Tag: Global Warming

The House Energy and Commerce Committee was the site of a climate change Colorado showdown Tuesday. Considering a bill that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating green-house gas emissions, the committee's majority Republicans voted in lockstep against broad consensus among the world's scientists that climate change exists. Colorado Democratic member of the committee Rep. Diana DeGette introduced an amendment that asserted that greenhouse gases generated by human activity were the "root cause" of global warming. Colorado Republican Rep. Cory Gardner joined with the other thirty Republicans in voting down DeGette's amendment and two other similar amendments put forward by Democrats.

While Al Gore’s passion for the environment helped him ascend to the highest political offices – and earned him a Nobel prize and an Oscar — he told a symposium audience in Aspen Friday night that the Colorado forests he learned to love on a road trip 40 years ago have plunged into despair no thanks to rising temperatures, poor political will and tiny insects.

The first of several promised clashes over U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulatory powers came this week at a hearing over a Republican bill that would block the agency from regulating greenhouse gases.

In the end, after some false starts and rhetorical meandering, the question was simple: Do you believe that carbon dioxide is a green house gas and contributes to climate change and therefore poses a serious health threat to humans? Al Gore and an overwhelming majority of climate scientists the world over answer a straightforward yes to that question. Most of the Republicans in Congress, however, answer no. Oil and gas climate "researchers" also answer no. Dr. Chris Urbina, the new Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment didn't seem sure how to answer the question, or at least didn't know how to answer state Republican senators asking him the question at his confirmation hearing Thursday.

The Obama years have so far been a predictable boom-time for the army of anti-regulation lobbyists paid by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that the Chamber spent $276 million over the past two years lobbying against, among other things, health care reform, environmental protections and Wall Street regulations. The Chamber is the number-one spender on lobbying this year as in years past, but it is outdoing itself, setting records in its own outrageous largess. In just the last three months of 2010, the Chamber spent $50.9 million on lobbying at the federal, state and grassroots levels. That's a step down from last year, when in the last financial quarter as health and financial industry reform were being discussed in DC, the Chamber spent $79 million from October through December to defeat or water-down Democratic legislation.

One of the standout moments in the last weeks of the heated U.S. Senate race in Colorado pitting Republican Ken Buck against Democrat Michael...

Members of Colorado's world-renowned climate science research community blasted U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck at a conference Friday for touting his skepticism about global...

"On behalf of the medical community, I denounce Ken Buck's comments. We feel he should retract his statements. Science does not support his view.......

BOULDER -- Champion snowboarder and Aspen native Gretchen Bleiler told students at CU Monday that she has been "chasing snow" for a decade and...

Despite the Gulf oil spill, a massive pipeline break in Michigan and broad concerns about global warming, ambitious climate-change and energy legislation is likely dead for the year. That poses a conundrum, going forward, for environmentalists: How to convince lawmakers of the need for legislation to sever the country’s decades-long ties to oil and to reform energy policy more generally?