Obama administration announces massive coal mining expansion | Grist

I hope this is a moment of opportunity for the environmental movement, and a broader progressive movement that has been increasingly spurned by a president moving ever rightward. Freeing ourselves from our own unrequited love affair with Obama can liberate us to adopt a strategy that might actually protect the environment and turn Obama's shift around: at a minimum, we need to join Sen. Bernie Sanders' (D-Vt.) search for a progressive pro-environment primary challenger to Obama. The real prospect of such a challenger is the one thing that could alter Obama's triangulating political calculus.

But we also need to consider our broader approach to accountability. Really -- if Obama's coal and oil blitz doesn't spur large protests at the White House, the environmental movement might as well pack its bags, rub on some patchouli, and head to the mountains (at least until the bulldozers come). At the end of the day, if we are to succeed, we will need to earn the respect of our friends and foes alike, and that starts with heeding hitting the ballot box and the streets.

The New Nostradamus of the North: Lord Stern, the Al Gore of academics, has not given up his climate crusade

I have often wondered why a charlatan like Lord Stern is so sought after as a lecturer at all kinds of gatherings. Having rewatched this and some other of his presentations, the following reasons come to my mind:

With his smooth, soft spoken delivery - although not in quite perfect Oxford English - Lord Stern projects the superior confidence of a British elite university don, who is used to be seated at the high table. Listen how he, without the smallest hesitation, gives his audience exact future ppm numbers and "facts" about coming 5 °C warming. He must himself know that much - as a matter of fact almost everything - of what he is telling his listeners are not facts - only some kind of worst case theoretical scenarious based on highly unreliable model studies.