Articles by The Guardian

Reprint courtesy The Guardian. Grist is a member of the Guardian Environment Network.

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By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian’s U.S. environment correspondent

What is the state of play for climate change legislation in America?

Barack Obama put his reputation on the line at Copenhagen by saying America would act on climate change. Now it’s up to Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill last June which would set a price on carbon, and would put progressively tighter limits on greenhouse gas emissions with a 17 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050.

Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, passed a nearly identical version of the bill out of the Senate environment committee last November. But action in the Senate has stalled. Boxer stared down a Republican boycott to get a bill through her committee. But Democrats are deeply reluctant to throw themselves into another full-on confrontation with Republicans so soon after the bruising battle over health care reform.

What happens next?

U.S. environmental organizations say there is still a good chance the Senate will move ahead on a climate change bill this year. A triumvirate of Senators — Democrat John Kerry, Republican Lindsey Graham,... Read more

The Guardian Politics

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‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for […]

The Guardian Climate & Energy
Twenty ideas that could save the world

Ask Chris Rapley, the ebullient physicist and director of the Science Museum in London, why he seems more sanguine about our prospects of taming climate change than many of his peers, and he’ll tell you about the day he first toured the museum’s library and archives. Surrounded by the thousands of designs and patent applications […]

The Guardian Climate & Energy
90 months and counting

This piece was written for The Guardian by Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation in Britain. Ten months have passed since pointing out that we have, at best, 100 left before a new, far more dangerous phase of global warming begins. The “chatter” of concern is getting louder. But at the same […]

The Guardian Climate & Energy
Be part of the green solution (and the Manchester Report)

The following post was written by The Guardian’s Dunan Clark The climate change debate often seems to focus more on the problems than on the solutions. It’s not hard to understand why: almost every week brings another scientific report predicting impacts sooner and more devastating than we were previously expecting. With so many gloomy headlines, […]

The Guardian Climate & Energy