December 22, 2025

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

by Keith Schneider1

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 …

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

by Keith Schneider1

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 …

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While Oil Gushes Into Gulf, A Flurry of Ideas This Week in Washington

by Keith Schneider1

The foreboding of the monstrous Gulf oil spill was accompanied this week by the opportune deeds of Washington lawmakers, policy makers, and activists hard at work to fashion a political response, including the Senate introduction of a comprehensive climate and energy bill. The new proposal was generally applauded for its expansive scope by business groups, labor, and environmental organizations, which also agreed that it needed some work. But first came the White House, which started …

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Hour of Choosing Arrives: American Power Act Introduced

by Keith Schneider1

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 …

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A Turning Point in Attack on Climate Science

by Keith Schneider0

On May 5, in an unusually aggressive response to what they saw as an academic witch hunt, the University of Virginia Faculty Senate condemned state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demand to turn over six years of documents related to the work of Michael Mann, a former UVa climate scientist. Two days later, members of the National Academy of Sciences published a letter in the journal Science that focused on the “political assaults” directed at climate …

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Oil Devotion Could Mean Climate No Motion

by Keith Schneider1

The one-foot waves today in the Gulf of Mexico were described as “tranquil” as BP started to lower a 70-ton case through 5,000 feet of water to contain the source of an oil leak that threatens the shorelines of four states. Guiding the steel cover over the well shaft in pitch-black waters at crushing depths, said engineers, is like floating a toy parachute off the Empire State Building and landing on a paperclip in the …

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Curt Guyette’s Good Piece on Grassroots Resistance to Clean Energy

by Keith Schneider2

Curt Guyette, a first-rate senior editor at MetroTimes, Detroit’s very good weekly newspaper, just posted one of the most even-handed pieces on the grassroots resistance to clean energy projects that I’ve seen. He interviewed me earlier this week and jotted down this quote: “The environmental community on a national level is pushing like hell for more clean energy,” Schneider says. “I know that because I work in Washington and I see it happening. But what …

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Bubbling and Crude: Gulf Coast Spill Reflects Devotion to Wealth, Power, and Oil

by Keith Schneider2

On March 17, two weeks to the day before President Barack Obama laid out a new plan to expand offshore oil exploration in the United States, a government auction of federally controlled oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico was held at the New Orleans Superdome. It took just a few hours for 77 energy companies to pledge $1.3 billion to the U.S. Treasury to look for oil and natural gas across a …

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As Gulf Slick Spreads Environmental Movement Takes Unexpected Heat

by Keith Schneider

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate economist,  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 …

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Go Blue! “Be Nice” While You “Shape Destiny,” Obama Counsels at University of Michigan Commencement

by Keith Schneider1

Barack Obama addressed 90,000 people Saturday at the Big House, the University of Michigan’s football stadium, where he was greeted warmly by the largest crowd to hear the president since the inauguration. Among the nearly 10,000 graduates was my daughter Kayla. The university is a place of innovation, stability, and optimism in a state that has endured more negative consequences of the recession, and the underlying transitional factors that caused it, than any other. The …

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