Climate 411

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

It’s not just an election year, it’s an historic election year. Every news outlet is filled with speculation and commentary. So why is it so quiet here, at Climate 411? How come we don’t talk about the election and the candidates?

It’s because of our tax status. Environmental Defense is incorporated as a 501c3 charitable organization. This means that donations to us are tax deductible, and we are allowed only limited lobbying and no electioneering whatsoever. Even commenting on candidates’ climate change plans could imply that we prefer one over the other and jeopardize our tax status. That’s why we talk about policies and not about candidates.

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come out with a neat new calculator that can make sense of all those arbitrary-sounding greenhouse gas numbers.

What does a metric ton of carbon dioxide look like? The calculator shows a dozen different equivalencies, such as 114 gallons of consumed gasoline, 2.3 barrels of oil, or 0.01 acres of forest preserved from deforestation. And it’s not limited to metric tons or CO₂. You also can try different amounts and different greenhouse gases.

The EPA developed the calculator to help people in communicating about reduction targets, but it’s useful to anyone trying to get a handle on the numbers.

This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense.

The results are in for 2007, and it was a warm one. How warm? It depends who you ask. According to NASA, 2007 was the second warmest year on record. NOAA’s analysis put it in fifth place. The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) ranked it eighth.

The results differ because it’s not as straightforward as you might think to take the temperature of the globe. There are many subtleties to consider.

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This post is by Mark Brownstein, Managing Director of Business Partnerships at Environmental Defense.

A little over a year ago, Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Ceres sent a letter to the three lead banks financing the TXU deal we helped broker. We said the banks no longer could ignore CO₂ in their investment decisions.

Today we are seeing the culmination of this effort. The three banks – Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley – have announced that they will require utilities seeking financing to prove the new plants would be economically viable under an expected federal cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

This will make it much harder for utilities to build conventional coal plants.

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