Green Options

File Photo: Hillary Clinton and the Indian Environment Minister in New Delhi

..and then takes a U-Turn the very next day!

In a reported letter to the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian Environment Minister proposed a radical shift in India’s stand on climate change–away from its national position on climate negotiations–which India has backed since 1990 and which was defended robustly even in UN talks in Bangkok earlier this month.

Minutes after the news spread, political parties sitting in the opposition were quick to respond. Within the next few hours, the Environment Minister issued a clarifying statement for national media and the entire Nation!

Although politicians themselves may be relative newcomers in the world of communicating in 140-character or less, those who write about and study politics aren’t. And that goes for those who favor environmental politics, too.

Oil exec calls for a carbon tax, bush protects marine areas and Obama wants to double renewables - and that’s not all of it!

Campaign politics dominated the headlines in 2008, making it a banner year for the armchair pundit. 2008 was also a year that issues like energy use, climate change and carbon footprints came to the forefront of popular culture and political reality. Put all of that together and you have 2008’s top environmental politics stories.

The four animal rights activists found guilty of blackmailing companies that supplied Huntingdon Life Sciences are certainly reprehensible, their behaviour was appalling and their actions verged on the psychopathic, but they are also an example of why the current way of doing environmental politics just doesn’t seem to be working

A coalition of 106 conservation organizations is supporting Congressman Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) as the next Secretary of the Interior, according to a letter from more than 78 groups sent to President-elect Obama and released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Is it possible that mad-campaigning and fuel consumption of these final efforts is ringing warning bells with the average voter, wondering when gas prices will fall and whether they can heat their homes this winter?

Subsumed for a small time by the socialist agenda, liberalism may be set for a resurgence in the United Kingdom.

Instead of me popping off the five most important, most-visited, or my otherwise favorite environmental politics blogs I’ll just start us off with a couple of good ones and why I like them. Then we want you to tell us what you all are reading and why you are reading them for your environmental politics fix.

For Teddy Roosevelt it was the creation of our system of National Parks. For Richard Nixon it was the passage of landmark environmental reforms found in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. For Bill Clinton it was an eleventh-hour preservation of millions of acres of public lands. For George W. Bush it will be tackling the issues of global warming and climate change.

huh?

In light of my recent post about the demoralizing effect this administration has had upon EPA scientists and other agency ‘lifers’, I was more than just a little surprised to hear about the story leaked in Monday’s Washington Times that reports President Bush is “poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming, and will lay out principles for what that should include.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined on Monday to confirm rumors that action was imminent, though she would not rule it out. She said the administration’s discussions are building toward an expected debate on climate change in the Senate in June [watch video of White House press conference here].

If President George W. Bush throws his support behind mandatory carbon dioxide regulations, it would indeed be a major shift away from his insistence that placing binding caps on emissions would harm the U.S. economy.