Author Archives: Eric Cesnik

“Cap-and-Trade Is Beautiful” Becomes “Cap Carbon Now”

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For better or worse, it’s not just what we say, it’s how we say it.  I have changed this website’s name from “Cap-and-Trade Is Beautiful” to “Cap Carbon Now” for several reasons.   First, “Cap Carbon Now” offers the reader a call to action as opposed to, well, an observation.  Second, it emphasizes the most important […]

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What’s So Great About Bipartisanship?

This entry was posted in Bipartisanship, Conservatives, Pure Cap-and-Dividend on by .

What’s so great about bipartisanship?  As a thing unto itself, perhaps nothing.  We hardly need agreement for agreement’s sake.  Though the Founding Fathers may not have envisioned the two-party system we have today, our political system has long accommodated rival ideas – even thrived on them.  (The Civil War being an exception to prove the […]

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10th Anniversary of Whitman’s Departure from EPA, Anti-Environmentalist Takeover of GOP

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Today marks the tenth anniversary of Christine Todd Whitman’s last day as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  The anniversary is especially poignant coming just two days after President Obama announced aggressive executive branch action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.  After all, President Obama is fulfilling a campaign pledge – a campaign […]

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Keystone, Activism, and Pure Cap-and-Dividend

This entry was posted in Keystone, Obama, Pure Cap-and-Dividend on by .

Environmental activists have made stopping the expansion of TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline a top priority.  Keystone XL, the expansion project, would transport Canadian tar sands oil to markets in the United States and beyond.  (A proposed southern addition to the pipeline would carry oil to the Gulf of Mexico, facilitating further transport by oil tanker.)  The […]

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With Bachmann Out, Is Science Back In? (Part I)

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Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announced last week that she will not run for reelection in 2014.  Her departure is good news for anyone who believes policymakers should embrace science.  Consider the comments Bachmann made about climate change on the House floor in 2009: “We’re told the crux of this problem is human activity. It’s human […]

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Environmental Faceoff: The Obama Campaign v. Obama?

This entry was posted in Conservatives, Keystone, Obama on by .

With no candidate to reelect, Obama for America has morphed into Organizing for Action, an issues advocacy group.  OFA will, to quote its website, “support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national agenda Americans voted for on Election Day 2012.” There’s just one problem: What if President Obama backs away from the very agenda […]

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A Big Picture View of Vehicle Emissions

This entry was posted in Fuel Efficiency, Gas Tax, Transportation on by .

The National Research Council has released a new report assessing the prospects for massive reductions in GHG emissions from light duty vehicles (e.g., cars, SUVs, pickup trucks). It’s a great read if you are interested in the future development of a variety of vehicle technologies. The report explores potential efficiency gains and emissions reductions that […]

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A Free Pass for Climate Change Skeptics?

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Scientific evidence of global climate change continues to mount, a rising sea of data.  Last week, scientists released new estimates of global temperatures over the last 11,300 years, a time period covering most of the current geological epoch, the Holocene.  (We live in the Holocene Epoch of the Quarternary Period of the Cenozoic Era of […]

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Should We Hike the Gasoline Tax?

This entry was posted in Fuel Efficiency, Gas Tax, Pure Cap-and-Dividend and tagged on by .

Researchers at MIT have released a new report showing that increasing fuel efficiency standards in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions costs our economy six to fourteen times more than would increasing the gasoline tax. Increasing fuel efficiency standards for new cars, they point out, does nothing to reduce emissions from the existing fleet of older vehicles on the road. A higher fuel tax, by comparison, would encourage all drivers to use less fuel by driving less and aiming for the best mileage possible. A higher gas tax is a tough sell politically because the price hike is highly visible to consumers. In contrast, consumers probably won’t notice the higher cost they pay for a more fuel efficient car – especially because the portion of vehicle cost attributable to efficiency technologies will be impossible to calculate.

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