Green Options

With Scott Brown’s Senate win pushing health care to the back burner, Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham are blazing the bipartisan trail toward Senate adoption of an energy reform and climate change bill.

The developed countries are struggling to build national consensus for ambitious mitigation measures while the developing countries have gained the higher ground in the negotiations for the next climate deal by announcing voluntary sectoral emission reduction targets.

An archive of my Big Coal cartoons. The pen is mightier than the sword (but probably not as mighty as the multi-billion dollar coal industry…).

Health Care and the environment are a mess! Can we be counted on to make them better?…Outlook not so good.

Late Friday, the House passed the first legislation solely dedicated to reversing global warming. Now the fate of the Climate Change Bill is in the hands of the Senate, and political pundits are predicting the bill won’t pass. This exact bill might not pass but sooner than later one will and until then they will have several things in common. A climate bill will change how we produce and use electricity. It will change how you travel from point A to point B. It will change how every business operates and how every American lives. Our lives will never be the same. Dramatic? Yes. True. Yes.

The passage of this bill will change your life in three ways:

1. It would affect what type of car you can drive - smaller.
2. It would affect how much you pay for energy - more.
3. It would affect what type of job you have - green job.

Energy affects every facet of our lives. When energy prices go up, food prices go up, clothing prices go up..the price for everything we buy gets more expensive. Why? Because our society is intricately intertwined with energy, and energy is intertwined with our economy.

This column highlights the top economic stories of the week.

For a while it looked like Google might actually bailout the newspaper industry by buying a stake in newspapers that have been struggling with debt and declining ad revenues.  However, it appears that this plan ha been called off.

Meanwhile, the Treasury department has committed $ 7.5 billion in aid to GMAC, the auto lender [...]

Democrats in the House of Representatives unveiled the already heavily discussed Waxman-Markey bill on Friday, formally known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act. It is 932 pages long. And no, I haven’t read all of it. So don’t feel too bad.

How much will it take to get the economy back on its feet?
President-elect Obama’s team has begun working on a plan to spend up to $500 billion in new funds if the economy continues to worsen. President-elect Obama promised to create 5 million new jobs in the alternative energy sector. However with the economic outlook worsening daily, will he be able to put his money where his mouth is?