Sen. Bernie Sanders has a new bill out to kill fossil fuel subsidies that come in the form of tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. Instead, Sanders would redirect those funds to generate 10 million solar roofs in America, which would create installation jobs and significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption.

The joy in some quarters over the Obama decision to deny the permit to TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tarsands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. I’m glad for the decision, but it was hardly a ringing endorsement of either concerns about potential damage caused by spills from the pipeline or concerns about what tapping into the tar sands will do to the climate. Rather, it was political posturing for effect by DC politicians on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The GOP forced a rider into must-pass legislation saying “You’ve got 60 days to approve or deny” and State said — back then — that with that kind of a time limit, they’d have no choice but to deny. And this week, they did just that.

As Bill McKibben says, “We’ve won no permanent victory (environmentalists never do) but we have shown that spirited people can bring science back to the fore.”

Come Tuesday, Bill will be taking a group of spirited people to Capital Hill, to take the fight to the science-deniers who live off the money from Big Oil. It should be quite something.

The countries at the Durban climate conference made an agreement to make an agreement. I am skeptical they will make an agreement in 2015, which would not take effect until 2020. For the time being, the world will still operate under the auspices of the Kyoto protocol, which only covered industrialized nations, and to which the United States, one of the world’s biggest emitters, is not a signatory.

Recessions tend to depress economic productivity and reduce demand for electricity generation (a primary source of carbon emissions in the US and China). That results in less greenhouse gas emissions. But that brief reprieve on emissions has ended, according to the latest studies, accelerating the climate crisis.

On Wednesday, Dr. Jeffrey Gleason, currently an avian ecologist for the the Bureau of Ocean Energy, Management, Regulation and Enforcement, was questioned by agents from the the Obama Interior Department Office of Inspector General about aspects of his involvement with Dr. Charles Monnett’s 2006 peer-reviewed scientific paper that linked Polar bear mortality while swimming in the Arctic to climate change. Dr. Monnett has been under investigation since late 2010. Scrutiny of Dr. Gleason’s actions related to the Polar bear findings dates back to his first interview, held on January 26th. His questioning on Wednesday resulted in a request by the investigators for him to undergo a lie detector test regarding a misplaced routing slip:

California’s Air Resources Board has formally approved a cap and trade system to minimize climate change pollution, become the first state in the nation with a cap and trade program. Legislation authorizing a cap and trade system was passed in California back in 2006, but after multiple reviews, the CARB finally approved the program.

It won’t be easy to reunite Labor and the Left to pursue progressive economic policies. There is a lot of bad history between the groups.

One of the world’s leading climate scientists, Michael Mann of Penn State, has been vindicated by the National Science Foundation. Almost no one noticed.

Climate change skeptics have been after Dr. Monnett since Al Gore used information about his research in the movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Judging from the attacks launched since the last week of July on his 2005 paper and how environmentalists used that information to heighten awareness of rapid changes in the polar ice cap, the investigation of the scientist will continue to be misrepresented by the anti-science community, even as he goes back to work.

While the Secessionist was taken to task by the legacy media for his rube-ish views on science, he’s paying no penalty at all within the Republican Party.