U.S. President Barack Obama late last week announced an aggressive agreement to  increase the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) to 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light-duty trucks by model year 2025. The agreement, made with 13 major automakers, including Ford, GM, Chrysler, Honda, Jaguar/Land Rover, Hyundai, BMW, Kia, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Nissan, Toyota and [...]

Article by Guest Contributor: Joelle Westlund As the COP16 comes to a final close, developing countries have yet to see extended commitments towards the Kyoto Protocol. Japan has reiterated its position on the future of Kyoto, arguing that China, India and the United States must fulfill their obligations to emission reductions through the signing of [...]

As of July 22nd , the second effort to enact a Climate Change bill in this congress failed. Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid announced that the ‘We know that we don’t have the votes’ for a comprehensive reform. Instead, the focus will be on a slimmer package focusing on household efficiency and the gulf [...]

Canada has slightly adjusted its mid-term climate mitigation targets to match US pledges. Canada’s Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, recently announced that Canada has changed its mitigation goals in an effort to harmonize with the Obama administration. Canada’s new emissions reduction target for 2020 is a cut of 17% on 2005 levels. Heading into the Copenhagen [...]

With the dust barely settled from the Copenhagen talks, critics within Canada have been scathing of its approach to the talks. They note Canada’s failure to take any leadership, its humiliation at the hands of the Yes Men (although there, Canada is hardly alone) in recent times, as well as the recipient of a fossil [...]

After much speculation, including people pointing out that Copenhagen is just around the corner from Oslo where he will receive his Noble Peace prize, President Obama finally addressed the issue of his possible attendance at the Copenhagen negotiations. In a Reuters interview Obama said yesterday that he will go to Copenhagen “If I am confident [...]

image by Ian Muttoo @ Flickr In the last week of October the Obama administration seemed to be finally making a concentrated effort to show that climate change is high on its agenda, with several public appearances from the president and the vice president during which they sang the praise of a low-carbon future for [...]

For Blog Action Day, focusing this year on climate change, I thought to do something a little different and take a look at climate action, and how it relates to climate policy and politics. So I talked with Ada Aroneanu, an organiser with 1Sky, a collaborative campaign bringing together many organisations so as to bring [...]

Skimming over the headlines this morning, what I thought was a standard positive-thinking op-ed at the NY Times entitled “Yes we can (pass climate change legislation)”, transformed into an exciting development when I noticed the authors of this piece – Senators John Kerry (no surprise there), and Republican Lindsey Graham.  Though there were some foreshadowing [...]

Starting on January 1st 2010, any US fossil fuel and industrial GHG suppliers, motor vehicle and engine manufacturers and other facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of CO2 equivalent per year, will be required to report their emissions data to the Environmental Protection Agency. According to the EPA this will cover approximately 85 [...]