Climate Progress: University Of Kentucky approves new $7 million industry-funded dorm named after “Coal”

October 28, 2009

You can’t make this stuff up, as this Think Progress repost makes clear.
A group led by Alliance Coal CEO Joseph Craft recently proposed donating $7 million to the University of Kentucky for a new dorm for the men’s basketball team. The catch, however, is that the dorm would have to be named after Craft’s true love: coal. The proposed change sparked intense protests from local environmentalists and students. One professor said that as universities become “models for new energy sources,” putting “coal” on a prominent building could “make it difficult to attract top students and faculty members to the university.”

Read the rest of the post at the source…

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Climate Progress: Memo to Baucus: Your state’s trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area

October 28, 2009

Sen. Max Baucus said Tuesday he has “serious reservations” about climate legislation unveiled by his Democratic colleagues, signaling trouble for a proposal that is stronger in certain respects than a bill passed by the House.

In an effort to inject drama and conflict into a hearing that lack both, the WSJ and other media outlets trumpeted the fact that Baucus said he thought Boxer’s proposed bill was too strong.

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Climate Progress: Harvard Business Review: SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability

October 28, 2009

 

The error-riddled book Superfreakonomics got the economics dead wrong, too, as Nobelist Krugman and others have noted.  Now Harvard Business Review weighs in on how they got the business side wrong.  I’m reposting an HBR piece by Andrew Winston, co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of the new book Green Recovery.

Read the rest of the post at the source…

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Climate Progress: Energy and Global Warming News for October 28: Solar industry takes on coal and oil lobby; White House continues to step up climate efforts

October 28, 2009

Solar Industry Takes on Coal and Oil Lobbies

A solar industry leader smacked down the oil and coal industries on Tuesday, calling for renewable energy proponents to open their wallets to level the playing field in Washington.

“The full promise of solar power is being restrained by the tyranny of policies that protect our competitors, subsidize wealthy polluters and disadvantage green entrepreneurs,” said Rhone Resch, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, according to prepared remarks for a speech he is to give at the opening of the Solar Power International conference.

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Climate Progress: Washington Post mocks Inhofe as “the last flat-earther”

October 28, 2009

It must be very lonely being the last flat-earther.
Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, committed climate-change denier, found himself in just such a position Tuesday morning as the Senate environment committee, on which he is the ranking Republican, took up legislation on global warming. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was in talks with Democrats over a compromise bill — the traitor! And as Inhofe listened, fellow Republicans on the committee — turncoats! — made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, Inhofe’s view that man-made global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
… Agitated, his utterances disjointed, Inhofe went on: “Now, I also was — was kind of — I don’t want any of the media to think just because I had to sit here and listen to our good friend Senator Kerry for 28 minutes, that I don’t have responses to everything he said.”Nobody doubted that Inhofe had a response. The doubt was whether the response would make any sense.

That’s Dana Milbank in his regular “Washington sketch” column writing about yesterday’s Senate climate hearing.  Milbank is being kind not to count his fellow WashPost colleagues George Will and Fred Hiatt in calling Inhofe (R-OIL) the last flat-earther (see “WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ” and “Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie“).

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About This Blog

This forum was created to provide a clearing house for all the reasonable and respectful commentary out there that's been drafted and submitted to online climate blogs, or to online climate-related articles, only to be deleted, or pulled from moderation, in contradiction to the blog or website's stated comment guidelines, or due to what the commenter believes are unreasonable and unfair restrictions for an open forum.

AIC respects any blogger's right to moderate the discussions on their forum however they see fit, but is troubled by the descrepancy between some forums' claims of openness and even-handedness versus the reality of their moderation practices.

For general discussion of questionable moderation practices on climate blogs, RC Rejects is probably a more appropriate forum for than AIC.

This forum was created with two primary goals:

Through the publication of rejected comments,

1) To provide a more open and diverse extension of ongoing discussions at climate blogs where people have had difficulties in having their comments published. While this forum requests that initial comments on a mirrored post are copies of comments that were rejected at the source, responses to and discussions arising from those rejected comments are encouraged. This forum is not intended as an echo chamber; people of all viewpoints on any issues are very welcome to join the discussions in a respectful manner.

2) To encourage those who may have given up on contributing (or attempting to contribute) to discussions at blogs that rarely or never publish their comments to begin again, in hopes that what comments do go through contribute to a better discussion on those forums.

Since this forum's creation, the initiative of Roger Pielke, Jr., on his own blog, has suggested a third goal which might supplant the need for the first two:

3) For climate-related blogs to create a "Rejected Comments" thread where people are free to post comments rejected from the main threads, in the interests of transparency.

It can be a real sting when one spends time drafting polite and relevant commentary only to have disappear into a black hole because it doesn't support a specific scientific or policy perspective.

By providing a fallback outlet for such speech, this forum hopes to provide a directly related space for those unheard voices, and to encourage more meaningful discussion between differing viewpoints.

Climate Progress's Comment Policy

Climate Progress's Comment Policy:

It's a little hard to track down an explicit and succinct comment policy for Climate Progress, as Dr. Joe Romm seems to have only stated it in comments under a blog post in response to people's periodic complaints.

If Dr. Romm or someone from CP posts an explicit policy on their site, or would like to email an explicit policy to AIC, future posts will use what they provide.  The following, located in comment #13 here, is the best I've been able to find so far:

"I don’t delete dissenting voices...
I delete long-debunked stuff, and off-topic ad hominem stuff, and it (not surprisingly) comes to very little, probably not 1 post in 100. It isn’t censoring because there is no right to post here unedited — read the TOU.
...I won’t waste time continuing to debunk that which has been be long debunked — since wasting my time and my readers’ time is a core strategy of many posters. BUT I can’t leave disinformation unchallenged, because some people come to these posts without having read any other posts. So you see the dilemma.
I can waste time responding over and over and over again to the same nonsense — and subject my readers to it. Or, with fair warning, which I’ve given many times, just delete the stuff.
I don’t moderate all the posts as many places do."