Is a consumer choice necessarily the best choice?

Jim Manzi, climate change voice of non-denialist conservatives, writes: But consider this at a common-sense level: you are forcing people,...

The 2008 U.S. Open goes green

The court is green, the ball is green, and now the tournament is green as well. United States Tennis Association...

Eleven organic breakfast cereals get put to the spoon

The scene was surreal … I mean, cereal. I awoke from deadline-anxiety dreams one Sunday morning, and crept down to...

A choice of primary energies: nuclear power takes the silver

In light of concerns about climate change, some enviros as well as those within the nuclear industry have emphasized nuclear...

Another example of how carbon constraints may benefit big box retailers

Wal-Mart and Costco have adopted a version of the one-gallon milk jug designed with efficiency in mind. The boxier containers stack better, eliminating the need for milk crates and conserving space in trucks and on refrigerated store shelves:

The company estimates this kind of shipping has cut labor by half and water use by 60 to 70 percent. More gallons fit on a truck and in Sam's Club coolers, and no empty crates need to be picked up, reducing trips to each Sam's Club store to two a week, from five -- a big fuel savings. Also, Sam's Club can now store 224 gallons of milk in its coolers, in the same space that used to hold 80.

Now that farmers have gotten big or gotten out, it’s up to alternative farmers

In “Dispatches From the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado...

Umbra on short-haul flights

Dear Umbra, I work in the touring music business, based in the U.K. but touring worldwide. I have noticed recently...

Connecticut wants to hide carbon prices

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is far from a perfect GHG bill. It is heavily allocation loaded, focuses only on a small sector of the economy (power plants >25 MW), and doesn't have any direct carrots to go with sticks.

The good news, such as it is, is that RGGI leaves many details to the discretion of the states, such that they can provide state-level patches to correct those absences in the overarching model. They can also make it worse.

Earlier this week, Connecticut chose the latter. As Restructuring Today ($ub. req'd) reports, Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell (R) has decided that if the price of carbon gets too high, she should rebate the money back to rate payers to make their energy cheaper.

In other words, rather than letting markets allocate capital in response to the price of carbon, we should hide that price from energy users. Yuck.

Story below the fold.

EDF prez says we can’t afford to wait for the ideal first step

 

The following is a response to this post.

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Ken Ward tracks the evolution of EDF's position on climate legislation in search of evidence that we've relented on tough global warming pollution limits since making climate change a top priority more than ten years ago. He sees our support of the Climate Security Act as a retreat from bold action, as surrender to what's merely possible in Congress. Far from it.

What shapes our advocacy and our support for that bill is not, as Ken suggests, the limits of politics-as-usual in Washington. It's shaped by the urgent need to begin reducing global warming pollution -- and the fact that as a nation we have failed to take action despite two decades of evidence that we are in deep trouble.