Jim Ball, Executive [...]

  Posted: September 10, 2007, 10:16am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Tale of Two Continents

  Ilulissat, Greenland -- I'm back in the New World, even though I had to get here by way of the Old. The symposium, "The Arctic: Mirror of Life" which brought me here to this Greenland settlement, originated farther east, in the Old World, when we took off from Heathrow [...]

  Posted: September 07, 2007, 7:34am EDT by Carl Pope

• Why Not Let Them Burn?

  Helena, MT -- Montana has been suffering an enormously bad wildfire season -- the legacy of a century of timber industry-driven forest mismanagement and global warming. For the past five years, ever since President Bush flew to Portland, Oregon to announce his "Healthy Forests" initiative, the threat [...]

  Posted: September 05, 2007, 8:11am EDT by Carl Pope

• Fighting the Wrong Water War

  Sacramento, CA -- California is getting ready to resume its twentieth century water war. On Friday, a federal judge ordered state and federal officials to maintain enough natural water flow through the San Joaquin Delta to protect the endangered delta smelt, a key indicator species for the ecosystem. Water [...]

  Posted: September 04, 2007, 9:14am EDT by Carl Pope

• Katrina and Al

  New Orleans -- Two years ago, the Sierra Club was preparing for its first ever annual convention, The Sierra Summit, and former Vice-President Al Gore was preparing a speech for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners on the topic of "hurricane risk and global warming." Gore's speech was scheduled for [...]

  Posted: August 31, 2007, 10:48am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Phyrric Victory?

  Washington D.C. -- Last Friday, the Bush Administration handed a seemingly huge payoff to the coal industry, which has been hammered all summer on Wall Street by a recognition that the tide of public and regulatory opinion in state after state is turning against the dirty fuel: the Administration proposed [...]

  Posted: August 27, 2007, 10:36am EDT by Carl Pope

• Big Carbon's Summer of Discontent

  San Francisco -- Congress is on its August recess, but the steadily rising tide of public and political demand for a new energy course keeps surging. The biggest news of the recess was Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid's announcement that he opposed all new coal-fired power plants, anywhere in [...]

  Posted: August 23, 2007, 9:08am EDT by Carl Pope

• Apologies to Karl Rove

  Washington, DC -- It appears that I may have been unfair to Karl Rove in blaming him for the singularly tone-deaf politics of the Bush Administration's approach to public lands issues: Mark Rey's sustained campaign to cut off funding for rural schools; the oil and gas drilling [...]

  Posted: August 16, 2007, 8:23am EDT by Carl Pope

• Something New in River City

  Sacramento, CA -- We reached a tipping point in our battle to protect the Arctic Wildlife Refuge when Bill Clinton refused to cave in to Republican congressional demands that he sign a budget which would have allowed drilling. Clinton, instead, allowed a temporary shut-down of the federal government. Something similar [...]

  Posted: August 13, 2007, 7:33am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Unitary Executive Kool-Aid Acid Test

  Chicago, IL -- A peculiar thing happened to Midwest Generation on the company's way to a wide-open permit to continue polluting at six of its Illinois power plants. For four years the Sierra Club and a coalition of allies have been pushing EPA to require the clean-up the six filthy [...]

  Posted: August 09, 2007, 10:01am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Rest of the Story

  San Francisco, CA -- One of the main difficulties with mainstream media is that they no longer have the patience to set the record straight in any but the most perfunctory way when they are misled -- which they are often. So today I'm going to tell the "rest of [...]

  Posted: August 08, 2007, 8:43am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Glorious Saturday

  Washington, DC -- After a nail biting week in which vote counts showed that the House of Representatives was torn between the old fossil fuel cartel that has always controlled energy policy in this city, and the beginning of a new energy future, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi masterfully divided her [...]

  Posted: August 06, 2007, 10:40am EDT by Carl Pope

• Iowa on the Move

  Ames, IA -- The politics of global warming are heating up in Iowa. Today the Club's own Sierra Student Coalition (SSC), in partnership with the campus-based ReEnergize US, began a three-day march from Ames to Des Moines. Meanwhile, SSC organizers in New Hampshire kicked off a five-day march [...]

