Clean Energy | ModeShift

Grassroots Resistance to Clean Energy Projects, A Colorado Example

by Keith SchneiderJune 4, 2010September 9, 20100

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times this morning published a interesting piece on how solar energy development in Colorado is being impeded by local resistance to new transmission lines. The many examples of how community or landowner or other resistance to clean energy projects has been well covered here on ModeShift. The trend represents another authentic risk to the nation’s ability to make a transition to a low carbon economy. There are oil companies …

Obama’s Pivot on Gulf Disaster to Commander in Chief

by Keith SchneiderJune 3, 2010June 3, 20100

On June 2, a day before BP announced it had sheared through a leaking pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the very few steps forward in the company’s 44-day campaign to staunch the worst oil disaster in American history, President Barack Obama finally stopped serving as the cleanup chief and became the commander in chief. During a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Obama pressed the nation to join …

Michigan: Where New U.S. Efficiency and Emissions Rules Really Count

by Keith SchneiderMay 26, 2010May 27, 20103

On Friday, May 21, President Obama gathered in the Rose Garden the chiefs of his transportation and environmental departments to take the next big step to leverage federal climate policy and clean energy investment to spur new job growth. The president directed Transportation Secretary Ray La Hood and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to draw up new rules that make heavy trucks much more fuel-efficient and produce less global warming gases. “This standard will …

Obama Makes Progress on Climate But Environmental Community Divided

by Keith SchneiderMay 21, 2010May 21, 20100

President Obama on Friday directed the EPA and the Transportation Department to develop a national policy to increase fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from medium and heavy-duty trucks in time for the 2014 model year. The action comes almost exactly one year (May 19, 2009) after President Obama set new fuel and emissions standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States beginning with the 2012 model year. The 2009 …

Principle Trumps Pragmatism: Grassroots Greens Campaign Against Clean Energy, American Power Act

by Keith SchneiderMay 20, 2010September 9, 20101

As the expanse of the Gulf slick widened this week and climate advocates reckoned with an American public focused on more urgent risks closer to their front doors, 15 big activist organizations and a coalition of 200 grassroots advocacy groups from across the country, many of them green, lashed the American Power Act. Greenpeace last Thursday called the measure “more of a ‘dirty energy bailout’ bill than anything else.” In a statement issued a day …

All Eyes To The Future: The American Power Act’s Imperiled Pragmatism

by Keith SchneiderMay 15, 2010February 17, 20211

Over 70 years ago, in the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an estimated 10 percent of all Americans were transported across a landscape of innovation, creativity, and optimism that became the economic and cultural foundation of the great American century. The Futurama exhibit was a huge diorama of a highway-heavy, congestion-free, car-dependent, time-efficient, leafy green urban and suburban all American pattern of civilization that no one had ever seen …

Hour of Choosing Arrives: American Power Act Introduced

by Keith SchneiderMay 12, 2010May 12, 20101

In a long-awaited proposal designed to secure existing domestic energy sources and develop new ones that begin to reverse the damaging effects of global climate change, New England Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman today introduced comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. The co-authors of the bill, one a Democrat from Massachusetts and the other an Independent from Connecticut, insisted that its vision is to change the direction of some of the nation’s toughest systemic …

As Gulf Slick Spreads Environmental Movement Takes Unexpected Heat

by Keith SchneiderMay 4, 2010September 9, 2010

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate economist,Â Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, and friend of most things green wrote a piece over the weekend that should give environmentalists heartache. In a column about the big Gulf oil spill, Krugman described how the environmental movement has been steadily losing political momentum because it’s been so successful in scrubbing the skies and clearing the waters of the visible hazards of pollution. He also lays …

Climate-Denying US Chamber Has A Point When It Comes to Grassroots Resistance to Clean Energy

by Keith SchneiderApril 29, 2010September 9, 20101

The US Chamber of Commerce and many of its state-based affiliates, including the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, are nests of ideological movement conservatives devoted to all manner of influential key words that have shaped how states and Washington view their duties to mother nature. The Chamber has promoted such concepts as “free-market environmentalism” — which means allowing market trends to strip the earth — and “sound science,” which is a euphemism for ignoring science-based fact …

Earth, Wind, Fire On Day of Onrushing Risks

by Keith SchneiderApril 28, 20100

The accelerating consequences of the warming Earth, the hazards associated with increasing reliance on fossil fuels, the promise of big clean energy projects, and the difficulties in advancing a national climate and energy policy fit for the 21st century came into sharp focus today in Washington and across the nation. In Boston, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that aftter nine years of public confrontation, the United States had reached a decision to approve crucial permits …