Sun cools? How daft! « Calder's Updates

You may doubt it, yet the doughty Richard Black of the BBC, who has made a career of rubbishing the solar contribution to climate change, uses the flimsy Haigh report to try to put the knife in once again: “The view that the Sun may be driving modern-day climate change has clouded policy discussions.”

What climate activists could learn from the anti-slavery movement | Mark Hertsgaard - Grist

Consider the striking parallels between the eighteenth-century campaign to end slavery in the British Empire and today's climate fight: just as the slave trade was central to Britain's prosperity, so the fossil fuel industry and its allies are the most powerful sector of the modern global economy. And just as the victims of slavery were distant unknowns to most Englishmen and -women, so the victims of climate change mostly live in strange, far-off lands (including the future) and thus have no vote.

Eric Felten: It's Better for Whose Environment? - WSJ.com

Ms. Sheppard may be a bit overwrought, but she has one thing right: You can add the Sun Chip bags to the pile of eco-virtuous products that consumers found less desirable than the traditional products they replaced. Compact fluorescent bulbs are so unloved and so widely unadopted that Congress had to resort to conventional-bulb prohibition, with incandescent bulbs getting Volsteaded come 2014. Low-flush toilets and low-flow shower heads failed to lure consumers from their water-guzzling predecessors, so the new devices were propped up by federal regulations—though resourceful end-users removed the flow-limiting gaskets to make their showers less stingy. Congress, it should be noted, has yet to mandate deafening snack-food packaging.

Why do today's environmentally conscious alternatives so often seem such sad substitutes?

Strassel: The Cap-and-Trade Crackup - WSJ.com

Mr. Boucher appears to still lead, but with a GOP wave building, no Democrat with an anti-job vote against his own constituents is safe. Virginia's ninth has already delivered one of the lessons of 2010: Cap-and-trade policy is terrible. Cap-and-trade politics is deadly.