  Posted: August 02, 2007, 11:07am EDT by Carl Pope

• Doing a Gonzales

  Miami, FL -- I have periodically referred to the logic of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen ("a word means what I say it means, no more, no less") when discussing the ability of the Bush administration to simply pretend that things are other than they are. I've also resorted to George [...]

  Posted: August 01, 2007, 7:04am EDT by Carl Pope

• Consider the Source

  Detroit, MI -- For over a decade the Sierra Club has made the pilgrimage to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, to meet with the auto industry, the leadership of the UAW, and with Michigan political figures. And always with the same message: the American auto industry has real problems and it cannot [...]

  Posted: July 31, 2007, 8:46am EDT by Carl Pope

• Odd Bedfellows Against Illegal Logging

  Washington, DC -- It's been clear to environmentalists for years that illegal logging was one of the major threats to the world's forests. While it happens, pathetically often, here in the US, it has become a central problem in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
  
  We now understand that [...]

  Posted: July 30, 2007, 9:46am EDT by Carl Pope

• Tipping Point for Coal?

  New York, NY -- There is an accelerating wave of news from the financial markets strongly suggesting that our efforts to slow down and stop the coal rush may be nearing a tipping point. The front page of today's Wall Street Journal carries the headline: "Coal's Doubters Block New [...]

  Posted: July 26, 2007, 10:13am EDT by Carl Pope

• No Child Left Behind?

  Periodically I've blogged on the grim fact that the Bush Administration has repeatedly hung its most faithful supporters out to dry. One of the most spectacular examples is the Forest Service's cynical effort to simultaneously sell out rural schools while selling off recreational lands used by rural communities. The [...]

  Posted: July 25, 2007, 8:21am EDT by Carl Pope

• When Government Is the Problem

  Washington, DC -- Ronald Reagan famously said, in his first inaugural address, that "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." This belief has been an article of faith for reactionaries ever since, and from 2000 to 2006 the entire federal government was gripped by cultish [...]

  Posted: July 23, 2007, 7:23am EDT by Carl Pope

• Is There Something In the Water of Puget Sound?

  Seattle, WA -- For the past two years, the big change on global warming has been the speed with which cities, and more recently states, have taken leadership roles in committing themselves to deal with global warming by forging a new energy future. Now the counties are stepping up [...]

  Posted: July 20, 2007, 7:06am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Capital of Trivial Pursuits

  Washington, DC -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expects to bring her energy independence bill to the House floor next week. But it is still far from certain that a majority of the House will commit themselves to any meaningful action on global warming or a new energy future. The two [...]

  Posted: July 19, 2007, 8:08am EDT by Carl Pope

• Uncle Sam Makes a Good Investment

  Washington, DC -- How would you like to save $600 dollars by spending $6? Sound like a good deal? Well, last fall's election is beginning to produce just these kinds of returns for taxpayers, as some (not all) of the crazier ideas of the last Congress get shut down. In [...]

  Posted: July 16, 2007, 6:33am EDT by Carl Pope

• Saving Florida

  Miami, FL -- Florida just became the first southern leadership state in the fight to whip global warming. Governor Charlie Crist used his Florida Climate Summit on Thursday as the occasion to sign three executive orders setting out policies to combat climate change. He committed to an 80 percent reduction [...]

  Posted: July 13, 2007, 9:01am EDT by Carl Pope

• Fox Distorts, We Reply

  We’ve known for a long time that what Fox News was broadcasting couldn’t exactly be called "news." But this week, a new film by Robert Greenwald exposes just how frightening the network’s propaganda really is. The film, "Fox Attacks: The Environment" documents the network’s consistent pattern of misinformation on [...]

  Posted: July 12, 2007, 9:07am EDT by Carl Pope

• Living to Fight Another Day?

  Harrisburg, PA -- Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has gone further than any state executive to date in making a clean energy future his priority. As part of a budget showdown with the legislature, Rendell refused to approve a proposal from the state Senate that omitted crucial funding for renewable [...]

