Green Options

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, U.S. President Barack Obama threw strong support behind clean energy and technology, touting America’s history of innovation and not shying away from problems.

Olympia Snowe’s support of the finance committee draft puts health care back in play, but without a public option. The Graham-Kerry compromise climate bill would start to cap carbon, but also allow coal to cash in. Will progressives settle for incrementalism?

Time-traveling to 2010 reveals how some of Washington’s worst-kept secrets will catch up with President Obama and cripple his climate agenda.

President Obama was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for reasons including his stand on climate change. Has his environmental record justified this award?

Failure to read the field on Chicago’s Olympic bid begs the question: who is counting votes for President Obama? The White House will need a much better ground game if the US is going to lead the world on climate change.

Is Exelon’s departure from the US Chamber of Commerce a harbinger for the entire utility sector? Or, is there a divide emerging within the industry?

In the midst of a week when climate change finally stole back some of the spotlight that had been hogged by health care reform for months, the Senate fought off a potentially devastating attempt to emasculate the EPA and its recently won power to regulate greenhouse gases.

In Peru, the government has acted on the financially troubled and environmentally challenged Doe Run Peru smelter. Their response to the closure of the site has been to give the operators a 30-month extension on their previous environmental clean-up deadline.

Very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults. But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.

As the world arrives at the UN ahead of Copenhagen, the US has more to lose than China in an escalating war of words over climate change leadership.

Impassioned editorials are calling for the restoration of The Angeles National Forest but what is the political cost of restoring the environment at a pace faster than nature’s, or of failing to do so?