Articles by Paul
Call China’s climate bluff
While American climate advocates are still taking victory laps over the historic clean energy bill passed by Congress in August, the international climate challenge remains dire as diplomats gather in Egypt next week at the…
US can improve energy security and climate together
Election seasons always feature exaggerated divisions, with candidates drawing bright lines between themselves and opponents. But lasting problems come when discourse devolves into false choices between important shared goals…
Democrats’ Midterm Message Should Be Working-Class Opportunity
Conventional wisdom in cynical Washington has it, and recent history does suggest, that the easiest way for a Democratic president to be reelected is to run against a radical Republican Party who has just taken over Congress…
GOP killed permitting reform — giving Democrats a new campaign issue
Over the last two years, Congress has passed a series of landmark bills that together fund more than $500 billion in clean energy investment, by far the largest ever enacted. More importantly, generous tax incentives can spur…
Why Democrats Must Support Biden in 2024
Despite good news for Joe Biden lately, many Democrats continue to be deeply worried about his chances of reelection. These concerns are understandable given that Biden, already the oldest president in history, will be…
Streamline power line permitting to achieve IRA climate goals
One of the most important goals of the clean energy and climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden is the decarbonization of the electricity system. The core of this effort is…
A look at the policies in the Democrats’ historic climate bill
The Inflation Reduction Act is the largest investment in climate policy in U.S. history, including more than $300 billion to address global warming. It also sets a goal of reducing carbon emissions by…
Climate Change: Congress Needs to Act Now
Federal regulations have been a crucial part of U.S. efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions over the last 30 years. But such regulations are increasingly subject to reversal by Republican presidents…
Democrats: Don’t just declare a climate emergency — make clean energy a winning campaign issue
The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to walk away from more than a year of negotiations over a landmark clean energy legislation is a bitter pill for President Biden and other Democrats who made passing effective…
As UK conservatives dump Johnson, most in GOP still embrace Trump’s far graver threat
Winston Churchill, the figure embattled UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims as his role model, once defined a politician as someone who “is asked to stand, wants to sit, and is expected to lie.” Yet in the end, Johnson’s…
Democrats in Congress, not courts or GOP, must address climate — a good bill is waiting
The Supreme Court decision this week to restrict federal regulatory authority over carbon dioxide emissions from power plants should provide Democrats in Congress the last impetus they need to finally act on comprehensive climate change legislation. And…
Democrats must limit oil shocks along with climate risks
Energy issues are defining U.S. consumer, economic and security challenges more profoundly than any time since the oil embargoes of the 1970s. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has placed enormous pressure on global oil and…
Letter: War is chance for US to drive green energy policies
Derek Brower’s Big Read (April 14) correctly details US efforts to increase near-term oil and natural gas supplies to address shortages resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But history shows that high prices and security…
War means Biden needs a more muscular energy plan
As he travels to Europe this week, President Biden seems to face nearly insurmountable new energy challenges. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spiked global oil prices, and constricted Europe’s natural gas supplies…
Manchin’s energy and deficit-reduction bill can fight inflation — and Russia
President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last week highlighted two of the greatest foreign and domestic challenges facing the United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has undermined decades of peace in…
Clean energy bill can curb long-term inflation
U.S. inflation hit a 40-year high in January, with prices rising 7 percent over the last year, generating deep concerns across government, industry and financial markets…
To boost economy and midterm outlook, Democrats must pass clean energy bill
Congressional Democrats are getting restless, and who can blame them. Despite a major infrastructure legislation becoming law last November, the Biden administration’s economic agenda…
One year later, Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ still dominates GOP
On this first anniversary of the Donald Trump-inspired insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last Jan. 6 during which five people died, we find the Republican Party speeding toward a new identity as the “ReTrumplican Party.”…
EU must reduce reliance on Russian gas supplies
Megan Greene’s op-ed (Opinion, December 16) is right that near-term US sanctions against Russia have very limited effectiveness. This is precisely why the EU must pursue longer-term strategies to reduce Russian sway, including cutting the EU’s costly reliance on Russian natural gas…
Can America prevent a global warming cold war?
At the 11th hour of climate negotiations in Scotland last week, the U.S. and China released a “Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s” outlining increased cooperation on a wide range of climate and clean energy topics…
Kings and Popes Attending COP28 Is Good — But Climate Crisis Requires Powerful Grassroots Movements
It’s important that older figures of religious and cultural influence like Pope Francis and the UK’s King Charles will be attending the United Nations COP28 climate change negotiations in Dubai beginning this week. However, their attendance…
Biden Must Confront China’s Xi on Looming Climate Disaster
As Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping prepare to meet in San Francisco today, extreme weather events caused by rising temperatures are increasingly wreaking havoc at home and around the world, with new studies indicating that…
How Major League Baseball undermined the regular season and the winningest teams, including the Orioles
The trait that separates major league baseball from every other game on earth is the sheer length of its regular season. At 162 games, the baseball season is twice as long as basketball and hockey, and 10 times that of pro football…
Hamas-Israel War Must Not Prevent Progress at COP 28 Climate Talks
The next United Nations climate change conference, COP28, is scheduled to begin at the end of November in Dubai. Beyond the challenges of getting the world to agree on difficult climate issues, progress…
Biden, Not Trump, Is Right on the Autoworkers’ Strike and Electric Vehicles
Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party, seemingly devoid of original policy ideas themselves, have tried to make Joe Biden’s advocacy of incentives for U.S. production of electric vehicles (EVs) a campaign issue in…
IN BOTH U.S. AND UK, OVERTAXING VOTERS IS BAD CLIMATE POLITICS
No political comparison is as discordant to British ears as one suggesting commonality with the American scene, particularly with Donald Trump still at large. Nonetheless, recent UK contretemps over energy taxes and climate…
Gas Is a Better Option Than Coal on Our Path to Draw Down Emissions
As the climate crisis worsens, the debate over emissions from natural gas is heating up, too. Unfortunately, both gas opponents and gas supporters have been cherry-picking the data, especially regarding the lifecycle emissions of…
Energy permitting is broken: New analytics can fix it
The energy permitting reforms included in the recent bipartisan budget agreement represented modest progress — but they didn’t fix the problem. The main challenge, and the huge economic opportunity, is the…
Sleepwalking Toward Climate Catastrophe
The last few weeks have brought unprecedented high temperatures in the U.S. and globally, including the four hottest days in a row worldwide ever in recorded history…
A Trade-Based Climate Policy Can Cut Emissions Globally
The recent reopening of diplomatic dialogue by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese leaders highlighted the enormous importance of climate change action by the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters. But it did not yield…
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