Green Options

ZapRoot gives two nods to Red, Green, and Blue this week with their usual brand of critical eco-snark.

Try your hand at editorial humor. Enter a caption for this cartoon in the comments section below. A winner will be chosen and their caption will be published next week. Good luck!

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.

There was no shortage of fodder for thoughtful political discussion in 2008. Not surprisingly, the majority of the posts receiving the most comments were directly related to the presidential election. We’ve compiled the nine most-discussed posts of 2008 so you can take a little walk down memory lane at Red, Green, and Blue.

Even with yesterday’s stock market rally, we’ve all got the economy on our minds… and, for the most part, we’re worrying about it. Our retirement accounts are shrinking, our jobs are less secure, and buying or selling a home seems like a fantasy. An injection of cash into the markets is welcome; an injection of new ideas is absolutely critical.

As I’ve noted in previous [...]

Over the last month or so, I’ve been keeping my eye on a fantastic new project called On Day One (which I’ve written about here). The organizing theme behind the project is to help ’set the agenda’ for the next president of the United States by providing policy suggestions and political direction based on user-submitted material.

Now, On Day One is honing-in on the critical environmental issues of today in an upcoming five-day online debate co-sponsored with Grist.org’’s Gristmill, and UN Dispatch. And I am excited that I’ve been invited, along with Dave Roberts and Kate Sheppard from Grist, Nigel Purvis from the Brookings Institute and Resources for the Future, to be one of four online panelists invited to debate and discuss the user-submitted ideas - one idea a day throughout the week.

As the lead writer of this exciting new endeavor, let me be the first to officially welcome you to Red, Green, and Blue, the newest addition to the Green Options family of environmentally-themed blogs. I cannot think of a better time to be launching a niche blog that is focused on environmental politics — let me briefly explain why.

In terms of the political component, and without belaboring the obvious, we are in the midst of a presidential campaign that has gotten people excited about politics again. Record numbers of people (especially young people) have already turned out to vote in their state’s primaries and caucuses. And after Hillary Clinton took Ohio and Texas this week, it looks like the Dems will have to wait a few more months before they can coronate their candidate, while the GOP has already settled on John McCain as their presidential candidate. We are also involved in a war that is raising the hackles of people across the political spectrum. One thing Democrats and Republicans both seem to want is resolution to this drawn-out war/occupation. We are all tired of seeing our troops being taken out by IEDs and suicide bombs, only to be sent home to underfunded VA hospitals, or even worse, to be sent home in a flag-draped coffin. Finally, the economy has slowed its pace of growth, and this too has gotten people more interested in politics. We are certainly living in interesting times, and as a direct result of that, politics are re-emerging into the popular consciousness.

The city of New York is the latest government considering restrictions on plastic shopping bags, with a proposal in the works to require large stores to offer in-house recycling and reusable bags for sale. But is action like that enough to stop the plastic bag scourge?

From Africa to Canada, Australia to Ireland, and in the oceans in between, plastic bag trash has become a pestilence seemingly without end. And

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It’s hard to figure out California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the one hand, he helped the state enact landmark legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging the use of renewable fuels and clean energy. On the other hand, he makes some decisions that leave environmentalists saying, "Whaaaa?"

Consider the Governator’s latest round of bill signings and vetoes: the green guv OKd bans on trans-fats

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An article in this week’s Time magazine raises an interesting point about climate change. While there’s a growing consensus that global warming is real, the author writes, there’s also an emerging body of opinion that says it’s either too late to stop it or it’s not worth trying to stop. We’d be better off, these pundits say, investing in ways to make it easier to deal with

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