That was some speech in Denver last night.
Ok, so few of us will ever reach the heights of masters of their art like Bill Clinton, but lessons aplenty for how to communicate.
You can watch his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last night here.
Don’t bother reading it, you have to hear it.
And that’s the first thing to remember. A great letter should sound like someone is speaking directly to you. If it doesn’t read like you’d say it, tear it up and start again.
And look at the words. A beautiful combination of stirring rhetoric with down-to-earth, folksy, chatty language. He talks to you, not down to you.
So get rid of all that organisation-speak, that jargon and the carefully worded descriptions of your programmes. Talk about your work as...
Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Blog.
It’s not just about framing—“new energy jobs” are the best and only shot at bringing down the political impasse between America and the energy policy it needs.
The effort to pass a sensible climate and energy policy is not working. I don’t just mean we’re not getting the right content in legislation—whether it’s trading or taxing or new investment. I want to face facts: right now there isn’t serious political support, or even interest, for an “energy bill” with climate change solutions at its heart. Not from most Democrats in Congress, and not from the vast majority of Americans, whose support is desperately needed by us climate and clean energy advocates.
This can be our crucial moment—a point of deep...
By Ben Block
Biofuels offer the promise of a low-carbon fuel that could power vehicles and stimulate the world's rural economies.
Yet biofuels are also among the most vilified of environmental technologies. Ethanol refineries are not always clean. The labor on biofuel farms is not always fair. The diversion of feedstocks from food to fuel may be driving up global commodity prices. And the forests, fields, and peat bogs cleared to make room for biofuel crops may release more carbon into the atmosphere than they would save from vehicles not burning fossil fuels.
To address these issues, the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) has gathered environmentalists, industry leaders, and university researchers to develop the first international standard for biofuel production.
In...
What happens with a new president?
by Eric de Place
This is the eigth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative -- the West's regional cap-and-trade system. (Much to readers' delight, this is the last installment I'm planning to write.)
You can't talk about regional cap and trade very long before someone brings up the subject of pre-emption. What happens if the federal government creates a national cap and trade program? Would the regional programs disappear? And if so, why bother working on them?
First, let's get one thing straight: no one knows what will happen.
Seriously. No one has any idea -- and that includes me.
No matter how confidently anybody expresses an opinion on pre-emption, you...
Brianna and I were stoked this week to get a piece back from Al Jazeera’s “Inside USA,” featuring Energy Action executive director Jessy Tolkan talking about America’s dependence on coal.
The Inside USA team traveled to the coal mines of Illinois to look at the personalities and the politics behind the fossil fuel. Half of America’s electricity is generated by coal; an amount that produces 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gases. With this in mind, advocates - including those those taking part in Power Vote - have joined leading climate scientists in calling for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, saying that addressing global warming means addressing America’s dependence on coal as a top priority.
Juxtaposed to the proposed...
Evo Morales has jumped over yet another hurdle this weekend. He has managed to secure a new vote of confidence from among the social movements and grassroots that constitute the loose coalition that is his political platform. This backing is what he needs to further advance his drive to transform Bolivia into a socialist state. But this is also an unfortunate step further into a vicious cycle of ideological polarisation from which, Latin American history says, one can only leave through violence and the absolute rejection of the past....(read more)...
The wildly popular Dark Knight ends with a stirring monologue about The Truth, capitol T. I’ve extracted part of it here:
Batman: “Sometimes, truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.”
This got me thinking about the push for Offshore Drilling (yup), and the fact that it is, in every way, predicated on LIES. When Congress comes back in session, we’re confronted with the potential of our elected officials authorizing one of the most myopic and harmful possibly “remedies” to high gas prices. The possibility becomes more likely each day. Even Nancy Pelosi, who had held surprisingly firm on the issue, is weakening her stance.
Batman is right: we do deserve more than just knowing the...
This past week I was lucky enough to hang out with the Greenpeace Youth Network for a few days at their annual youth camp, Change It, in Seattle. I e-mailed some Greenpeace friends to ask if I could come help at the camp for a few reasons. 1) I went to the Greenpeace sponsored Direct Action Camp this past June and wanted to keep tabs on what Greenpeace is up to in my neck of the woods. 2) I’ll be a trainer at Oregon’s SPROG this upcoming week and I wanted to get a taste for what was to come. 3) I work for the Sierra Club now and I’m already seeing the debilitating effects of environmental infighting.
I went to the Greenpeace’s Change It camp as a personal attempt at abnormal environmental networking. I’m currently reading a book, Greenpeace, by Rex Weyler about the early...