  Posted: July 11, 2007, 9:25am EDT by Carl Pope

• Live Earth's Critics

  Cleveland -- The big criticism of Saturday's incredible series of concerts to stop global warming, Live Earth, was that, well, they were concerts. The idea was to listen to music and have a good time. And people burn fossil fuels getting to concerts, and performers sometimes travel very long [...]

  Posted: July 09, 2007, 3:52am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Nuclear Chimera

  San Francisco -- The idea that nuclear energy is going to be a big part of the solution to global warming is getting less and less plausible. First there's the obstacle of the remaining safety, waste storage, and proliferation problems to somehow be solved. And the core fact that the [...]

  Posted: July 06, 2007, 9:33am EDT by Carl Pope

• Getting Trade Right

  Washington, DC -- There are few issues on which mainstream U.S. media coverage is less adequate than trade. The standard framing for reporting on trade is that U.S. environmental and labor organizations are trying to impose U.S. standards on third-world countries (which don't feel they can afford them), and that [...]

  Posted: July 02, 2007, 6:45am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Ministry of Truth Strikes Again and Again

  Lake Tahoe, CA -- After Hurricane Andrew swept through Florida in 1992, the UN placed the Everglades on its list of World Heritage Sites in danger. The UN also cited the threat of urban development to the famed 'River of Grass.' But apparently Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne knows something about [...]

  Posted: June 29, 2007, 11:14am EDT by Carl Pope

• Confusion Reigns Under Heaven

  Dallas, TX -- The Sierra Club's first line of defense against pulverized coal power plants has been to demonstrate that they could be shut down, blocked or dragged out indefinitely almost anywhere -- Florida, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin -- and that, even if the plants are built, states [...]

  Posted: June 28, 2007, 7:48am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Return of the Red Queen

  New York, NY -- Former EPA Administrator Christy Todd Whitman returned to the crime scene of 9-11 at a Congressional hearing Monday. Once again, Whitman insisted that EPA had done the right thing by telling the public that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe even when [...]

  Posted: June 27, 2007, 7:49am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Dose of Reality on Family Planning

  Washington, DC -- In a recent Time article, Michael Kinsley discussed the danger facing the reactionary wing of the Republican party; namely, that on issue after issue, whether it's the environment or gay rights, they are "on the wrong side of history." Perhaps no where is this truer than [...]

  Posted: June 25, 2007, 7:03am EDT by Carl Pope

• Grinding Up the Sausage

  Washington, DC -- Thomas Jefferson compared the US Senate to a saucer, where legislation heated in the House by the fires of public passion could be poured to cool. The Senate has played that function -- but more often its processes are a particularly gruesome form of sausage-making. The Senate [...]

  Posted: June 22, 2007, 9:03am EDT by Carl Pope

• The End of Welfare as We Know It

  Anchorage, AK -- America's last welfare state is also its last frontier -- Alaska -- a state where, thanks to some progressive planning in the years when oil had been discovered but did not yet own the state, most of the royalty revenues from the North Slope have been kept [...]

  Posted: June 19, 2007, 8:38am EDT by Carl Pope

• No One Ever Got West on His Own

  San Francisco, CA -- On Saturday night, Robert Redford was urging a group at dinner to throw their shoulders to the wheel behind the Senate candidacy of Mark Udall in Colorado. Redford was making the point that the myth of the West as place of "rugged individualists" who didn't work [...]

  Posted: June 18, 2007, 7:17am EDT by Carl Pope

• Waverly and Waterloo Get It. Will Washington?

  Des Moines, IA -- Representatives of fifty cities in Iowa are gathering at the invitation of Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie to brainstorm about how to reduce their city's greenhouse pollution. Most of these cities are already "Cool Cities" and have signed the US Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement. [...]

  Posted: June 15, 2007, 9:18am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Department of Homeland Insecurity

  Washington, DC -- If you only recently starting reading my blog, you might have thought that, as part of the 'War on Terror,' the Bush administration would be in favor of tougher security precautions to prevent terrorists from attacking chemical plants and putting American communities at risk. But ever since [...]

  Posted: June 13, 2007, 6:43am EDT by Carl Pope

• Another Faith-Based Initiative -- Not!

