The United States will come under some serious heat this month, but the climate drama won’t be taking place at United Nations talks.

With more than a month to go before the Copenhagen climate talks, the press are practically tripping themselves to write off the talks as a failure. Now, I’m not here to blow sunshine and tell you that all’s going great here in Barcelona, and that we’re well on our way to a fair, ambitious, and binding…

The global grassroots climate movement is finally here, and huge.

Climate activists have been waiting two long decades to see what a global climate movement would look like. As of last Saturday, we know. And as movement mentor and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote in an email after watching photos of grassroots actions around the world projecting from the giant, iconic screens of Times Square, “it looked diverse and creative and beautiful.”

Diverse? There were events on every continent…

The United States and other industrialized countries have to face up to historical responsibility.

When it comes to climate change, the burden of historical responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the developed West. There’s no avoiding the fact that industrialized nations, which have grown economies, developed infrastructure, and generated great wealth by burning fossil fuels, have also affected countries throughout the developing world. The impacts of climate change aren’t some future threat—they are happening now, damaging…

How Obama can overcome incredulous reactions and truly earn his Nobel Peace Prize in Copenhagen.

They’re still scraping jaws off the floors of the U.N. center in Bangkok. For it was at the tail end of the last day of the two-week session of climate change talks, during which the United States stood tall and stubborn as the biggest obstacle to an international agreement to be achieved Copenhagen, that word of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize buzzed…

America can make or break the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen—depending on what happens in Washington.

I’m getting a lot of emails here in Bangkok—where I’m currently tracking the U.N. climate treaty negotiations for TckTckTck’s Adopt a Negotiator project—from folks back home wondering what they can do to help secure a deal. How can concerned citizens back on the home-front possibly impact the high-level diplomatic talks on the other side of the globe? The answer, it turns…

The Alliance for Climate Education teaches the reality of climate change to our nation’s children—with ease.

Not long ago, I wrote that “the kids are alright.” I was talking about the incredible force that the youth climate movement has become over the past couple of years, taking advantage of the web’s networking potential and bringing together like-minded thinkers and activists, often culminating in good old-fashioned, on-the-ground mobilization.

But the youth climate movement is still limited, in its size,…

How Glenn Beck and Fox News may have just unleashed progressives’ greatest hope.

The wingnuts won’t have Van Jones to kick around anymore. Victim of a month-long, flagrantly dishonest smear campaign orchestrated by Glenn Beck at Fox News, Jones resigned last Saturday—as you’ve surely heard—from his post as the White House’s special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation.

Thank you, Glenn Beck, for giving us Van Jones back.

Like many folks who’ve long admired Jones’s work, upon first…

Crucial stepping stones on the pathway to a climate pact.

There are plenty of folks who are calling December’s climate treaty summit in Copenhagen “the most important meeting in the history of the world.” You can include me in those ranks (though it’s actually called the 15th Conference of the Parties, or, more simply, COP15). In the now dwindling weeks leading up to these talks, the world will bear witness to a truly unprecedented run of…

The United States will come under some serious heat this month, but the climate drama won’t be taking place at United Nations talks.

With more than a month to go before the Copenhagen climate talks, the press are practically tripping themselves to write off the talks as a failure. Now, I’m not here to blow sunshine and tell you that all’s going great here in Barcelona, and that we’re well on our way to a fair, ambitious, and binding…

The global grassroots climate movement is finally here, and huge.

Climate activists have been waiting two long decades to see what a global climate movement would look like. As of last Saturday, we know. And as movement mentor and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote in an email after watching photos of grassroots actions around the world projecting from the giant, iconic screens of Times Square, “it looked diverse and creative and beautiful.”

Diverse? There were events on every continent…

The United States and other industrialized countries have to face up to historical responsibility.

When it comes to climate change, the burden of historical responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the developed West. There’s no avoiding the fact that industrialized nations, which have grown economies, developed infrastructure, and generated great wealth by burning fossil fuels, have also affected countries throughout the developing world. The impacts of climate change aren’t some future threat—they are happening now, damaging…

How Obama can overcome incredulous reactions and truly earn his Nobel Peace Prize in Copenhagen.

They’re still scraping jaws off the floors of the U.N. center in Bangkok. For it was at the tail end of the last day of the two-week session of climate change talks, during which the United States stood tall and stubborn as the biggest obstacle to an international agreement to be achieved Copenhagen, that word of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize buzzed…

America can make or break the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen—depending on what happens in Washington.

I’m getting a lot of emails here in Bangkok—where I’m currently tracking the U.N. climate treaty negotiations for TckTckTck’s Adopt a Negotiator project—from folks back home wondering what they can do to help secure a deal. How can concerned citizens back on the home-front possibly impact the high-level diplomatic talks on the other side of the globe? The answer, it turns…

The Alliance for Climate Education teaches the reality of climate change to our nation’s children—with ease.

Not long ago, I wrote that “the kids are alright.” I was talking about the incredible force that the youth climate movement has become over the past couple of years, taking advantage of the web’s networking potential and bringing together like-minded thinkers and activists, often culminating in good old-fashioned, on-the-ground mobilization.

But the youth climate movement is still limited, in its size,…

How Glenn Beck and Fox News may have just unleashed progressives’ greatest hope.

The wingnuts won’t have Van Jones to kick around anymore. Victim of a month-long, flagrantly dishonest smear campaign orchestrated by Glenn Beck at Fox News, Jones resigned last Saturday—as you’ve surely heard—from his post as the White House’s special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation.

Thank you, Glenn Beck, for giving us Van Jones back.

Like many folks who’ve long admired Jones’s work, upon first…

Crucial stepping stones on the pathway to a climate pact.

There are plenty of folks who are calling December’s climate treaty summit in Copenhagen “the most important meeting in the history of the world.” You can include me in those ranks (though it’s actually called the 15th Conference of the Parties, or, more simply, COP15). In the now dwindling weeks leading up to these talks, the world will bear witness to a truly unprecedented run of…

An energy- and money-saving solution that pretty much everyone can get behind: three-day weekends.

Workers of the world, unite in giving Utah a round of applause. The Beehive State has made Thursday the new Friday, and by proving the benefits of this condensed calendar, Utah has brought us all closer to the dream of a shortened workweek.

A year ago, Republican Governor Jon Hunstman announced the Working 4 Utah initiative, essentially putting 17,000 of the state’s 24,000 executive…

To save our planet we’ll have to make sacrifices—and they might include the sage grouse and the desert tortoise.

An old buddy of mine is a wind power developer out West. As he cruises around Colorado and Wyoming scouting the steppe for promising sites, he has run into an unlikely adversary—the sage grouse, a chicken-like bird who’s resident in the very same broad, sagebrush-spotted, wind-battered ridges that make wind developers drool. I’ve been getting a kick…