The senator from Arizona (click here) brought climate science into Capitol Hill hearings and cap-and-trade legislation to a vote, but then moderate Republican politics changed.
Among the many battles Sen. John McCain waged in his storied career, it is easy to overlook his fight for U.S. action on climate change.
He wrote legislation that failed. He built a bipartisan coalition that crumbled. And when Congress came closest to passing a bill that embraced his central idea—a market-based cap-and-trade system—McCain turned his back.
And yet, McCain's nearly decade-long drive on global warming had an impact that reverberates in today's efforts to revive the U.S. role in the climate fight. In the Senate chamber and on the campaign trail, the Arizona Republican did more than any other U.S. politician has done before or since to advance the conservative argument for climate action.
Today's efforts to recruit GOP members into the climate movement—appeals to conservative and religious values, the framing of climate change as a national security threat, efforts to stress market-based solutions and the role business leaders can play—all owe a debt to McCain....
October 8, 2018
By Isobel Thompson
I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris (click here) ,” Donald Trump crowed during his announcement, more than a year ago, that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord—a deal that, to his mind, did not “serve America’s interests.” Of course, according to a new report compiled by nearly 100 leading scientists, the Northeastern United States and north-central France will soon face the same fate regardless. According to the report, issued by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), the widely shared goal of keeping a global rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius is firmly off-track, with current levels of emissions set to hike temperatures up to 3 degrees Celsius by 2040. Even if temperatures rose by 2 degrees Celsius—a figure previously deemed acceptable—the results would be dystopian, exacerbating the risk of drought, floods, poverty, and extreme heat. “It’s a line in the sand, and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the working group on impacts. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community, and I hope it mobilizes people and dents the mood of complacency.”...
Those are real jobs in a real factory that produces cars that do not pollute.
By Johnna Crider
We haven’t seen (click here) a new picture of the Tesla Gigafactory 1 in Nevada in about two months and during that time, they have been busy preparing for the production of Model 3 battery packs and drive units.
The entire world gives $400 billion in subsidies to oil companies. (click here) An article by The Atlantic asks this question: Is that bad? The answer, to me, is obvious — yes.
The article, noting that we spend $400 billion on oil subsidies globally, indicates that taxpayers want their governments to stop subsidizing this rich, over-mature industry, yet politicians keep the money funneling toward them. It is estimated that Tesla Gigafactory 4 in Germany will cost approximately $4.4 billion. That means you could build ~91 gigafactories for the cost of one year of global oil subsidies....
