This was the year climate change vanished from the political agenda – and then suddenly reappeared, after Hurricane Sandy shook the country. It was just a few years ago that President Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen to rescue faltering climate treaty talks amid bipartisan calls for global warming action. But in 2012, there wasn’t a…
Well, it’s taken 80 years, but the post–New Deal, post-military-industrial-complex mega-state has finally come up with a single good idea: the construction and deployment of a mobile, moon-sized, planet-killing death ray in outer space. Here is the language of the official petition to build a Death Star–style “space-superiority platform,” submitted to the White House under…
No American should be denied a taxpayer-funded job because of what he or she believes about religion. Yet that’s exactly what is happening today under the “faith-based” initiative. It’s wrong, and it time for it to stop. The idea of awarding tax aid to religious groups to run various secular programs for people in need…
With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year’s end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called…
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country. American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal, announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that…
A $45 million pot to fund innovative projects that aim to increase government transparency and accountability using web and mobile technology has been unveiled by the U.K., U.S. and Swedish governments. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative in early December to support Internet-based technologies that increase…
With media figureheads like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore representing the right and left, it’s no wonder conservatives and liberals seem worlds apart. But the two sides of the political spectrum are closer together than they believe, a new study reveals. Everyone, including political moderates, overestimates the gap between liberal and conservative morals, according to…
Countries are working towards a new global agreement on climate change that would, unlike the Kyoto protocol, require cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from both developed and developing countries, to be signed in 2015 and come into force from 2020. At Doha, they cleared away some of the obstacles to the proposed new treaty, including…
The annual United Nations climate change negotiations concluded in Doha after the customary all-night negotiating session and recriminations over who must bear the costs and burdens of a warming planet. Delegates from more than 190 nations agreed to extend the increasingly ineffective Kyoto Protocol a few years and to commit to more ambitious — but…
The annual exercise in futility and finger-pointing that is the United Nations Climate Change Conference will wrap up in Doha soon – or maybe not. “I can sit here all year,” the Qatari leader of the talks said, according to the BBC. “You decide when to leave.” As yet another Conference of the Parties comes…