Articles by Joseph Romm

Mike Tidwell speaks out in the WaPo against coal

Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, regularly has me on his Earthbeat radio show, so I'm returning the favor with this great letter to the editor he had in the Washington Post yesterday:

Fact: Virginia gets less than 1 percent of its electricity from "green" sources such as the wind or the sun. Fact: Virginia ranks 38th among U.S. states in energy efficiency. Fact: Climate change is real, and fossil fuel substitutes are needed, according to President Bush's State of the Union address last year. So how would Dominion Virginia Power respond to these facts?

• Savagely blow up entire mountains in southwest Virginia.
• Feed the resulting exposed coal to a proposed power plant that is unnecessary and would cost ratepayers at least $1.8 billion.
• Create lots more greenhouse gases in the process.
• Doom the good people of southwest Virginia to living with a brutal extraction industry that has no future.

Whew! Talk about getting everything wrong.

And yet Gov. Tim Kaine supports the plan:

Conventional oil will peak within seven years

The oil company with the best strategic planning says the day of reckoning is nigh:

McCain’s doubletalk express on global warming

If you think Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is a straight-talking, courageous politician on the issue of global warming, watch this jaw-dropping clip from last night's Republican presidential debate:

The transcript is online, so we can go through McCain's entire Orwellian answer to moderator Tim Russert. [Note: This was following a question to Giuliani about the global warming threat to Florida and his opposition to mandatory caps, which I'll briefly discuss at the end.] Russert said, correctly:

Senator McCain, you are in favor of mandatory caps.

And, as you've seen, McCain immediately answers:

No, I'm in favor of cap-and-trade. And Joe Lieberman and I, one of my favorite Democrats and I, have proposed that -- and we did the same thing with acid rain.

And all we are saying is, "Look, if you can reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, you earn a credit. If somebody else is going to increase theirs, you can sell it to them." And, meanwhile, we have a gradual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Details on the EPA chief overruling his staff on California tailpipe emissions

We have known for weeks that the EPA administrator overruled his staff when announced late last year that the EPA was denying California's application to regulate vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions.

Now we have the details of the PowerPoint presentation that the EPA's legal and technical staff made to Johnson, thanks to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). At the end, I'll reprint a letter from the Terminator (and 13 other governors) sent to the EPA. As reported today by the S.F. Chronicle:

In the presentation last year, EPA staffers wrote that California could clearly demonstrate "compelling and extraordinary conditions" -- the legal definition under the Clean Air Act that requires EPA to approve regulations set by the state.

"California continues to have compelling and extraordinary conditions in general (geography, climatic, human and motor vehicle populations -- many such conditions are vulnerable to climate change conditions) as confirmed by several recent EPA decisions," the staff wrote.

The staffers also told Johnson that climate scientists at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had concluded California was at greater risk from the impacts of global warming than other states, which could justify the tougher rules.

"California exhibits a greater number of key impact concerns than other regions," they wrote. The staffers listed all the risks that could prove the state's case -- from potential water shortages to rising sea levels affecting coastal communities to health threats from air pollution.

"Wildfires are increasing," which could "generate particulates that can exacerbate health risk," they wrote. "California has the greatest variety of ecosystems in the U.S.; and the most threatened and endangered species in the continental U.S."

Nice to see the EPA staff gets this issue, even if their boss and the White House don't. The story notes: