Weekly Mulch: Can Clean Energy Curb Climate Change? Probably Not.

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
During the State of the Union address earlier this week, President Barack Obama spoke at length about clean energy, with nary a mention of climate change. This is the new environment in which America’s energy policy is being made.
Just two years ago, Democrats were rallying to combat climate change, one [...]

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Weekly Mulch: For Cancun Climate Summit, Activists Consider the Long View

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
A year ago, it seemed possible—likely, even—that President Barack Obama would sweep into the international negotiations on climate change at Copenhagen and make serious progress on the tangle of issues at stake. The reality was quite different. This year, the expectations for the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun are [...]

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Weekly Mulch: Climate Deniers Set to Freeze Progress in Congress

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
A chill is coming to Washington. A wave of climate change deniers were elected to office this week, and come January, we can expect a freeze in all reasonable and productive discussion about the fate of the planet.
Last year, the political discussion about climate change and carbon regulation was complicated [...]

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Weekly Mulch: How Reid’s Energy Bill Undermines Senate Climate Efforts

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) introduced a limited energy bill that responds to the oil spill and promotes energy efficiency. Reid’s action is a signal that the Senate will not pass climate legislation before November, although Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said that a climate bill could come up [...]

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Weekly Mulch: Politics, Power, and the Environment Beyond BP

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Washington has a blind spot when it comes to the environment. BP and the oil spill brought the government’s failures into the spotlight, but the same problems crop up across industries: Corporations pollute water, blast through mountains, and pour carbon into the atmosphere with insufficient oversight. But no one—Congress, the [...]

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Weekly Mulch: Oil rig sinks, as does Senate climate bill

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Two disasters flared up this week, one environmental, the other political. Off the coast of Louisiana, oil from a sunken rig is leaking as much as five times faster than scientists originally judged, and the spill reportedly reached land last night. And in Washington, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) jumped from [...]

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Weekly Mulch: Clock Ticking for Climate Change Legislation

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Seven months out from the midterms, electoral anxieties are hampering potential climate change legislation. Election years are a time to pass easy, politically popular policies, and climate change legislation does not fit that bill. For the Senate’s climate change legislation to have a chance, Congress has to sweep through the [...]

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The Green Job Market

It’s undeniable; we as a country have fallen on some hard times. Unemployment has become startlingly common within the last couple of years. Businesses, employees and jobseekers alike are struggling to be more efficient and more competitive within their fields and within the market as a whole. I believe that a lot of (political) [...]

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Weekly Mulch: Green products, green energy

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Ed. note: This week’s Mulch is pint-sized and will run on Monday rather than Friday. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week.
Some people live off the grid, eat local food, and have an energy footprint so minuscule that even the canniest hunter couldn’t track them down. But the [...]

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Weekly Mulch: Nuclear Plants will go up in Georgia

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
If you were to look out to the horizon of the clean energy field right now, you would see the hazy outlines of nuclear reactors.  President Barack Obama announced this week that two new nuclear plants will go up in Georgia, built on the promise that the federal government will [...]

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