Climate change requires us to rethink and transform the ways we produce and consume energy and the way we transport goods and people. But draft legislation being considered by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (S.1733) fails to hold polluters accountable and falls short of empowering locally controlled sustainable energy.
There is no question that Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) understand the threat posed by climate change and are passionate about and committed to addressing the problem. They are environmental champions. But the draft bill contains compromises, flaws, loopholes and giveaways that defeat its purpose.
The bill is too similar to the flawed legislation passed in June by the House of Representatives that prioritizes nuclear power and coal over solar and wind power, and puts corporate utilities before community-owned power. Science tells us that we must act now to lower our emissions of greenhouse gases, but this legislation locks us in to our coal and oil addictions and relies on a dubious
Back in the day when I was a young newspaper reporter, we never heard of your Internets and could only dream about the Googles. When we wanted campaign information, we spent days in some dank backroom at the supervisor of elections office, buried under a mountain of documents. And making copies at 10 cents a page added up fast. I can’t imagine what life would have been like if we had access to the online data available at some of the Web sites Katie Donnelly spotlights in her post “