Does the Accra Agenda for Action provide the solutions and momentum needed to accelerate progress towards the Paris Declaration or are we getting something rather plain and uninspiring? The answer may soon become clear as Ministers and participants of the HLF3 will officially receive the Accra Agenda for Action today to endorse in Accra. ...(read more)...
For the eighth time the U.S. Republican Party -- the party of big oil and climate change -- has held future green energy hostage [ark] in the Senate to an insistence upon drilling every last bit of oil in every last wildernesses' intact ecosystems first. Given an American addiction to cheap fossil fuels necessary to power climate changing conspicuous consumption [ark] as the meaning of life, the public appears willing to fall lemming like into line with the myth that the "energy crisis" can be solved by drilling. Paying the full cost of energy including upon the environment is no crisis.
This comes as MIT researchers appear to have overcome a major technological limitation to economical solar energy storage [ark], perhaps removing the last major barrier to solar energy charged fuel cells...
Does raising the threshold lower the bar?
By Eric de Place for the Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.
This is the third in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative--the West's regional cap-and-trade system.
One of the core questions in cap and trade -- really, for any regulatory system -- is who, exactly, participates. Ideally, the program would include as many sources of climate pollution as possible without creating an administrative nightmare. (In fact, administrative simplicity is one of the main reasons why an "upstream" approach to regulation works best.) So we want to include refineries and coal plants, but not necessarily the neighborhood propane dealer. This is a good...
After more than a year of letter writing, petition signing, legislative call-in days, public hearings, lobby days and a huge conference, all involving thousands of people around the state, today the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act (for the hardcore legislative fans out there, the text of the bill can be found here) by a vote of 154 to 0. This bill requires reductions of carbon emissions of 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 and between 10% and 25% by 2020.
From here, the bill, which has already passed the senate, returns there for some final merging of the house and senate versions, and heads to Governor Deval Patrick’s desk for signature. This is a HUGE victory in the state of Massachusetts, and a huge victory for the our...
How to hand out allowance money.
By Eric de Place for the Sightline Institute's Daily Score blog.
This is the second in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative. We've written extensively on "allocations" -- the method of distributing the carbon permits to the public through auctions or free distribution -- but there's a related issue often confused with allocations. Called "apportionment," it has important ramifications.
I know, I know, nothing gets the skin tingling like the word "apportionment." But this is a big question for the Western Climate Initiative -- the seven-state-four-province regional cap and trade system. Which states and provinces get to pass out the carbon permits? How...
What's in, what's out, and what's wrong.
By Eric de Place for Sightline's Daily Score.
Last week when the Western Climate Initiative's latest draft appeared it mystified most folks who aren't insiders to the process. That's a shame because WCI is hugely important. So over the next few days I'm going to embark on a series of posts that I hope will clear up some of the misunderstandings. Along the way, I'm also going to explain what Sightline wants to see improved.
Maybe the single most important question in cap and trade is the question of "scope," the question of what we should include under the cap. How do we decide which carbon pollution counted? And who must obtain the tradeable carbon permits that are equal to the cap?
WCI gets a couple of things right....
As we wait for the final draft of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) to be published it seems a good time to take stock of what will be happening at the third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF3), which takes place in Accra, Ghana in the first week of September. A recent Commonwealth workshop to bring together senior finance officials from across the Commonwealth to prepare for HLF3 highlighted for me the potential that the HLF3 offers for moving the aid effectiveness agenda forward....(read more)...
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports a huge range of journalistic programs, ranging from experimental efforts in community journalism to massive players in the media ecosystem like National Public Radio. 180 of their grantees are in Chicago today at a meeting hosted by Knight designed to build connections between grantees and encourage cross-fertilization of projects. (The Rising Voices project of Global Voices is supported by the Knight Foundation, which is why I’m here.)
It’s also an interesting opportunity to see how people in the journalism world are looking at the business and technical challenges facing the field. The opening speakers, Rosental Alves from the University of Texas and Dianne Lynch from Ithaca College offer quite a bit of disparity...
by Yingling Liu
China's recent plastic bag ban has been immediately accepted by consumers. In a country where billions of plastic bags are used each day, the government's top-down policy move will likely benefit the country's environment and energy security well before market forces or consumer-led efforts are able to achieve similar impact.
The ban prohibits shops, supermarkets, and sales outlets from handing out free plastic bags and bans the production, sale, and use of ultra-thin plastic bags under 0.025 millimeters thick. It took effect nationwide on June 1.
Plastic bags, a seemingly minor commodity, have mobilized four powerful government departments in China. The State Council, China's cabinet, issued the bag ban earlier this year, and in May, shortly before its...