December 24, 2024

Category: Global Climate

As Gas Heads to $4, Teachable Moment For Presidential Candidates

by Keith Schneider3

  We’re one-tenth of a penny short of $3-a-gallon gas today here in Michigan. Energy analysts predict that the price will approach or exceed $4 by mid-summer. Welcome to the new world of gas price politics and the emerging new culture of energy efficiency in America.  It’s a whole lot easier to make the case for land and energy-conserving development patterns, energy efficiency, and a new economic development strategy in the United States when consumers’ ire is stoked by the price at …

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Email the Sun

by Keith Schneider5

  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of a select number of Republican leaders in the United States who makes any sense, turned up at the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday to deliver an Earth Day plan for his city that should be the basic text for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. A full account of the 127 steps the mayor proposed is here. The big pieces …

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Build High Speed Rail in the Midwest

by Keith Schneider22

  Since 1996, nine states in the American Midwest have been gradually inching forward on a proposal to establish a 3,000-mile high speed train network linking 100 of the region’s big and small cities. Chicago would serve as the hub of the The Midwest Regional Rail System. Spokes would include Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Des Moines, and many other large cities served by trains capable of traveling 110 mph, which would make the travel time and …

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Earth Day is Boomer Day

by Keith Schneider8

  Perhaps not since the very first one 37 years ago has Earth Day attracted the credibility or the genuinely intense national and global focus that it has this year. Thousands of grassroots celebrations, including the annual march in downtown Traverse City today, are occurring this weekend. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, introduced a green investment plan and policy strategy for transforming the nation’s largest metropolis into an even more transit-friendly, energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive place to live and do …

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The Right To Speak and the Duty to Be Right

by Keith Schneider6

For longer than I care to recount Rush Limbaugh has been in my life. My work takes me on the road, as it’s done for three decades now, and sometime in the early 1990s I scanned the AM dial and happened on his show. He was an amusing host then; funny, well-informed, voluble, not nearly the sanctimonious blowhard, fabricating tool of the radical establishment right that he’s become. Rush attracted so many listeners to his noon to 3. p.m. show …

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Kunstler on Tom and His Green World

by Keith Schneider0

Jim Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and wielder of one of the sharper editorial knives in the country, takes slices out of Tom Friedman’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article on the global green movement in an essay that published on his site at kunstler.com and picked up by Alternet.org.  The money passage: “Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart’s mendacious campaign to “green” up its operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its …

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Tom and His Green World

by Keith Schneider3

Tom Friedman, the New York Times’ great foreign affairs columnist and a former colleague of mine wrote this in a must read Sunday Magazine article yesterday: “After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of Communism and the “red menace” with massive spending on an interstate highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway …

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More Big Boys Weigh In On Climate Change

by Keith Schneider0

   It was only a matter of time before global warming would become an organizing principle in the United States. Even for the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. It’s all come in a rush. This week, in a 5-4 decision, the High Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority and duty to regulate climate change gases produced by automobiles. The suit, brought in June 2003 by Massachusetts and 12 other states, asked the nine justices …

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Step It Up On Climate Change

by Keith Schneider1

Monica Evans, who co-founded and oversees the regional chapter of the Sierra Club in northwest Michigan, reminded us this week of the Step it Up rally to accelerate action on global climate change. She and her colleagues are hosting a regional event in downtown Traverse City on the afternoon of April 14, starting at 1:30 in the Chase Bank Courtyard across from Horizon Books downtown. There’s a parade and a potluck dinner afterward. The Traverse City rally is part …

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Why Give Barack a Pass on Energy?

by Keith Schneider2

It’s understandable that many Democrats are enthused about Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He’s young, hip, smart, and charismatic. He’s an African American in a race that also features a woman and a Hispanic man. And he talks a good line about energy, the environment, the economy, national security and global climate change that intelligent progressives have accepted uncritically, including those at ThinkProgress.com. But from this vantage his candidacy feels like it’s wrapped too …

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