A report by global re-insurers claims that 2012 was one of the most expensive years for insurers on record. Natural disasters specifically “large scale weather events” were to blame for the historically high numbers. The world’s second-largest reinsurer said yesterday that natural catastrophes and man-made disasters cost the insurance industry $77 billion in 2012, the [...]

Now Senate Democrats might actually see climate change as a wedge issue, just a couple years after one of their caucus members literally shot climate change legislation in one of his campaign ads.

Jim Yong Kim, the new President of the World Bank, called on the world to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a shift for an organization that usually does not weigh in on the subject. Kim’s report, “Why a 4° Centigrade Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” has a very specific intent. “It is my hope that this report shocks us into action,” Kim writes in the foreward.

California ushers in a new era today with one of the the first greenhouse gas emission auctions in the United States. The state passed the Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006, and six years later, the cap and trade program on carbon emissions in the law is operational and ready for action. More than six [...]

My original working assumption on the subject of a carbon tax, basically a levy on fossil fuel usage, working its way into the fiscal cliff negotiations was that I appreciated the thought, but doubted the reality. It’s not that a carbon tax wouldn’t raise revenue and also contribute in a smart way to reducing greenhouse [...]

I think Rudy Giuliani is just being a good partisan by claiming that the federal response to Superstorm Sandy has been worse than Katrina. But has the media run with a narrative of competence and professional response while residents in Staten Island and Rockaway Beach, for example, yell for help? I think that’s beyond question. And the anger is growing in these areas.

I recall hearing quite a bit from various governors that the US is the “Saudi Arabia of coal” or the “Saudi Arabia of wind,” or whatever natural resource they had in abundance. Now, according to AP energy writer Jonathan Fahey, the US verges on becoming the Saudi Arabia… of oil. U.S. oil output is surging [...]

Every time I write about climate change, it’s all I can do not to sigh and think about how doomed we are. Climate change represents one of the most impossible problems to solve purely for political reasons. It’s not a technological deficiency; even if it were, we can clear that hurdle. But this is an [...]

A direct action group called Tar Sands Blockade has been harassing TransCanada and their efforts to build the lower half of the Keystone XL pipeline. That portion, from Cushing, Oklahoma to the port at the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, was approved by President Obama as a way to speed through to international markets what [...]

The Senate passed, by a 90-1 count, an “Iran containment” resolution that creates that “red line” Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded for recently. And, it puts the red line for Iran’s nuclear program at a nuclear capability rather than a nuclear weapon, a shift from current Presidential policy.

Eduardo Porter attempted to take the air out of one of the few carbon mitigation programs the Obama Administration has been able to approve, the increase in fuel economy standards. Porter’s perspective is basically that increased gas taxes make more sense than higher fuel economy, and that the latter carries unintended consequences. For the first [...]