This Stephen Colbert clip on oil companies and the environment is fall-over funny and dead-on right.
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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
Last week, the New York Times Dot Earth blog posted a sobering video of coastline erosion in Alaska. This is no simulation – it’s a time-lapse video made from pictures taken two hours apart from late June to late July of this year.
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The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is an agreement among 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce global warming pollution from power plants by means of a cap-and-trade system. In cap-and-trade, global warming pollution is limited to an agreed-upon cap that declines over time. The governing authority issues "permits" – also called "allowances" – corresponding to the cap, with one allowance equal to a ton of CO2 or its equivalent in greenhouse gases. Companies must have allowances for any global warming pollution they emit.
The RGGI auction of allowances is today, and was opened by New York Governor David Paterson. The Washington Post said in an editorial, “We hope that it serves as a reminder to Washington of what can be accomplished when vision and leadership are exercised.” We agree! From EDF president Fred Krupp:
The launch of America’s first carbon market is proof positive that the U.S. can and will take bold steps to combat climate change.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
A cap on greenhouse gases could solve our addiction to oil, but it’s hard to explain this succinctly. Can you convey this concept in a vivid and memorable way through a video or still image? If so, you could win a $10,000 professional fee. We’re also offering cash prizes for the second and third place entries.
Details on what we’re looking for and the rules of the competition are on our Web site.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
Former President Bill Clinton gave an interesting analysis last night on the Late Show with David Letterman of how we got into our current economic mess. It all started at the beginning of the decade with lots of money to invest and no place to invest it. (For more on this, listen to the excellent report from This American Life on "The Giant Pool of Money".) Since most of the economic activity at this time was in real estate, investment bankers invented something called "mortgage-backed securities". This worked well and they wanted more, so lenders started giving mortgages to people with no ability to repay them – leading to the current mess.
We could have avoided this problem, Clinton said, if government had provided incentives for investment in the next big thing – clean energy.
EDF’s position is that the green economy is our best hope for the future. The incentive we need to make this happen is a cap on global warming pollution.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
You know how Peace Corps volunteers travel to developing countries offering help where it’s needed? Imagine a corps of interns working at U.S. corporations to help them reduce their environmental footprint, save energy, and save money, and you have the Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps.
Our Corporate Partnerships team placed MBA students from top business schools at five California companies: Intuit, NVIDIA, Cisco, Yahoo! and Salesforce.com, and at Crescent Real Estate in Houston, Texas. The interns spent the summer making the business case for increasing energy efficiency in company facilities. One intern found that Cisco could reduce its carbon footprint by nearly 300 million pounds and save $24 million over five years by installing smart power distribution units in their labs. For more, check out our "What We Did This Summer" page.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.