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THE WITNESS
A girl and her mother in Beijing, China
The Chinese coal mining industry has been hit by slowing coal consumption growth and simultaneously, a flood of cheaper imported coal. To stem the decline in profits, Chinese coal producers are pursuing a variety of strategies, including considering investing in renewable energy, auctioning Australian coal export capacity, and pushing new coal import standards. Continue reading
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell was asked about her plans to establish a moratorium on federal coal leasing yesterday, during her first visit to the Pacific Northwest, OPB reports: Continue reading
© Karuna Ang / Greenpeace
“400 ppm” is buzzing in the air like the impending ruckus of cicadas.
The immediate reaction to the news that the amount of atmospheric carbon surpassed the dreaded 400 parts per million milestone is to hang your head and sigh. (It’s okay if you’ve done that. I did too). It feels like you’re still running when the race is already over. Continue reading
Jim Rogers has a choice between clean and dirty energy.
“We must move at ‘China speed’ to combat global warming.”
That’s what Jim Rogers, CEO of the largest utility in the country and one of the world’s biggest carbon polluters, Duke Energy, said once upon a time. Now Rogers, who has agreed to retire at the end of 2013, has seven months left to prove he meant it, and determine how history will judge his climate legacy: as a leader who helped start a clean energy revolution, or a polluter who told a nice story about global warming, but never acted to stop it.
That’s why Greenpeace and NC WARN, one of our allies in North Carolina, published an ad today in the Charlotte Observer challenging Rogers to stop talking and start acting, by directing his company to invest in solar energy, wind energy, and energy efficiency throughout the Duke Energy service territory. Continue reading
Representative Chris Stewart (R-UT) is the chair of the subcommittee on the environment, the congressional group in charge of the EPA, climate change research, and “all activities related to climate.” It is therefore extremely troubling that Stewart denies the basic findings of climate science. Stewart has said that he is “not convinced” that climate change is a threat, despite the fact that the EPA, NOAA, and all of the climate science and scientists that he now oversees, disagree with him. In fact 98% of actual climate scientists disagree with his views on climate science.
Don't worry. The U.S. State Department is okay with encouraging tar sands mining like this.
The U.S. State Department released its draft environmental assessment of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline last Friday afternoon as we entered our weekends. Some of us were stunned as we watched Congress do nothing to tame the indiscriminate cuts in public jobs from the “sequester,” including hundreds of millions of dollars cut from environmental programs and protections. The announcement was further buried by today’s highly-anticipated appointments of EPA administrator Gina McCarty and Dept. of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, whom some beltway insiders speculated would be appointed last week.
While the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement acknowledges that tar sands oil production is more carbon intensive than conventional oil, the 2,000 page document seems like an easy excuse for President Obama to approve the pipeline without seeming hypocritical for breaking his State of the Unions promises on climate change.
The climate doesn’t care how any message is framed if we’re still dumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like a global industrial sewer. Greenpeace’s Point of No Return report includes Alberta’s tar sands among the largest carbon fuel reserves on the planet, with potential for 420 million metric tons in annual CO2 emissions by 2020.