AMSTERDAM — The United States assured international negotiators Monday it remains committed to reducing carbon emissions over the next 10 years, despite the collapse of efforts to legislate a climate bill. U.S. delegate Jonathan Pershing told a climate conference in Bonn, Germany, Washington is not backing away from President Barack Obama's pledge to cut emissions
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WASHINGTON — As BP neared a fix that is expected to kill for good the runaway well that has wreaked economic and environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the government Monday said that 10 to 12 times the amount of oil had been flowing from the well than it originally thought. via Gulf oil
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Last winter, when record snowstorms brought life in the northeast corridor to a halt, Virginia Republicans launched a web ad, “12 inches of global warming,” and the family of Oklahoma senator and global warming “skeptic” Jim Inhofe built an igloo on the national mall, labeling it “Al Gore’s new home.” Now, as Xtreme weather has
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Nature doesn’t care about our political machinations. And nature is telling us that our current economic model is dangerous and self-defeating. Unless we find some real global leadership in the next few years, we will learn that lesson in the hardest ways possible. via Jeffrey Sachs: Making Sense of the Climate Impasse | Huffington Post.

EPA determined in December 2009 that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public’s health and the environment. Since then, EPA received ten petitions challenging this determination. On July 29, 2010, EPA denied these petitions. The petitions to reconsider EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” claimed that climate science can’t be trusted, and asserted a
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The last three months have been the warmest on record and we need to bring the same urgency to climate change that we did to stopping the Gulf oil spill, says Bill McKibben. Over the same period as the BP spill was taking place, if you add up all the carbon being burned in all
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The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade
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Microscopic marine algae which form the basis of the ocean food chain are dying at a terrifying rate, scientists said today. Phytoplankton, described as the ‘fuel’ on which marine ecosystems run, are experiencing declines of about 1 per cent of the average total a year. According to the researchers from Dalhousie University in Canada the
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Environmental experts say it’s too soon to know the full extent of the damage caused by this week’s spill of an estimated 819,000 gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed in Calhoun County. However, one thing is clear: The area’s environment will feel the effects of the spill for years to come. via
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Maude Barlow, who previously served as a senior adviser to the United Nations General Assembly on the water issue, said Wednesday that the “historic” passing of a Bolivia-led resolution, on which Canada abstained from voting, has no physical impact on Canadian water supplies. “What it does do is it requires each country’s government to start
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Senate majority leader Harry Reid on Tuesday unveiled a vastly narrower energy bill, minus controversial climate provisions that would have capped carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The bill focuses instead on addressing the Gulf oil spill, home efficiency, land and water conservation, and natural gas powered vehicles. via Stripped down energy bill leaves
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Senate Democrats’ decision to scale back energy legislation disappointed environmentalists, some utilities and the Obama administration, which took office promising to steer the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. Conversely, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision to drop a cap-and-trade plan, in which companies would buy and sell pollution rights, was “welcome news” for companies
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Agency Specialists Say Greenhouse Gas Offsets Unenforceable and Demand Probe Washington, DC — The major bills before Congress to regulate greenhouse gases to combat global climate change suffer from “multiple unfixable flaws” that undermine their effectiveness, according to a detailed congressional disclosure by two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees, posted today by Public Employees
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WASHINGTON — Senators John F. Kerry and Harry Reid conceded yesterday that they have no chance of passing a comprehensive climate and energy bill any time soon, saying they would instead push for a limited bill to address problems with offshore oil drilling and to boost energy conservation. The stripped-down bill would include provisions that
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is struggling to meet a self-imposed deadline for passing energy legislation, his fellow Democrats say, and they expressed doubt the measure could be approved before Congress takes its month- long August recess. Reid didn’t confirm the comment to reporters after the lunch and was noncommittal about the measure’s timing. He
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UNITED NATIONS, Jul 15, 2010 (IPS) – A long outstanding proposal to recognise the right to water as a basic universal human right is threatening to split the world’s rich and poor nations. Opposition to the proposal is coming mostly from Western nations, says Maude Barlow, a global water advocate and a founder of the
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Japan is focusing its nuclear energy marketing efforts on Vietnam which recently announced plans to build 13 new reactors by 2030 and inked a deal with Russia for the first two units. via Is Asia rising to dominate the global nuclear industry? | The Energy Collective.

As expected, the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill has grown weaker still, relinquishing an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions and instead targeting only the utility sector for greenhouse gas reductions starting in 2013. And that’s still apparently too controversial for this Senate, as the conventional wisdom says not even a utility-only bill can get enough votes to
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The time has come for action on the climate crisis. On 10/10/10, thousands of communities will join together to celebrate climate solutions. All over the world, we’ll be putting up solar panels, installing wind turbines, digging community gardens, and more. Install solar panels on the roof of the White House, and then get behind policies
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Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent
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