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What would Pope Francis do?
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on June 22nd, 2015
InsideClimate: The Holy Father doesn’t give carbon credits or air conditioners his imprimatur. He favors a legally binding climate treaty tailored to the needs of the poor. And he has guidance on natural gas, boycotts, and paying the social costs of carbon. Fifty-five paragraphs into his wide-ranging encyclical on the global environment and the climate crisis, Pope Francis arched an ecclesiastical eyebrow at how much air conditioning you are using. "People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity," he wrote,...
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Nebraska Supreme Court Holds the Key to Keystone XL’s Future
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on September 5th, 2014
InsideClimate: Nebraskan landowners who have fought the Keystone XL pipeline to a standstill there urged the state's Supreme Court on Friday to reaffirm that the legislature acted unconstitutionally when it allowed rubberstamp approval of the pipeline's proposed route across the region's fragile sandhills and vulnerable aquifers. Otherwise, said David Domina, the landowners' lawyer, the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada and its political allies would be free to run untrammeled over private landholders and...
Global climate inaction mean economic turmoil for South Asia, warns bank
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on August 23rd, 2014
InsideClimate: The first comprehensive study ever issued on the economic costs that uncontrolled climate change would inflict on South Asia predicts a staggering burden that would hit the region's poorest the hardest.
"The impacts of climate change are likely to result in huge economic, social and environmental damage to South Asian countries, compromising their growth potential and poverty reduction efforts," said the study, published by the Asian Development Bank.
The cuts in regional GDP are so deep that...
Report describes the unfathomable cost of inaction on rising seas
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on February 19th, 2014
InsideClimate: The world needs to invest tens of billions of dollars a year in beefing up shoreline defenses against rising oceans or it will face mind-boggling costs in the decades to come, according to new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If nations don't build up dikes, levees and sea walls, harden existing infrastructure, and preserve natural sponges like wetlands and barrier islands--and if they also do nothing to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases that...
Reading John Kerry’s Mind on the Keystone Pipeline
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on January 25th, 2014
InsideClimate: Imagine, if you will, John Kerry's internal monologue—his soliloquy as the State Department prepares to release its final environmental impact statement (EIS) on the Keystone XL pipeline designed to funnel tar sands crude from Alberta across the U.S. midsection. After the EIS arrives, Kerry must review whether the pipeline is in the national interest—a question that Obama has said rests largely on its climate impacts. Of course, we can't know what Kerry really thinks. Here we take a guess by looking...
In Northern Gateway Pipeline Decision, Economics Trumped All Else
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on December 19th, 2013
InsideClimate: An independent Canadian federal panel on Thursday approved Enbridge's proposal to build a new pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the British Columbia coast, a significant gain in the industry's long campaign to find export markets for the nation's abundant but carbon-heavy form of crude oil. The panel set 209 conditions on the project [3] as a way to overcome environmental and safety concerns. Even that, it said, would not guarantee that there would be no environmental harm. But its central...
Obama’s New Special Adviser Is Outspoken Critic of Keystone XL
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on December 11th, 2013
InsideClimate: By asking John Podesta to come to the White House as a special counselor at a time of turmoil and tough choices, President Obama has created an unusually close tie to an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Canadian tar sands it would carry. Podesta is a Washington policy insider who was Bill Clinton`s chief of staff and whose Center for American Progress, or CAP, is an influential voice of liberalism. He has kept climate change high on his agenda for years and will continue to do...
IEA: Tar sands export pipelines needed for Canada’s oil to boom
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on November 15th, 2013
InsideClimate: Growth in the Canadian oil sands industry will depend on the construction of major new pipelines, including the disputed Keystone XL across the United States, according to a report by a prominent energy institute. The faster new pipelines are approved, the more rapid the increase in tar sands production over the next two decades, the International Energy Agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook [3], released on Nov. 12. Accelerated growth would mean a surge in global greenhouse gas emissions,...
Military Report: America Has ‘Misguided’ Fixation With Domestic Drilling
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on June 24th, 2013
InsideClimate: A new report from the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses and the London-based Royal United Services Institute, two of the NATO alliance's front-line strategy centers, recommends putting more effort into fighting global warming than securing reliable supplies of fossil fuels.
The authors call the habitual American fixation on winning energy independence through expanded North American production of oil and natural gas "misguided." They say the "only sustainable solution" to the problem of energy insecurity...
In Age of Electronic Democracy, Keystone Voices Get Wide Audience
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on May 28th, 2013
InsideClimate: Stu Luttich of Geneva, Neb. is just one of the thousands of ordinary Americans who sat down in early March and gave the State Department their two cents worth on the Keystone XL pipeline. Luttich has what he calls "some ground" in Nebraska that he'd like to restore to native grassland, and he works with other Nebraskans trying to do the same thing. So when the State Department opened its 45-day public comment period on the Keystone draft environmental impact statement, he offered his take on the...