Guest Blog

-- By 1Sky board member and Climate Solutions Policy Director KC Golden.

Not just 60. 350.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has a well-earned reputation as a sharp, level-headed, practical leader. Most people wouldn’t describe him as a visionary.

– By Christopher Gianino, 1Sky North Carolina organizer.

This past week, I had the great privilege of traveling through eastern North Carolina with Majora Carter on a series of workshops titled “Your Place in the New Economy.” This was put on by the Elizabeth City State University Center for Green Research and Evaluation, which is partnering with the Majora Carter Group to craft a plan for developing a green economy in Eastern NC. The three workshops were held in Elizabeth City, Tarboro and Henderson, NC and were an opportunity to bring a message of economic recovery through green jobs to the people who need it most.

-- By William Becker, Executive Director at the Presidential Climate Action Project.

With the announcement that a delegation from the Congressional Republican Flat Earth Caucus will show up to embarrass President Obama in Copenhagen next week, we hope the White House finally decides to step up on climate change.

-- By 1Sky board member and Climate Solutions Policy Director KC Golden.

A specter hangs over the U.S. negotiators at the UN Climate Summit: what I’ll call the Kyoto Syndrome. Conventional wisdom holds that the Clinton Administration, and Al Gore in particular, blew it by agreeing to the Kyoto Accords without building the foundation for the Senate to ratify it, which it never did. (See, e.g., “How to Prevent Climate Change Summit from Failure”)

By Aimée Christensen, CEO of the Global Observatory.

A few days ago, a key group of ten senators sent a letter to President Obama presenting their advice to him as he prepares to travel to Copenhagen. Their advice is a very different message than the one note negative message of warning that the Clinton Gore Administration received from the Senate (95-0) prior to Kyoto, headlined by: don’t sign something that doesn’t include developing country commitments with the same compliance timeframe as developed countries.

1Sky board member and Climate Solutions Policy Director KC Golden offers this pre-Copenhagen perspective as he writes en route to the U.N. Climate talks. Thanks to our friends at Climate Solutions for allowing us to publish this guest blog.
--Gillian

Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

I didn't even notice my heart pounding until after turning the corner from W 44th street onto Broadway. Displayed on four giant screens -- the hallmark of Times Square -- were the very photos we had just been sorting through and tagging in a dingy, overcrowded campaign office downtown not even an hour earlier. And now they were flashing before thousands of people in Times Square, while Jay-Z's new Empire State of Mind blanketed us in what seemed like a real-life music video.

Guest blog by Victoria Bembibre, New Media / Communications Coordinator at Global Observatory.

Dealing with climate change is not just an environmental matter, but also an economical issue. In order to stop or reduce global warming we need to think – governments and businesses must – about investment in development of new technologies and renewable energies, international trade and competitiveness, jobs, growth, new industries, etc. And in times of world economic crisis and key climate change challenges, both these issues need to be addressed at a global level.

Recent testimony by CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf has many environmental groups running for cover, for it claimed that climate legislation could slow economic growth. If we take a deep breath, however, and examine his claims in context, we can see that his comments are not really bad news after all.

Guest post by 1Sky Policy Intern Ben Wessel. Read the full post at The Energy Collective.

Coal and oil companies, manufacturers, and their allies at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have spent many millions of dollars to oppose climate legislation in Congress. The Chamber – which has lost crucial members, including several big utility companies, over its opposition to mandatory climate regulation — spent $26 million on lobbying Congress in the first half of 2009, double the total of second-biggest lobbying firm ExxonMobil. (You can monitor lobbyist spending at OpenSecrets.org.) The opponents peddle bogus economic analyses and misinform the public into thinking that Congress wants to bankrupt the American family. That's why it’s time for clean energy advocates to recruit some unlikely allies in the fight to deal with the climate crisis – small businesses.