  Flagstaff, AZ -- A recurrent theme of my blog has been exposing the myth that Karl Rove and the Bush Administration are committed to taking care of the voters who constitute their base -- deeply religious Americans, for example. You might think that a born-again, pious leader like the [...]

  Posted: June 11, 2007, 8:35am EDT by Carl Pope

• Speaker Pelosi says 'No!'

  Washington, D.C. -- Last week the Bush administration went aground on the shoals of global warming. This week the old guard in Congress tried to steer between the Scylla of public demand for action on climate, and the Charybdis of their deep fealty to the old politics of carbon, cars, [...]

  Posted: June 07, 2007, 1:58pm EDT by Carl Pope

• Another Two Bite the Dust

  Tallahassee, FL -- The biggest coal-burning power plant still on the drawing board was planned right next to Everglades National Park by Florida Power and Light. But the Glades plant, which the Sierra Club had challenged before the Florida Public Service Commission, won't be happening after all. The PSC [...]

  Posted: June 06, 2007, 7:20am EDT by Carl Pope

• Bush on Global Warming -- An Aspirational Moment?

  Washington, DC -- Last week I watched, perplexed, as the Administration did an exotic new three step dance on global warming. First, they sent our allies in Iraq, Britain and Germany, a blistering critique of the global warming proposal the Europeans had drafted for the G8 industrial nation summit. The [...]

  Posted: June 05, 2007, 7:46am EDT by Carl Pope

• There Will Be No Booing

  San Diego, CA -- Bill Haller is a Sierra Club air quality volunteer who appeared at a California Air Resources Board (ARB) hearing on requiring heavy duty construction equipment to meet modern air pollution standards. This is a particularly vital issue for the environmental justice community because heavy construction [...]

  Posted: May 31, 2007, 7:21am EDT by Carl Pope

• Beware a Wounded Beast

  Washington, DC -- Big Carbon is in big trouble, but it's going to do as much damage as it can in its struggle to keep its control over our energy economy.
  
  Evidently it can still whip-saw the Bush administration. Whatever the president may have said about domestic energy consumption [...]

  Posted: May 30, 2007, 6:48am EDT by Carl Pope

• Who's Afraid of Rachel Carson?

  Washington, CD -- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is afraid of Rachel Carson.
  
  For the centennial of Silent Spring author Carson's birth on May 27, members of Congress from her home states of Maryland and Pennsylvania introduced a resolution honoring her birth and another to name a post office [...]

  Posted: May 29, 2007, 6:43am EDT by Carl Pope

• You Can Hear the Base Breaking Up

  Salt Lake City, UT -- In my last blog posting, I pointed to budding leadership on global warming from unlikely places like Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Governor of Idaho. So what's left as a political base for the global warming deniers? Well, when the Sierra Club sued EPA over its [...]

  Posted: May 22, 2007, 5:39am EDT by Carl Pope

• Who Would Have Thunk It?

  Tulsa, Oklahoma -- Fourteen months ago, when the Sierra Club launched its Cool Cities program, our goal was to double in two years the number of U.S. cities that had signed on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. At that time, almost 150 cities were committed to reducing [...]

  Posted: May 21, 2007, 4:06am EDT by Carl Pope

• Stepping Up To the Plate

  Albuquerque, NM -- When the 2008 presidential campaign season commenced, one open question was whether candidates would deal with global warming and energy in a substantive way.
  
  Of the initial front-runners, only Senator John McCain had an established track record on the issue -- and he has remained [...]

  Posted: May 16, 2007, 12:49pm EDT by Carl Pope

• Are These Trade Agreements Free or Fair?

  Washington, DC -- Late last week Washington was buzzing about a trade "deal" between the Congressional Democratic leadership and the White House. The deal is based on a "concept paper" and has been commonly described as an agreement to include labor and environmental rights in future trade agreements. The [...]

  Posted: May 15, 2007, 7:56am EDT by Carl Pope

• What Do Voters Want?

