The New Yorker just published (16 September issue) an excellent article "The President and the Pipeline" on Tom Steyer and the campaign to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, advocates for the Canadian government's position ("industry officials") were able to slip in a statement that was...

My remarks when receiving the Ridenhour Courage Award were written in Union Station on my way to the event. But my concluding comment -- that we are near a point when the American people should contemplate a centrist third party -- was not an idle spur-of-the-moment reflection.

I...

Today 36 Norwegian organizations sent an open letter to Prime Minister Stoltenberg expressing opposition to development of Canadian tar sands by Statoil (the Norwegian state is majority shareholder of Statoil). Signatories include not only environmental organizations, but a broad public spectrum, including, appropriately, many youth organizations. It is encouraging...

Co-written by Pushker Kharecha and Makiko Sato

Humanity's Faustian climate bargain is well known. Humans have been pumping both greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) and aerosols (fine particles) into the atmosphere for more than a century. The CO2 accumulates steadily, staying in the climate system for millennia, with a continuously increasing...

We stand at a fork in the road. Conventional oil and gas supplies are limited. We can move down the path of dirtier more carbon-intensive unconventional fossil-fuels, digging up the dirtiest tar sands and tar shales, hydrofracking for gas, continued mountain-top removal and mechanized destructive long-wall coal mining. Or we...

The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised.

The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this...

President Obama, finally, took a get-involved get-tough approach to negotiations on health care legislation and the arms control treaty with Russia -- with success. Could this be the turn-around for what might still be a great presidency?

The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be...

Jim Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but he writes on this policy-related topic as a private citizen.

It didn't take long for the counterfeit climate bill known as Waxman-Markey to push back against President Obama's agenda. As the president was arriving in Italy...

The issue of mountaintop removal is so important that I and others concerned about this problem will engage in an act of civil disobedience on Tuesday, June 23rd at a mountaintop removal site in Coal River Valley, West Virginia...We must make clear to Congress, to the EPA, and to the...

Today I testified to Congress about global warming, 20 years after my June 23, 1988 testimony, which alerted the public that global warming was underway. There are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming...