Hot times yield lukewarm climate debate in D.C.

But what about a serious dialogue on the topic on Capitol Hill? “There isn’t one,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.

Still, Kerry said, the real-world impact of the warming Earth means the climate’s time in the political spotlight is coming.

“It’s a matter of timing but it’s not going away,” Kerry told POLITICO. “It’s getting bigger, it’s getting more serious. And it will be very much front and center I think over the next months.”
...
Boxer said she had waited to hold Wednesday’s update on climate science until the conclusion of the two-year effort that led to passage of this year’s highway bill. But she said the storms and heat played a part in her decision to call the hearing.

A Look at Electric Cars from Chevy and Tesla — A blog on Environmental Happenings by Dean Bill Chameides

Debuting at the turn of the 20th century and rivaling gas- and steam-powered engines, the electric car fizzled out by the 1920s, elbowed out by advances in the internal combustion engine (namely electric starters) and newly discovered oil in Texas. It had a brief resurgence in the mid-1990s with GM’s EV1

India blackout, on second day, leaves 600 million without power - The Washington Post

The blackout, the largest in global history by the number of people affected, dramatically underlined the concerns industry leaders have raised for years – that the nation’s horribly inefficient power sector is dragging on the economy and could undermine its longer-term ambitions...“India’s basic energy shortage is compounded by the policy of selling electricity to consumers at politically correct prices,” the Hindustan Times wrote in an editorial. “The government-owned distribution monopolies in the states have all but lost their ability to buy power because their political bosses force them to sell it cheap, sometimes free, to voters.”