  San Francisco, CA -- A new poll shows, unsurprisingly, that Americans think global warming is a big problem, want their government to act to solve it, and think that ideas like more efficient cars and trucks, renewable energy and efficiency will be good for today's economy and tomorrow's climate. [...]

  Posted: May 14, 2007, 7:48am EDT by Carl Pope

• Mindlesser and Mindlesser

  Washington, DC -- I know. It's not a word. But it's definitely a concept.
  
  Perhaps the greatest myth about the Bush Administration is that Karl Rove "takes care of the base." He does serve his paymasters -- those who fund the party -- but as for the Republican base, [...]

  Posted: May 08, 2007, 10:01am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Wild and Wooly Week for a Changing Climate

  Washington, DC -- It was a frenetic week for the politics of global warming, showing that while public sentiment has gelled on the subject, Big Carbon is fighting back hard, and getting a hearing in this city.
  
  The first surprise was an effort by the coal industry to [...]

  Posted: May 07, 2007, 9:45am EDT by Carl Pope

• One More Down

  Washington, DC -- Julie MacDonald, the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, resigned yesterday. Mcdonald was most recently in the headlines for sending copies of confidential Interior Department memoranda to her children and personal friends. More seriously, she also got in [...]

  Posted: May 02, 2007, 7:34am EDT by Carl Pope

• No Child Left Inside

  Washington, D.C. -- Last week, we announced a Sierra Club grant of $1.1 million to Operation Purple Camp, a project of the National Military Families Association, which sends children whose parents are deployed overseas in Afghanistan or Iraq to camp for a week in the summer. I'm thrilled that [...]

  Posted: April 30, 2007, 9:29am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Empire Strikes Back

  Washington, DC -- Even as its support in the hinterlands rapidly dwindles, the empire of big carbon is still on the offensive in Washington, DC. In a key test of how much pressure the coal and nuclear lobbies can muster, the House of Representatives voted, 264-154, to make the two [...]

  Posted: April 27, 2007, 7:12am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Tale of Two Cities

  Columbia, SC -- This southern capital, where a Confederate soldier still stands guard looking north on the lawn, might seem to have little in common with New York City. But both are finally engaging with the reality that the first half of this century will be dominated by the reshaping [...]

  Posted: April 25, 2007, 7:11am EDT by Carl Pope

• My Favorite Day of 2007

  Washington, DC -- How can I know this when it's only April? Because the Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony is always the most exciting and heartwarming, hopeful day of any year. And this year was no exception. Again the ceremony honored six extraordinary winners. But one thing was different [...]

  Posted: April 24, 2007, 10:27am EDT by Carl Pope

• Almost Everyone Gets It

  Washington, DC -- I don't typically testify on Congressional panels with a former CIA Director, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, Admirals and four star Generals. So this week's appearance before the first hearing of the House Selection Committee on Global Warming and Energy Independence was a [...]

  Posted: April 20, 2007, 7:11am EDT by Carl Pope

• Why It Matters That Kuwait Controls Daimler-Chrysler

  Washington, D.C. -- America is finally waking up to the fact that our addiction to oil is a serious foreign policy threat. I'm testifying tomorrow at the first hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on Global Warming; the topic is the "Geopolitical Implications of Rising Oil Dependence and Global Warming." [...]

  Posted: April 17, 2007, 12:11pm EDT by Carl Pope

• Skiing an Avalanche

  Palo Alto, CA -- The politics and economics of global warming are moving so fast it's like skiing an avalanche -- exciting but scary, essential, given how little time remains, but also dangerous, because we need to get it right, and when when you are moving too fast, it's easy [...]

  Posted: April 16, 2007, 8:35am EDT by Carl Pope

• How Much and How Fast?

  Guest Blogger: Bill McKibben
  
  It's looking increasingly likely that Congress will finally do something about global warming. The question is, how much and how fast?
  
  The science, by now, is uncomfortably clear. Only really dramatic action, beginning now and lasting long into the future, has any hope of [...]

  Posted: April 10, 2007, 5:27pm EDT by Carl Pope

• Free the Plastic Bag Seven

  Irvine, CA -- The Ayn Rand Institute has finally figured out how to drive home the evil of environmentalism. They are making their case based on the plastic bag ban. A press release from the Institute claims that San Francisco's recent ban on light-weight plastic bags "is the latest [...]

