EPA’s rebuff of California waiver to set carbon emissions is as bad as it gets… until next time.

This week, the nations of the world gather in Bali to frame a global treaty on global warming to follow the Kyoto protocol, when it expires in 2012. The following prayer is offered in the hope of their success.

One of Kevin Rudd’s first moves will be to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. Is he the man to bring China into the fold?

Yet another wonkish plan driven by emissions envy: Can’t Dems just pledge to get new global treaty ratified?

Here are a dozen reasons why the Nobel Veep is ready to roll.

One man denies the Holocaust took place. The other man denies that global warming is the most important issue of our time.

James Hanson - photo: NY Times

James Hanson blew the whistle on the Bush administration’s censoring of government climate scientists. Will he have something to say to the Nobel people about the administration’s current campaign to champion “voluntary” global warming pollution “goals”?

This post is written for young people of all countries, but particularly those from America and the industrialized nations, whose personal and lifestyle decisions can start to reshape our energy economy. It’s also targeted at those corporations that market their products and services to that younger generation—specifically American Express, which is currently running one of the most irresponsible ad campaigns I have ever seen. In content, in meaning, and in all specifics, the American Express ad sends the clear, deeply corrupt message to young people that thoughtlessly increasing their carbon footprint is just fine. They should pull the ad and apologize.

Enrique Gil at Commonground posted a nice piece well worth reading about the waste of electricity by home electronics while in the off or standby position. Since everyone reading this is probably guilty, I recommend you read it and do something about it.

A gallon of regular gas is about $3 on average nationwide. Yet Americans are not changing their driving habits—and telling pollsters they are spending less on other stuff (restaurant meals, movies, toys) in order to keep up their high-mileage lifestyles. Hopeless? Not necessarily.

A couple months back I wrote a post on the moral obligation rich countries have to help poor, vulnerable countries meet the challenges of global warming. I was talking then about helping poor countries mitigate the worst effects of flooding, droughts and cyclones. Today, a Reuters Alertnet report from South Africa adds a new dimension to that point. In the effort to create biofuels from staple food crops like maize and sugar, South Africa has set off a “highly unequal” competition between the poor wanting to get enough to eat and the rich wanting to fill their car tanks.

It came as a disappointment, but no surprise, that the Bush administration rejected the German proposal on climate change leading up to next week’s G-8 summit of industrialized countries. This U.S. president has shown himself incapable of reflection or change, in Iraq, on energy and climate policies, among many others. The question now is what Europe and Japan are going to do about Bush’s rejectionism: paper it over with smiles and soft-core communiqués? Or deliver some firmer message that American unilateralism won’t be let off with a roll of the eyes?

The Great Gray Lady of American journalism has been doing a great job this year covering energy and climate issues, with Andrew Revkin’s reports on how the Bush administration tainted climate science with ideology, and Tom Friedman’s columns and reports on the clean energy tech boom in Silicon Valley. But yesterday the New York Times showed a real lapse in editorial judgment when it printed an op-ed piece called “How to Win the Energy War” by Frank G. Zarb, disclosing only that Mr. Zarb was Gerald Ford’s assistant on energy affairs and is “the managing director of a private equity firm.” The issue, of course, is transparency—giving readers as much information as possible in order to help them understand and evaluate facts and opinions in context.

This just in: The Smithsonian Institution, once the world’s most distinguished science museum, censored a 2006 exhibit on climate change in the Arctic in order not to upset the rightwing politicians who vote for the Smithsonian’s appropriations. References to human-induced Arctic warming thought to be too strong by Smithsonian executives were taken out of the exhibit’s textual materials or watered down, according to an Associated Press story quoting former Smithsonian exhibitions meister Robert Sullivan.

I was going to post a positive note for energy independence from a week when hundreds of U.S. mayors got together in New York to trade best practices in reducing global warming emissions and Bill Clinton’s foundation announced a major-league effort to make buildings in 16 big cities worldwide energy efficient. Then I read the BBC news report about the Bush administration trying to eviscerate the G-8 summit's draft proclamation on the need for swift, united global action on climate change, and all my desire to report something hopeful ended up on the floor in a dark pool of pissing wrath.