  Posted: April 09, 2007, 7:21am EDT by Carl Pope

• Potluck Organizing

  Guest blogger: Bill McKibben
  
  This is the kind of email I get pretty much hourly these days, from people I've never met. It's from a man in Jacksonville, Florida, where I've never even been, writing to tell me what he and his friends have planned for April 14, when [...]

  Posted: April 05, 2007, 8:04am EDT by Carl Pope

• Looting the Baggage Train

  Washington, DC - It has been a bad fortnight for the folks who call themselves "good Bushies." The White House Chief of Staff accuses the Attorney General of lying to Congress. New polls show that only 35% of the public identifies with the Republican party. Both houses of Congress vote [...]

  Posted: April 04, 2007, 10:24am EDT by Carl Pope

• Reality Prevails at the High Court: 5-4

  Washington, DC -- By a 5-4 ruling the US Supreme Court today ruled that the science of global warming is real, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and that the EPA should regulate it under the Clean Air Act, even if the Bush Administration does not want to do [...]

  Posted: April 02, 2007, 8:57am EDT by Carl Pope

• Dr. Singer, Meet Mr. Michaels

  San Francisco, CA -- The global warming sceptics don't seem to feel a particular need to get their story straight. A few months ago when the IPCC report finally ended the scientific debate, CATO's leading global warming denier, Dr. Patrick Michaels (yes, he's a PhD too, but the headline needed [...]

  Posted: April 02, 2007, 5:20am EDT by Carl Pope

• Elections Have Consequences

  Asheville, NC -- Environmentalists can argue about which was last fall's sweetest election victory: Californians love the stunning upset handed Richard Pombo, but sentimentalists in the South point to the retirement of "Timber Charlie" Taylor as their finest moment. Now Heath Shuler, the freshman who beat Taylor, has delivered on [...]

  Posted: March 29, 2007, 7:15am EDT by Carl Pope

• Wiping Out America the Beautiful

  Washington, DC -- A few days ago, the former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Steve Griles, pled guilty to having concealed from Congress the influence peddling that went on in the Department of the Interior under his boss, Secretary Gale Norton. Today, Salon magazine revealed that the influence peddling [...]

  Posted: March 28, 2007, 10:47am EDT by Carl Pope

• First, Let's Kill All the Inspectors

  Washington, DC -- Stephen Griles, the former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, has pleaded guilty for lying about his cozy relationship and influence peddling on behalf of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Griles has now conceded that through his then-girlfriend, Italia Federici, "Abramoff occasionally sought and received [his] advice and intervention [...]

  Posted: March 23, 2007, 10:55am EDT by Carl Pope

• Bold Strokes on the Campaign Trail

  Nevada, IA -- Last week New Hampshire spoke out: in more than 90% of the nearly 200 town meetings that debated whether or not the US needed to curb its emissions of carbon dioxide, the resolution was approved. That’s a powerful message to presidential candidates. Town meetings are the [...]

  Posted: March 21, 2007, 8:34am EDT by Carl Pope

• The Heartland Takes a Big Leap

  Kansas City, MO -- Kansas City Power and Light today entered into a binding contract with the Sierra Club that the utility will entirely offset carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power plant that it currently has under construction, will make unprecedented investments in renewables and efficiency (four times [...]

  Posted: March 20, 2007, 5:09am EDT by Carl Pope

• If You Want to Be President -- Listen

  Concord, NH -- Whenever you win with an election by more than 90 percent, you are either in North Korea, or your opponents are brain-dead. New Hampshire this week had such a Pyongyang moment, sending the presidential candidates of both parties a message -- you are in serious danger of [...]

  Posted: March 16, 2007, 4:09am EDT by Carl Pope

• A Victory for the Sacred

  Flagstaff, AZ -- The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that a ski resort which has leased sacred Native American land from the Forest Service cannot dump treated sewage on the land as part of its snow making operations. The ruling, in a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club [...]

  Posted: March 14, 2007, 6:55am EDT by Carl Pope